Introduction
The response to the current educational challenge should be seen as complex as it lies not only in professional skills but in curricular decisions, materials, technology, and the financial and attitudinal aid essential to a successful educational institution. In order to introduce successful remediation plans, it will be important to introduce effective leadership and the principal experienced in setting the goals, climate, and achievement in a school (Ball et al 2000). The principal has, first of all, to be an instructional provider and a professional in testing, curriculum and assessment fields. The remediation plan will be based on and reflect the main principles and standards of the national education system and the state curriculum recommendations.
Plan
The first step in remediation plan is gap analysis. This step will help to evaluate skills deficiency and weaknesses of the current curriculum, assessment and instructions. The aim of this step is to ensure effective standards and ongoing development program for administrators, teachers, administrative staff, and parents. For teachers gap analysis means, through initial teacher education, evaluation of the knowledge they now possess. Then, to stay abreast of new standards that emerge from research, educators in the field need continuing service so that new ideas can be translated into daily practice (Earwaker 2004).
The second step is development of the standards and new programs for the school. This level will involve analysis of the differences between current level of assessment and instructions, and desired one. Though it is a costly part of the educational budget, money spent on continuing changes represents most likely the single most valuable investment; and teachers must educate their school boards about this significant dividend to avoid pressures to short-change it. The motive for listing curriculum (what to teach) after leadership, service, and instruction (how to teach) is not because the former is less significant. To teach well that which is not worth the effort is an educational failing parallel to teaching ineffectively to the most goals. Because “how to teach” is a newer art, the difference between knowledge and performance is greater (Minnich, 2006).
Externally, curriculum should reflect general rules and principles of education. Internally, curriculum should reflect internal needs of the institutions and its main goals. If schools really accomplished what is in most curriculum guides, educators would be considerably ahead of where they are now in education. It is essential that school teachers and parents agree upon and clear up their curricular goals, assign responsibility for achieving them, and have a paper that will make these decisions clear to any inquirer (Ball et al 2000). Curriculum content should be chosen for its potential. This approach does not necessarily mean only “practical use” but rather that the knowledge and skills learned will be conducive to new learning and problem solving, originality, and the making of responsible decisions throughout life (Earwaker 2004).
Instructions and assessment criteria should be based on national standards of education and reviewed by teachers. On the one hand, the ability to read with understanding, to write and speak clearly, and to solve simplex problems are skills that are useful during lifetime. Rather than teaching students to memorize simple data, the teachers should teach key analytical skills that help the student understand that differences in cultures and economies are not deficiencies and that most events and feelings are unsurprising results from identifiable causes rather than disorganized happenstances (Ball et al 2000). In modern technological world, it is more significant than ever that students are able to use the scientific and analytical method and understand the difference between correlational and causal relations (Schön 2009).
Assessment and instructional techniques can be improved with the help of computers and information technologies. Schools have computers to tell the consequences of making a particular decision before people actually make it, and thereby can greatly expand our ability to accomplish the strategic aims they all seek. Computers, like other techniques and equipment, are extensions of the human mind and body and can give powerful support in creating a better world. A well-designed curriculum must communicate skill in using these equipments and eliminate the myth that new technology is ineffective (Ball et al 2000). Certain things are noticeably absent from plans arising from the current “back to the basics” anger. The most imperative of these is “knowledge of self as a physical, social, emotional, and academic being” so one’s own human functions can be brought into either inevitability or control (Yates and Bradley 2000).
The next and the most important step is implementation of the plan. This step will consist of three stages: familiarization with the plan, implementation and controls. At the stage, resistance to change is inevitable as many teachers trey to avoid additional training and innovative approaches. The main strategies used to level change will be involvement and negotiation. The teachers should accept the idea that whatever emerges in the future, students will be the subject resolvers and decision makers. Preparation for resolving conflicts and difficult life situations and making those hard decisions is the main imperative. Studying individuals who have basic skills, who know and accept themselves, who can work effectively with others, who know how to think and how to learn–this is the part of a school toward making citizens of the future (Yates and Bradley 2000).
