Tuesday, March 1, 2016

A Shift In Teachers' Paradigm.

How to cater to the needs of so many different children?

Teachers at Sri Ayesha help learners get to the point where their minds and hearts are open, leaving them ready to learn. In effective schools, students are not so much motivated by getting good grades as they are by a basic love of learning. As parents know their own children's learning styles and temperaments, teachers, too, develop this sense of each child's uniqueness by spending a number of years with the students and their parents.


Teachers should focus on the child as a person, not on the daily lesson plan. Great teachers lead children to ask questions, think for themselves, explore, investigate, and discover. Their ultimate objective is to help their students to learn independently and retain the curiosity, creativity, and intelligence with which they were born. As I’ve said in many of teachers training and discussions, teachers don't simply present lessons; they are facilitators, mentors, coaches, and guides.

Traditionally, teachers usually told that they "teach students the basic facts and skills that they will need to succeed in the world." Studies show that in many classrooms, a substantial portion of the day is spent on discipline and classroom management.  At Sri Ayesha, we do things a bit differently.
Normally, Sri Ayesha teachers will not and should not spend much time teaching lessons to the whole class. Their primary role is to prepare and maintain the physical, intellectual, and social/emotional environment within which the children will work.  A key aspect of this is the selection of intriguing and developmentally appropriate learning activities to meet the needs and interest of each child in the class.

Our teachers are supposed to present lessons to small groups of children at one time and limit lessons to brief and very clear presentations. The goal is to give the children just enough to capture their attention and spark their interest, intriguing them enough that they will come back on their own to work with the learning materials.


The teachers closely monitor their students' progress. Because they normally work with each child for two or three years (in the case of Dar-Salam and Dar-Izzah), they get to know their students' strengths and weaknesses, interest, and personalities extremely well. We want our teachers to use the children's interests to enrich the curriculum and provide alternate avenues for accomplishment and success.

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