New Vision

So this past week I got a new idea for what direction to take for the next chapter of my life. I want to go back to school to get a couple masters degrees, one in behavioral science and another in education. As I have mentioned in more than one post I want to use my past to carve out the future and I hope to complete some practical research in how to best facilitate learning when you have a class made up of children with and without special needs.
Back in Montgomery College, I wrote up a paper about teacher centered instruction vs. student centered instruction and wrote an argument for balancing the two. My new, more robust idea is that the whole class will support each other's learning and work together to understand a given problem and it's solution. Encouraging the class to not only treat each other with respect but to provide each other with emotional and academic support. I want to experiment with the idea of peer tutoring and to find a way to create a classroom where no one feels excluded. This is not to say we make the teachers obsolete. Teachers would be facilitating the learning process and the children would get a chance to fully digest each lesson by discussing and practicing the lesson among themselves. Obviously, this would be more beneficial for older children who will have enough of an attention span to stay focused for half an hour or so.
Due to the direction we are going in with social media, part of my goal is to make sure future students will be able to develop social skills which is why I like the idea of a collaborative classroom. Even people in my own generation feel uncomfortable asking for emotional support from friends.  When a child struggles through the school day, they feel alone in their struggle and feel as though they are lacking much needed support. I firmly believe that schools should, once they get enough federal funding that is, start making more of an effort to help those on the fringe to interact positively with their peers and to make and extra effort to notice how students are being treated by their peers when they think there are no adults around to witness their behavior. Hopefully it doesn't require extra funding but teachers are already on strike for being mistreated by the government.