Question

Heather is a bright middle school student who usually does well in language arts. She loves to read and enjoys a wide range of authors and types of literature. However, she doesn't like to write. She finds writing tedious and occasionally doesn't do her best work on writing assignments. Currently the class is learning to research a topic and write informational reports, being cautious about citing sources and presenting ideas in their own words. During class, Heather becomes impatient about summarizing ideas in her own words and complains to the teacher that she hates this assignment. The teacher responds by saying, "Didn't you learn to summarize in elementary school? If you actually read the article you'd be able to do this in a snap. Stop complaining and get busy."

First, discuss who owns this problem of Heather's hating the assignment.
Then explain why this teacher's approach is NOT effective.
Next, describe what the teacher might do to deal with the problem positively.

Answer 1

Heather's elementary school teachers are definitely responsible for her hatred towards assignments. Small class size during early elementary years leads to high achievement, better concentration, higher-quality class participation and more favorable attitudes towards assignments. Smaller class sizes are beneficial to the students as they have constant attention of the teacher. A small size class typically leads to the teacher to spend more time teaching than wasting time disciplining the students. A small class size includes students anywhere between 13 to 17 in number.

The teacher's approach is not effective because this would lead to Heather to not only hate assignments but she would soon lose interest in her academics as well because she would feel like the teacher is not being empathetic. The teacher's way of dealing with the situation would make Heather feel discouraged instead of encouraged to finish the assignment.

The teacher must instead work on the problem in a more constructive way. The teacher should be more supportive and tackle Heather's problem of writing assignments by verbally doing it or by asking her to make a power point presentation instead of actually writing it.