Response to Parents’ Claim of Underutilizing Student’s Talent
(Name of the Institution)
“Dear Parent (preferably cordially by name using Mr. / Mrs.),
Thank you for your feedback and we are really happy to make acquaintance of an aware parents who monitor the progress of their children and recognize their developmental needs. We are truly grateful to get assisted by your feedback. However, there seems to be a gap between the angle from which you are perceiving our lesson planning and implementation and the way we view it. Kindly allow me to clarify our way and address your valid concerns.
In our view, class teaching is not an individual session of individual progress, nor does development occur so in classroom. A classroom always has certain time constraint pressurize learning process if a holistic teaching approach is applied. That is why we tend to incorporate teaching in groups which is a standard practice globally. Your son/ daughter happens to be one of our better learners, whereas ours is a mixed proficiency level group of students. So, at some point it might appear that you child is constantly tutoring the weaker peers but the purpose behind putting him/ her in that position is not to improve other weak students but him/ her.
When working in a group, even with weaker peers, your child is assuming the role of the team leader and constantly developing leadership qualities which will serve him in both personal and professional scores in future tremendously and obviously in present school situations. Moreover, your child actually has to give way more effort in working in the group to learn and analyze the lessons and also in guiding his/ her peers. So naturally, his learning quality, along with rate, and rate of internalizing his relevant knowledge is greater. So, when he is tutoring his peers, he is actually tutoring himself in an implicit way. Such process works indirectly but very effectively, and the knowledge acquired in this way is very deep- rooted, and ensures an exceptionally long retention which is very important for long term development.
As teaching practitioners we can trace a lot more benefits of what your child is doing. Being in the team as an active member and in fact as the leader, your child is having a partial locus of control using which he can generate new ideas and develop new ways of further self development. Being active in class in this way would give him individual attention and reputation as an exceptional student of the institution which will also influence his career further.
Group work is a globally accepted format of teaching which allows individual development in the constrained time of a regular class- session. By selecting both good and comparatively weak students within the same group, we get a scope of bridging the gap of proficiency levels of the learners, and this ensures greater rate of interaction among students which again motivates them to advance in their study. So basically, by tutoring the weaker peers, your child is actually teaching himself/ herself and in an intrinsic way getting constantly motivated to further his/ her study.