Negotiations should help teachers to understand that they should be aware of the need to do ongoing assessment, using both formal assessment and “dip sticking,” throughout a lesson to understand whether, they should move on, go back and teach again, or generate more than one “catch hold point” in the lecture. It is probable for the content to remain the same, but those students who have achieved the learning can be stretched while those students who need more teaching will receive it. For instance, an assessment usually is not necessary for “dip sticking.” Short responses, telling a neighbor (with the teacher controlling the responses), choral responses, or brief written sentences alert the teacher to students’ current state of learning. Waiting until the end of the class or the end of the module to assess learning is no longer justifiable. Remediation should be provided as soon as possible, if it is needed (Field, 2000).
Implementation will take three weeks and demand development of new plans and their implementation during lessons. The new curriculum that provides knowledge of self will stress the constants in structure and function of all humans as well as personal features that can make an individual proactive rather than only reactive to his self. The new curriculum will include such items then teaches students to act more maturely–to gain some measure of self-awareness. This new standards will include helping them address issues associated with the expected waxing and waning of feelings; anticipation of and preparation for approach triggered by certain circumstances; awareness of one’s anger which when touched set off expected overreaction, and the development of compensatory or rigid activities to ameliorate the effect; and an awareness of the thoughtful and empirical base of one’s cultural values and their consonance with actions (Curzon, 2003).
Learning how to think and how to learn, knowing the factors that put forth an influence on the function of the world’s most complex and unique device, the human mind, may well become the essence of new ideology of education. Of equal importance is a sensitivity to those same issues that, used by others, (such as television education, political speeches, etc.) can have a powerful authority on the learner’s behavior (Ball et al 2000). A student’s response should be the result of intent not the result of default or manipulation by others. Only by accepting the potential effects of new principles of learning such as modeling, strengthening, redundancy, and transfer, can one be free to be master of one’s own education rather than be a mere reactor to the stimuli and knowledge encountered (Mortimore, 2007).
The important step is control of the program. The control process should evaluate the degree of success and results of the new programs. Along with this control methods should emerge a personal assessment plan based on feelings of worth and competence in those areas deemed appropriate by each teacher. These areas may diverge from traditional school subjects to aesthetics or athletics or depending on the education environment, but there should exist some field of action and body of content that a teacher must master to respect himself. New skills that act as new techniques can be taught and acquired with honesty and sincerity by most teachers (Wallace, 2001).
Highly trained school teachers can 1) analyze what each student now knows, and what is next ready to be learned, 2) expand successful learning strategies for individual children as well as new education tools for judging whether they have actually learned, 3) employ research-based procedures to increase students’ motivation to learn, the rate and degree of scholarship, retention of that learning, and its transfer to new situations that demand creativity, problem solving, and decision making, and, 4) discipline with dignity. Most teachers who are willing to put in the necessary time and effort for scholarship, practice, and internalization can achieve these skills. Granting differences in usual ability, outstanding teachers are not born, they are made in the same way that other professionals, but are made–by acquiring knowledge plus practice with coaching (Bloomer, 2005).
Conclusion
Without good management the remediation plan will fail. Teachers, school administration and parents should support the principles that promote learning, their various contributions to education can be disjointed, wasted, or even actually subversive of good education. The new curriculum will deal with the intellectual power of the individual. Based on new educational assumptions, students will adopt a new stance about the ability to learn. Apart from new educational variables that could limit individual achievement, teachers have to identify psychological principles that have a profound effect on education. Continuing teacher training should be a core of the yearly changing demands but must become a long range professional aim to which illuminating detail is constantly added.
References
- Earwaker, J. (2004) Helping and Supporting Students (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press).
- Field, J. (2000) Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books).
- Minnich, E. (2006) Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).
- Schön, D. (2009) Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco: Jossey- Bass).
- Yates, C. and Bradley, J. (eds) (2000) Basic Education at a Distance (London: Routledge).
- Ball, S., Maguire, M. and Macrae, S. (2000) Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post-16, London, Routledge.
- Bloomer, M. (2005) Curriculum Making in Post-16 Education: The Social Conditions of Studentship, London, Routledge.
- Curzon, L.B. (2003) Teaching in Further Education, 5th edition, London, Continuum.
- Mortimore, P. (2007) (ed) Understanding Pedagogy and its Impact on Learning, London, Sage.
- Wallace, S. (2001) Teaching and Supporting in Further Education, London, Learning Matters.