I believe that it is very difficult for a teacher with between 30-40 students to give each student the individualized attention that allows the teacher to truly know a student's strengths and weaknesses. Usually a class's ability level is a generalization of the abilities of most of the student's, while those on the periphery slip through the cracks. While I tutored in a ninth-grade classroom at Garfield, there were five volunteers that were able to float around the room and engage students in conversation about the assignment given. This particular teacher also had an assistant teacher. There were many resources immediately available to the students and I believe that many classes should mimic this format. However, most do not and the responsibility of the education of so many students lies on only one teacher.
I would agree that many students in large classrooms are simply leaning generalized concepts and taking in less than the teacher expects because they are not offered the individualized attention they need. It is important, in order to construct knowledge, to truly understand a concept, be able to ask questions, make mistakes and have them corrected and built into a knowledge that makes sense to the learner. In order to achieve this, students do need more attention paid to them individually.
ReplyDeleteIn Scaffolding instruction requires assistance to facilitate the student’s development. The goal of scaffolding teaching strategy is for students to become a self-regulating learner and to be independent. By providing more assistance and support, students are able to accomplish the task further. This strategy helps students to complete the task or master the concepts independently. Internalization is the process of incorporating external input from social interactions into a child’s internal mental functions. Essentially, internalization addresses how children utilize external information to transform the way they think and reason about the world. Scaffolding encourages internalization because it helps students to build their prior knowledge and to internalize new information. It requires students to internalize in order to complete the task or master the concepts independently.
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