Foundations of Education Lesson 4: Assignment Worksheet

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Foundations of Education Lesson 4: Assignment Worksheet

• How have you seen family influences impact your students’ learning? (If you are not currently teaching, relate how you have seen family influences impact learning in your own school experiences or the experiences of others.)

I have been fortunate in that most of my students’ families had positive impacts on their education (or at the very least, a neutral impact). Most families I dealt with were involved in their child’s schooling and a supportive influence for homework and other assignments. I found very few “helicopter parents” among our population, which surprised me considering the high SES level of our overall student body. My school also did a pretty good job managing these kinds of parental expectations, though, with a paragraph written by each teacher included in every student’s report card. So most parents felt like they were “in the loop” and didn’t press for inappropriate access for themselves or inappropriate protection/preference for their children.

Students at a private school are not likely to be faced with parents who devalue education (obviously, the parents value it at upwards of $10,000 per year), but family income level does not protect children from other possibly negative influences – emotionally abusive families, parents with drug or alcohol problems or other illnesses, divorcing parents, etc. are still common at any SES level. We had two sisters from a family where the mother had died, and the father had remarried; neither he nor his new wife wanted anything to do with the girls. So they set up a trust fund for them and sent them off to boarding school. The girls, like typical teenagers, tried to pretend that the situation didn...

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...hat students with disabilities have to overcome in the classroom? What observations can you make about the problem-solving skills, learning strategies and dedication to effort that a disabled student might need to succeed in your classroom? How can you reinforce or help your students to develop those skills and strategies?

I tried the blindfolded and the tracing experiments; I found myself using other senses in order to compensate. Students with disabilities will certainly need to use their other senses and other learning modes to work with the material. Which teaching techniques I would use would certainly depend on the disability of the students, but in general, instructional strategies that benefit disabled students often benefit the class as a whole – using visual, aural, and kinesthetic styles, scaffolding and use of metacognitive strategies, and others.

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