Why Personalized Learning to overcome High Student to Teacher Ratio?

Make your classroom more effective by ensuring tailored learning 

What is High Student to Teacher Ratios? 

High student to teacher ratios to a phenomenon that would be familiar to most educators and parents. It basically means that there are far more students than ideal to every teacher in a school or classroom. Overcrowded classrooms are an unfortunate reality at most schools where resources are low but demand from students grows year on year. Research shows the high student to teacher ratios negatively affects learning in a multitude of ways, the primary being that teachers are unable to give students the kind of individual attention they need. Instead, teachers are distracted by excessive classroom management responsibilities, overwhelming logistics and disciplinary efforts, instead of being able to focus on their real job of teaching. 

What is Personalized Learning? 

Personalized learning refers to a teaching methodology that focuses on ensuring that the teaching pedagogy used in class is customized to the unique and individual needs of each student. Personalized learning has been shown to be one of the most effective teaching methods in the classroom – it essentially teaches students the course material in the most ideal way suited to their learning methods. 

How does Personalized Learning address the issue of High Student to Teacher ratios? 

Personalized learning would ensure that despite logistical constraints of having an overcrowded classroom, students are receiving the kind of teaching they need to excel. So despite numerous distractions, the time being spent on learning and teaching is high quality and has a high return on investment in time and effort being put in by both student and teacher. 

How can we use Personalized learning to address crowded classrooms? 

Personalized learning can thus be used to mitigate the ill effects of the high student to teacher ratios in our educational institution’s classrooms. Despite overcrowded classrooms increasing the burden on teachers, personalized learning can mitigate many of the ill effects of such a situation. Below we discuss in greater detail some methods that can be easily implemented to ensure superlative learning outcomes in the classroom despite barriers: 

• Use Technology to Personalize Learning 

In this increasingly technologically driven world, a multitude of platforms, tools, and educational aids ensure that students remain engaged and feel personally connected to the material they are consuming. School management systems like Fedena, for instance, automate and digitize many processes reducing the burden of logistical constraints at scale in an overcrowded classroom. They ensure that the burden on teachers of non-teaching duties is reduced as much as possible or at least made easier through automation in a single-window platform. 

• Build Comprehensive Communication Channels 

In overcrowded classrooms with high student to teacher ratios, it is easy for some pupils to feel overlooked. This means that they do not have a sense of community or motivation emerging from their classrooms – a grave predicament for any student. Building communication channels between teachers and students thus becomes of primary importance. This can be done in multiple ways – from scheduling face time or one on ones between teachers and students to using private communications channels like an instant messenger or private inboxes in school management systems like Fedena to stay in touch with students anywhere, at any time, on their own personal communication devices. Keeping lines of communication open between teachers and each of the members of their classrooms gives students a sense of personal connection. It also means that they are more likely to reach out proactively when they need help, reducing the burden on the teacher to be the one to always keep an eye on student progress. Personalized learning thus becomes a collaborative process between teacher and student. 

• Create Personalized Rewards systems 

Finally, there is no work without reward. A simple system to motivate students would be to create rewards for students who achieve their academic goals. When teachers invest the time to make sure these rewards are personalized to the taste of their students, pupils are likely to work harder thanks to personalized learning rewards.