TEACHER’S AND PARENTAL ROLES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING.

 

Two important people in student’s life is teachers and parents. Both groups have big roles in the process of teaching and learning for students. The common thing between them is they tried to promote academic success through interactions with the students, but their roles still different from each other. Part of student’s success is also contributed by teachers’ successful behaviours, attitudes and skills. In addition, it has been shown that parental involvement within the scope of schooling can significantly influence the educational attainment of children and adolescents (e.g. Wilder, 2014). In twenty-first century, it is crucial to understand teacher influences in teaching and parental involvement in students’ learning.

One of the main roles of teacher in learning is sharing knowledge. Teacher is the one who initiates the source of knowledge to his/her students during teaching process. Sharing notes, educational sources and explaining specific terms and information based on syllabus is what teacher can do to play his/her roles. In Vygotsky cognitive theory, teachers must assist student to reach some part in student brain in order to help students reach an understanding of the topic learned through scaffolding activity. As an example, it might be hard for students to understand mathematical formula own their own, so here come the roles of teacher. Sharing their knowledge, elaborating the formula to help students have a better understanding on the subject. Nevertheless, if only teacher who shares knowledge, it will not effectively work for student’s minds, without effort from them too. Students must be reminded to search for additional knowledge, do practices and read more reading materials so that it helps them to have basic understanding on the lesson.

Next, the role of the teacher in an integrated teaching and learning environment is to assist students with making connections and therefore finding meaning through an educational process. Sometimes it is hard for students to make connections with peers and they may feel disconnected with others. Therefore, teachers can help by conducting various collaborative learning between classmates such as presentation, group activity, discussions on variety of topic to enhance communication. The benefits of collaborative learning initiated by teachers are, students can build self confidence and create better relationship between friends, but is this collaborative activity during teaching always work effectively? Is it better to start with an individual learning phase before students cooperate or is the reverse order more beneficial? With their study, Abercrombie, Hushman, & Carbonneau (2019) make clear that cooperation is useful for learning, but individual learning before cooperating with each other increases the effectiveness. Thus, learning process is more meaningful with connections and communications between students as it may help students in their studies.

Parents can effectively play their roles in learning through support activities and role modelling. Parents can support students by providing access to facilities in learning or creating a good environment of learning at home. As an example, these days students must go through online learning during movement control order (mco). Hence, parents should show encouragement by providing internet access and helping students through this online learning by preventing distractions of learning at home. An American psychologist Bronfenbrenner emphasised the importance of support system to students because students who have supportive family most likely to success compared to other students who have social surrounding problems.

Another parental roles in learning is involving in students learning activities. How can parents actively involves with students education? Based on articles published in 1994 and 1997 by Wendy S. Grolnick and her colleagues, there are three dimensions of parental involvement in education. First is behavioral involvement which refers to parents way of showing interest in their child’s education, such as volunteering at schools when there are activities that involve parents, attending academic report days. This behavior shows parents’ interest toward their children progress at school in academic and social development. Second is personal involvement which is basically parents concern with their children academic performance which involves parent–child interactions that communicate positive attitudes about school and the importance of education to the child. The third one is cognitive/intellectual involvement refers to behaviors that promote children's skill development and knowledge, such as reading books and going to museums. Parental roles according to this theory have major influence in student’s achievement because these interactions affect students' motivation and make students believe that they can be successful in their academic performance.

Finally, the contribution of Liou, Wang, & Lin (2019) elucidates that parental involvement mainly has indirect effects on academic achievement. Parental engagement in learning process is essential in influencing students’ motivational beliefs and this, in turn, has a positive impact on students’ achievement. Parents can influence students’ performance by strengthening their science self-concept and strongly emphasise the utility value of subjects.

To sum up, it can be seen that it is very worthwhile to take a closer look at the difference roles of teachers and parents in teaching and learning. Teachers and parents are not at the centre of education, but without them, learning and educational processes of students and a successful growth of young people into society would not be possible.