Supporting Teachers in the Classrooms to Make Schools Stronger and More Viable: Now, more than ever, teachers need parental support for their child in the classroom. No longer will teachers feel isolated in the classroom surrounded by a large group of challenging, inquisitive children with individual learning profiles and demanding instructional requirements. Teaching will cease to be dependent upon dated and often limiting curriculums purchased years back by local school districts and school boards. Schools will want to innovate through virtual online learning to ease multiple pressures.

Positive Parental Support Will Aid Teachers: Parents/legal guardians will advance to personally monitoring their child’s learning at all levels. This involvement will go beyond attending Parent Teacher Organizations (PTO) meetings, engaging in annual fifteen-minute parent-teacher conferences, and dropping off cookies in the classroom for their child’s birthday celebration.

Parental/guardian participation will be in brief, pleasant, ongoing segments, both in and out of the classroom environment. Yet, sessions will be practical, tutorial, and non-disruptive to the daily instructional routine. In order to maintain classroom pace and momentum, volunteer parents can offer to assist quietly as tutorial help-mates creating a warm, friendly, classroom environment. Student learning pressure can be reduced in the new paradigm, because now each student has double the teaching attentive support.

The visiting parent/guardian will play an important instructional supportive role, but not in a supervisory, watchful mode. As helpful assistants, they can keep their student, or a small group of students, on task. They can help the uncertain student how to understand the assignment.

This type of parental supervisory support can reduce the need for paid para-professionals, offering the school district, charter, parochial, or private schools substantial economic savings, thus reducing fiscal and accountability pressure.

Educational Innovation is Now at Your Finger Tips: There will be additional options that will include classroom participation to support the teacher, classroom, and school by offering at-home supplemental practice with auxiliary online learning applications. The outside world’s open learning avenue is now accessible through the internet. Scientific innovation can now be easily located.

Key Trends:

Innovative online Blended Interactive Learning will replace traditional classroom curriculum methods in all subject matter. There are six key online blended learning models outlined by Michael Horn: online-driver,self-blend, online lab, flex mode, rotation, and face to face. (Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. (2008). Christensen, Horn, and Johnson. McGraw Hill.)
Online customized earning will be automated. Teachers will not be required to learn curricula by studying laborious manual instructions. This approach has kept classroom instruction stagnant, because once teachers learned a particular methodology, they stayed with it. Subsequently, learning new methods and applying innovative materials was avoided.
Scientifically tested and tried online learning materials will be in demand, and rise to the top. Educational materials will be competitive for value-added benefits. Numerous companies, large and small, will compete for market share position.
Learning will become a standards and performance-based system. Each student will have their own learning profile established, becoming learner-centered, and performance based with the mastery of skills. Their learning styles will be identified and enhanced. All learners, at all paces and levels, will learn at higher rates, because the inter-works of learning will be better understood.
Parents will take a new interest and have a prominent role in their child’s customized learning process. Students moved through grades K-12, and graduating from high school non-proficient in basic skills will be greatly reduced.
Academic progress will be measured through repetitive testing as dictated by national and state guidelines with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn.
Classroom time will not be spent teaching “how to take the mandated state tests” by learning how to choose the correct multiple choice item. Alternatively, class time will not be a time-driven system, but will be garnered towards students learning basic skills in primary grades, and teaching advanced concepts through the grades leading to high school and beyond.
Program Content Developer of The Bridge To Achievement, Educational Consultant, Workshop Trainer at Mem-ExSpan, Inc.; Attended the University of Texas, the University of Iowa, and graduated with B.S. degree in Education from Drake University, majoring in Education, Speech-Drama, and English. Minored in Science and Social Science. Taught grades K-8 in seven Midwestern public school districts. Received a Masters Degree in Special Education – Learning Disabilities from the University of Kansas, and 1980 formed the non-profit 501 C3 Educational Media Therapy Consultants, Inc. This was later changed to Innovative Learning Systems, Inc., a national consulting group offering teacher and parent informative workshops and student scholarhships for cognitive skills retraining and Brain-Based Learning. Additionally, formed Mem-ExSpan, Inc. to develop educational cognitive skills retraining content through continuous classes to help individuals ages 9 to adult. Established thirteen national training-test sites, published and documented research from six experiments over five generational developmental levels. Five published longitudinal reports appeared in The Journal of Accelerated Learning and Teaching (JALT) with several demographic groups. See: my home page: Http://www.memspan.com and our nonprofit organization, Innovative Learning Stratagem’s “work in process for parents information”, http://www.strategytech.com