At TutorEye, our goal is to serve a million customers this year and to fulfill this goal, we have started inviting industry speakers to come and share their thoughts on critical topics related to education and technology.
As a part of our September Edtech discussions, we at TutorEye had yet another powerful guest speaker join us for a brief discussion on the future of education and importance of mental health with Dr. Kathrine Murray, an award-winning early childhood specialist global speaker, an education coach, a parent guide and a classroom expert.
Below is the summary of expert advice and opinion shared by Dr. Murray on questions asked by TutorEye’s academic lead, Amandeep Singh:
In her response Dr. Kathrine shared that she is writing a book about the brain set formula for classroom design and she is explaining the formula developed by her around aligning children’s brain development with the way we set-up classrooms.
Other than this, she is also keeping busy currently with a lot of collaboration work with different educational organizations around the world. She shared that her engagement with these organizations range from writing parenting courses to creating courses for early childhood educators and there are a lot of changes coming in the post pandemic world.
As per Dr. Kathrine, the post pandemic is full of changes. She even went on to refer to it as a different world.
She projects that one of the big changes will be a result of homeschooling. She thinks that with homeschool students took the pressure and learnt to become a lot more independent which means students in the post pandemic world will be much more self-directed.
She also mentioned that due to the change in the student behavior, there will be a lot of changes that school & college boards will make to the curriculum achievement standards, the expected outcomes and many of the outcomes might need to be achieved more organically.
Which means that parents and teachers’ role is going to experience a lot of changes. From teachers they will most likely play the role of coaches and facilitators, and support child development organically.
Last big change she thinks will be related to the level of interaction and human connections. She shared the need for more facilitation of social interactions with babies born in pandemic, even younger & high school children, who missed out completely in the last 18 months on learning from friends and environment around them.
Dr. Kathrine answered the question by sharing some recent data on trauma. She stated that there has been a lot of trauma, primary and secondary, during COVID19. She explained that primary trauma is when something happens to oneself, and secondary trauma is when a person watches something happen to someone else and she/she gets disturbed and traumatized by what they have observed.
Trauma situations are the primary drivers of a foggy brain, a situation resulting from a rush of cortisol in the brain leading to difficulty to think clearly, to remember things, to learn things.
As per Dr. Murray we all need to be responsible in ensuring the children around us feel safe, secure and calm as only a calm brain can learn. She also expressed the importance of calmness in adults, who play a role of a facilitator, coach, parent or teacher and are role models for children.
Dr. Murray referred to tutoring as a big stress reliever. She took the example of TutorEye’s service model where students can reach out to experts and within 3 minutes you have a mentor by their side explaining concepts and helping the student feel secure and calm.
Correlating this with her above answer on mental health, Dr. Murray said that the brain of a student stuck with homework has a lot of anxiety and stress. So, if students don’t know how to do things and as parents aren’t able to help then it may end up becoming quite stressful for both the child and the parent.
Dr. Murray understands the importance of a technology-enabled learning environment and she like the fact that the learning environment for students is very visual and beyond just verbal explanation to a question.
Dr. Murray suggested that education for children today needs to be viewed in different ways. Unlike the traditional ways of teaching, teachers and parents need to focus on facilitating children’s learning in a playful way, in a way that relates to their interest and in a way that aligns with their brain development.
By following the above approach, we are involving the students in an engaged learning process, and retention of information in such cases is higher as next time the student has to answer a question then he/she will be easily able to activate memory and relate it to an event in the past that he/she enjoyed learning.