I just recently participated in a Professional Development Day training. I learned so many different techniques that will keep students engaged, and learning but something that really stuck with me was the idea of "serve and return." This is the simple interaction between a young child and a caring, responsive adult. By interacting with children back and forth, almost like tennis, it helps with their brain circuitry. Children learn from experience and meaningful exchanges. This helps develop neural passageways in their brain, which in turn leads to a stronger foundation for learning and for education.
After learning about "serve and return", I began to grow really fond of the idea. It shows just how much of an effect we as adults have on young children in the first few years of their life, truly impacting their education as they grow older. In the classroom, this serve and return can be demonstrated through a simple, "But why?" By an educator acknowledging the question, as well as answering to the best of his or her ability, fosters curiosity in the child, and the want to learn more.
Coinciding with this idea, it is important that when engaging in serve and return, teachers should be asking students open ended questions, rather than questions that could be answered with "yes" or "no." This pushes the student to actively think of an appropriate response. It also helps students develop language and verbal skills as well as social skills.
Serve and return, as well as asking open ended questions, allows children and students to develop their cognitive skills, truly leading to a strong foundation for learning as the years and their education continues. I feel that as future educators, we should actively use this idea of serve and return in the classrooms, and encourage other educators to do the same.
It sounds like this program was really beneficial to you. I think that the different techniques that you stated above could be really beneficial to you as a future teacher because it gives you different ways of talking to students. This "serve and return" idea does really show how much of impact adults have on children. Children look up to adults, and can learn so much which is why it is so important for adult to act as role models. Reading this is also very informative to me because it now allows me to do my own research on serve and return. It sounds like you had a lot of fun during this training! That's awesome!
ReplyDeleteServe and Return sounds like a great way to get adults to realize how big of an impact they have on children. Children learn from adults, first their parents, then their teachers and coaches when they get to school. Adults are the essentials to kids learning. Open ended questions are great for the classroom. These types of questions get kids brains going, they get to use their imagination and really think about the question. This really helps in a students learning.
ReplyDeleteWow, this seems like an awesome training that you attended, and I hope that some day I can participate in something like this! Serve and return sounds like a great concept, and it seems like it can be very helpful to young learners! This can not only assist the young children in communicating with the adult and learning from the adult, but it shows the adult just how much impact he or she really does have on that child's learning and life in general. Teachers could use this technique in their classrooms to really get a concept across to their students and to make it stick. I also think that the idea of asking open-ended questions, rather than yes/no questions is a good idea, because it really gets the students to think and ponder on an answer rather than there being such a straight forward answer.
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