If we were to take a poll of the basic academic needs of students in a typical classroom in any school in this country, many of the needs listed would still have an interpersonal or personal edge to them. This is significant in that students will always commingle their own interpersonal needs with academic needs. In this section, we will review six basic academic needs of students.
One: Each student in our classroom needs to have an understanding of our instructional goals and objectives.
If we do not communicate our instructional goals clearly and concisely, we will have students who are confused or misguided. We will have students who have no direction, meaning, or understanding of what they should be doing. All of us have sat in classrooms where we had no idea what the instructional manager wanted us to do, so we did whatever it was we thought they wanted us to do. Most of the time it was wrong. After awhile, we
may have stopped performing. In short, we behaved normally and did not succeed, at least as the instructor would have defined success.
Two: Each of us needs to have a goal for each lesson we teach.
We need to constantly inform, remind, and communicate to our students as we accomplish our goal. Goal setting will reduce the likelihood of having inattentive, confused, direction- less students. In fact Wlodkowski (1978) suggested that:
...with the goal-setting model, the student knows that she or he is in command and can calculate what to do to avoid wasting time or experiencing self-defeat. Thus, before even beginning the learning task, the student knows that her/his effort will be worthwhile and has an actual sense that there is a good probability for success. (p. 54)
Three: Our instruction should match the students' cognitive development/potential and learning style.
We are well aware of the fact that students are grouped according to ability, grades, and achievement. Regardless we need to occasionally take note of each of our students' cognitive development and maturity. We cannot assume because students are in the same grade they have the same cognitive abilities, development, or potential. If we make this assumption, many of our students will cease to learn and their cognitive development will drop sharply. We should attempt to match the content to the student's cognitive ability.
In addition, we should attempt to match the content to the student's learning style. No two students learn exactly the same way. Now this doesn't mean that we have to determine each and every student's learning style. It does mean that we need to be more cognizant of the various learning styles or preferences and learning paces of our students and have a variety of instructional approaches to each lesson. Dembo (1977) suggests that:
A teacher who uses the best textbooks available and develops the most interesting and stimulating lesson plans can still fail to reach a majority of students in his (her) classes who do not have the necessary structures (operations) to enable them to "understand" the presented material. This means that the classroom teacher must be able to (1) assess a child's level of cognitive development, and (2) determine the type of ability the child needs to understand the subject matter (p. 273).
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In conclusion, we should be aware of our student’s current cognitive capabilities, learning styles, learning preferences, and learning pace. We should attempt to
accommodate and assure students' learning by using materials and lesson plans that will enable them to learn and understand.
Four: Our students have a need or desire to be active participants in the learning process.
Leonard (1968) noted, "no environment can strongly affect a person unless it is strongly interactive" (p. 39). We believe that when students are more actively involved in the learning process, more learning is likely to occur than when they are passive observers. For example, more learning is likely in classrooms where there are many student-to-teacher interactions, student-to-student interactions, and question and answer sessions; where teachers provide feedback and students are encouraged to communicate about the content. Students often learn more by participating in the learning process than by sitting by and watching or listening. V. Jones and L. Jones (1981) noted, "children tend to learn what they do rather than what they see or hear" (p. 42). At various points in the instructional process we should stop and have the students
participate actively in some manner:
Good pedagogy must involve presenting the child with situations in which he himself (or she, herself) experiments, in the broadest sense of that term--trying things out to see what happens, manipulating things, manipulating symbols, posing questions and seeking his (or her) own answers, reconciling what he (or she) finds one time with what he (or she) finds at another, comparing his (or her) findings with those of other children. (Duckworth, 1964, p. 2).
In summary, when students do, students learn. When students don't do, they may or may not learn. Often very passive, unmotivated students will not learn in a passive,
unmotivated environment. Hence, we have to make learning fun and exciting.
Five: Regardless of the age of the student, they have a need to see how the content relates to their lives and pursue some interests of their own.
Students are more willing to listen, to communicate, to inquire, and to learn if the subject matter has some relevance in their lives and if they are allowed to pursue some of
their own interests. Many of us have had the experience of having to attend or being forced to attend meetings or workshops which hold no interest to us or our immediate lives. Yet we went, we fussed about it, we sat politely, and we learned only that we would never attend another meeting unless forced to do so. We don't want our students feeling this way about our classes. We want our students to see that what we are teaching is relevant to them, their lives, and their futures. We can often encourage this view by allowing our students to pursue some of their interests and relate them back to the classroom content. If students are allowed to pursue some of their own interests, their enthusiasm might build for our class and content. Students more than ever are asking, "how does this relate to me, or what I do?" Glasser (1969) examined the reasons for students failing and found that:
...with increasing frequency from grade one through the end of graduate school, much of what is required is either totally or partially irrelevant to the world around them as they see it. Thus both excess memorization and increasing irrelevance cause them to withdraw into failure and strike out in delinquent acts. (p. 30)
Finally, we need to adapt our lessons to the lives of our students, allow them to integrate some of their own interests into our lessons, and be able to answer the question, "So teacher, how do I use this?"
Six: Perhaps more important than the other academic needs of students is the need to experience success in the classroom.
The reports are out weekly: experiencing success, not failure, in the classroom environment will lead to better students, more motivated students, better teachers, and better classrooms. Absolutely nobody enjoys being in an environment where they fail over and over. Why should we think that it is any different for our students? When students have long-term failure experiences, they tend to become negative, communicate about school in a negative fashion, and mentally or physically drop out of the system. From the day they enter school until the day they complete school, our students should be able to count more successes than failures. If all they experience is failure then our system is failing them.