Getting Your Kids To Learn Faster and Better

I worked as a consultant for a local school district a few years ago helping them implement a federally funded reading achievement program. I sat in on meetings where the high school principals selected the participating students. Most of the principals were home grown, so to speak, and had lived in the town or city where the school was located. As the students’ names were mentioned the principals attempted to identify who should be selected by asking questions about them. Sometimes a principal thought they knew the parents of this student and asked about them by name Often, the parents of the low achieving student had been a classmate of the principal and the principal knew them also as low achieving. As I watched it became clear that the students who were being selected were often second generation students where parents in the first and their children in the second had poor academic records.

Does this mean all family members were less intelligent and therefore unable to achieve? Perhaps, but probably not. Then what does it mean? We discovered that parents of low achieving students pass on their attitudes about learning and their work values and habits to their children. For instance we found that many parents stopped their children in the middle of their homework to either play with them or make them do their home chores. When parents were asked to teach their children a certain skill (e.g. spelling) many parents communicated their own inadequacy by admitting they “had never been good at spelling.” Their children often parroted the exact statement and feeling when faced with a similar task. When asked to identify a positive memory of school they could share with their children, the parents often could not. In an attempt to find one, one woman told of slipping and hitting her head on the ice and then described how the school nurse was nice to her. Not very positive.

There is a great deal of research where the findings indicate that parents create a learning environment of some level or another in the process of rearing their children. The extent and emphasis parents give to learning and to particular subjects often transfers to student interest and achievement levels in the classroom. This fact is well known by educators but we still have not figured out how to get parents who had their own negative experiences make a new and better family learning environment for their children. Many school districts spend large sums of money in this attempt. What would we do if we could?

I can describe what was done in this project which seemed to work well. First, we asked teachers to make home visits to these students and meet the parents in their world. When parent-teacher conferences were held more parents came and appeared to be less threatened and more open to being involved. Second, we asked parents to come to the classroom and spend a few hours assisting the teacher. This was done to give the parents greater awareness of the requirements of the classroom such as due dates, teaching strategies, and so forth. Third, we taught the parents how to teach specific skills to their children and gave them the materials to be successful. Fourth, since many parents displayed a restricted communication code in their homes (e.g “shut up,” “stop it” and etc.) we showed the parents how to expand their family communication by giving longer explanations when making decisions about family rules and by creating opportunities to talk more with their children. They learned to say, “Well let’s talk about it.” This was done so that both parents and children would be able to mentally process more words.

I can’t recall the exact results from this project but I know it was successful enough to be re-funded. While the school environment makes a big impact on our children, our children’s first learning environment, and perhaps the most influential, is the one they find at home.