Why Should Children Study Arts?

Schools nowadays are focused on teaching core subjects like math, reading, and science. But what about art subjects? While some educators and parents think that art education should be relegated to leisure and extracurricular activities, creative activities can help children develop into great thinkers. Here’s why children should be encouraged to pursue art education:

Improved motor skills Simple things like holding a crayon or a paintbrush are essential for a child’s fine motor development. Children at the tender age of three must be able to draw circles and use safety scissors. Preschools emphasize the use of scissors and other art materials as these can help children learn writing faster.

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Introduction to critical thinking and decision making Art education can strengthen a child’s critical thinking skills. With art, they can always try something new. The experience of making decisions like choosing the right shape or color can be carried over to their adult years.

Visual learning Threading, drawing, sculpting, and other art activities help children learn tasks visually. Art teaches students to criticize, interpret, and use visual information. It fosters among children awareness of their surroundings and a sound estimation of reality.

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Improved academic achievement Many studies prove the link between art and academic achievement. Children who have art activities in a week are more confident in pursuing academic tasks. Because of the confidence they gain through art, they don’t shy away from school contests like quiz bees, essay writing contests, and science fairs. Learn more about innovative education by visiting this Jay Eitner blog.

Honing Great Readers With Dear Time

Reading is a skill that must be honed in young children. However, getting children to love reading is harder than it looks like, especially if they are not exposed to reading at home. This is why DEAR time is important in the classroom.

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DEAR time, or Drop Everything And Read time, is a classroom activity where students and teachers drop whatever they are doing to take time to read. It is not a graded activity or a class interruption but is simply a time for both students and teachers to appreciate reading. DEAR time should not take long. It only takes about 10 to 15 minutes a day. After all, the goal of DEAR is to make students read independently. For those who are wondering, here’s how to develop an effective DEAR time for students.

Have a classroom library: Books in the library must have a variety of genres and levels. When children are surrounded by books, they will most likely read books. Exposing children to a collection of books will stir their curiosity to open one.

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Encourage parental support: Reading should not only be done in the classroom but at home as well. Asking parents to take their children to the library, or to buy them books will encourage reading at home.

Allow children to read whatever they want: Give children the liberty to choose the kind of books that they are interested in. Those with objectionable content may be disallowed, but children should be free to choose an “easy” or a “hard” book for their enjoyment.

Jay Eitner is an award-winning educator and a superintendent for schools for the Waterford Township School District. Visit this blog for similar content.

Ways To Develop Critical Thinking Skills In Children

For a student to be an effective learner, they need strong critical thinking skills. This helps them in analyzing information and choosing the best solution for problems, among others. The earlier students are trained to be critical thinkers, the better they become as learners. Below are some ways teachers can develop critical thinking skills in the classroom.

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Inquiry: Allow students to be creative and to ask about topics that they are greatly interested in. When students wonder, they learn how to develop questions while searching for information. This eventually leads them to demonstrate an understanding of the given topic, and some will even share what they have learned with their peers. Inquiry encourages collaboration and fosters critical thinking skills.

Problem-solving : After inquiring about a specific topic, children will eventually learn how to solve problems on their own. Problem-solving allows students to perform trial and error, eventually leading them to the correct solution.

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Collaboration: Collaborative learning strategies help children understand what others think about a certain topic. This also allows them to listen to what their peers have to say while sharing their knowledge of the subject matter. This also helps them come to an agreement with the members of a group.

Jay Eitner is a national award-winning educator. He has given numerous workshops on digital leadership, student achievement, and technology infusion. For more topics like this, visit this blog.

Merging Data-Driven Approaches With Student-Centered Learning

Some educators still haven’t accepted the fact that teaching and learning aren’t all about data. Often, the emphasis is placed on data rather than anything else like the learning environment, a student’s abilities, and more. When students are given a voice in the classroom, they can express better their desire to learn and how to succeed in the task.

To learn how lessons can be grounded in student-centered learning, teachers must first become the student. Through this, teachers can create activities that support the student-centered mindset, and design an environment where both quantitative and qualitative data can be supported. Teachers can give students weekly checkups where they would know where the students are at with regard to their learning progress.

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It’s inevitable in a class to have someone getting left behind. To provide the attention needed by students having a hard time with a particular topic, teachers can work together with some of the pupils who have the mastery of the lesson to help their classmates—one-on-one—which would result to student-centered and developed lessons.

