Standard: Teachers establish a respectful environment for a diverse population of students Element: Teachers provide an environment in which each child has a positive, nurturing relationship with caring adults.
Teachers provide an environment:
Allow students to share ideas that have been generated from their group.
Develop interdependence with other students in order to complete assignments (jigsaw activity)
Develop interpersonal and small group skills. Develop trust, leadership and confidence.
IS Cooperative Learning [CL] (Guidelines and Procedures for Building Strong Relationships in the Classroom) Building Relationships with Students to Improve Engagement
Why is building relationships with students important in the classroom? Just like any relationship, it is important to understand students and have them understand you. Teachers must realize that many of their students are growing up with many different ideas about who they should be and how they should act towards others. Teachers, on the other hand, have a strong reference about the way they were taught and how it was when they were growing up. Good relations are built when you can identify with universal principles you have in common with students. Everyone likes people that they can relate to. If good relations are built with students’ cooperation and a sense of respect will be formed in the classroom.
What are examples of ineffective ways of building relationships with students? Why are these ineffective? If teachers don’t try to understand student struggles, barriers in the classroom can form that might become very hard to overcome. One of the ineffective ways to form relationships is to constantly dispute with students about their ideas or ways of thinking. Another ineffective way of building good relations is to hold students to standards as if they were adults. Many students are very young in the way they think and perceive things. They might not take many factors into consideration before making a decision. Teachers must try to explain things in a way that can help students understand.
The Two Wings of the Effective Learning Environment
How teachers structure student to student interaction patterns has a lot to say about how well students learn, how they feel about school and the teacher, how they feel about each other, and how much self-esteem they have. Cooperative learning is one of the wings, which enables true learning to take place. Developing social skills and emotional discipline allows a student to become a vessel of content knowledge and information.
Standard: Teacher Engage Learners in Islamic Education through Critical Inquiry Thinking
Element: Engages students in active learning and critical inquiry thinking that fosters problem solving and real-world experiences
Inquiry Based Learning: "Inquiry" is defined as "a seeking for truth, information, or knowledge -- seeking information by questioning." Individuals carry on the process of inquiry from the time they are born until they die. This is true even though they might not reflect upon the process. Infants begin to make sense of the world by inquiring. From birth, babies observe faces that come near, they grasp objects, they put things in their mouths, and they turn toward voices. The process of inquiring begins with gathering information and data through applying the human senses -- seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.
The Essence of Inquiry: "Inquiry ... requires more than simply answering questions or getting a right answer. It espouses investigation, exploration, search, quest, research, pursuit, and study. It is enhanced by involvement with a community of learners, each learning from the other in social interaction."
Importance of Inquiry: Memorizing facts and information is not the most important skill in today's world. Facts change, and information is readily available -- what's needed is an understanding of how to get and make sense of the mass of data.
The Application of Inquiry: While much thought and research has been spent on the role of inquiry in science education, inquiry learning can be applied to all disciplines. Individuals need many perspectives for viewing the world. Such views could include artistic, scientific, historic, economic, and other perspectives. While disciplines should interrelate, inquiry learning includes the application of certain specific "ground rules" that insure the integrity of the various disciplines and their world views.
Outcomes of Inquiry: An important outcome of inquiry should be useful knowledge about the natural and human-designed worlds. How are these worlds organized? How do they change? How do they interrelate? And how do we communicate about, within, and across these worlds? These broad concepts contain important issues and questions that individuals will face throughout their lives. Also, these concepts can help organize the content of the school curriculum to provide a relevant and cumulative framework for effective learning. An appropriate education should provide individuals with different ways of viewing the world, communicating about it, and successfully coping with the questions and issues of daily living.