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Data is important for teachers and students to know where they’re at when it comes to their progress. Students utilize their classwork as a source of data, strengths, analyzing, weakness, and structures to improve their work. With the use of data, students can inspect evidence of their own improvement, examining their errors for patterns, and recounting what they see in the data in regards to their current level of performance. Data can be used by students to set goals and reflect on their progress through time, and include data analysis into student-led meetings.

Jay Eitner is an award-winning educator and a superintendent for schools for the Waterford Township School District. For more information about Jay, visit this LinkedIn page.

Top Readily Available Technology Tools For The Modern Educator

Technological innovations have presented a plethora of new ways teachers can fine-tune the teaching process. There are many innovative tools within easy reach of the modern educator, some of which teachers should start taking advantage of right now.

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One of these is Google Drive. This free-to-use online storage is just like your typical MS Office, and features like Google Sheets allow teachers to create multi-authored or multi-editable documents. Sharing documents students are working on fosters collaborative work, with the teacher able to access and make corrections, solicit feedback, and offer other inputs outside the classroom. 

YouTube can be used for uploading video productions and similar class projects that teachers can then view without the need for the submission of DVDs or flash drives. Educators can make their own channels, too; with organized video playlists and instructional PowerPoint slides that are part of the course curriculum. Quick access without the need for laptops and other physical storage devices is a great benefit of uploading to YouTube. 

Finally, while Facebook and Instagram are the more popular social media venues nowadays, teachers should make good use of blogging, via sites like WordPress or Blogger. Assignments can include making a semester-long chronicle of insights learned in the classroom, or the timelining of an elaborate student project. This will allow teachers to check outputs while going paperless and being more environment-friendly. 

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Over the years, Jay Eitner has won several awards and has presented workshops on digital leadership, technology infusion, and student achievement. More on Jay’s work and interests here.

Must-Watch Inspirational Teacher Movies

Over the decades, there have been many inspiring movies that revolve around teachers making a huge difference in the lives of their students. Beyond just being feel-good flicks, these films teach us important life lessons that we would do well to learn and apply. Here are some teacher movies truly worth watching.

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Finding Forrester (2000)

The learning experience in this film doesn’t take place in the traditional classroom, but it is a classic example of what it takes to indulge in mentorship. Reclusive writer William Forrester (Sean Connery) encounters a young African-American male, Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), from the slums whose writing intrigues him. He proceeds to help the boy in his writing, as well an in various other aspects of life and love.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Considered as the best teacher movie of all time by many, “Dead Poets Society” is the story of how a teacher (played by Robin Williams) not just impacts, but changes the lives of several boys in a conservative high school in mid-20th century U.S. His unorthodox teaching methods help them to “seize the day” and appreciate poetry as a wonderful thing people read and write not just because it’s cute, but because we are members of the human race.

Il Postino (1994)

A foreign film that explores the relationship of Nobel-winning poet Pablo Neruda and his postman Mario during his exile in an Italian island, this is a heartwarming and bittersweet mentor-mentee movie that shows the redemptive powers of poetry. It doesn’t get any more democratic as when Mario tells Neruda that “poetry belongs not to those who write it, but to those who need it.”

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Award-winning educator Jay Eitner is known for his out-of-the-box teaching style, which focuses on creating student centered, data driven, and technology infused learning environments. For similar articles, visit this blog.

Why Student-Centered Learning Matters

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In student-centered learning (SCL), the learner is the focus and owner of his or her education. The teacher or faculty member’s role, though, isn’t less important, as he or she still leads and guides the students to the meat of the matter, i.e., the knowledge being imparted. The goal is to make it the student’s education, not the teacher’s.

In student-centered instruction, students and teachers interact equally instead of the former simply listening to the teacher. There are four major important benefits of SCL:

Enables the benefits of group work Through SCK, students learn crucial communicative and collaborative skills when they do group work.

Increases interest and independence in learning Students learn to direct their own learning, ask questions, and independently accomplish tasks. They are more interested in learning activities and active participation in this model.

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Harnesses students’ leadership ability SCL gives students the chance to take charge even when they may not quite have all the content skills. It allows them to discover their interest-based choices and areas they feel most passionate about.

Gives up need for teachers’ control Children and teens produce a great volume of content through social media, and in those platforms they earn a following and join others in common interests. When they enter school, what they know and can produce is set aside most of the time. In SCL, they integrate these skills inside the classroom and their real-world networks.

Jay Eitner is an award-winning educator and a superintendent for schools for the Waterford Township School District. He has been known for his out-of-the-box and technology-oriented approach to learning. Learn more about his work on this page.