Author: Анна Кравец Эдуардовна, Андрукевич Екатерина Андреевна | Anna Kravets, Andrushkevich Ekaterina
Introduction
This article is devoted to the topic of the future of the primary education system from the point of view of innovations in it available today. The article examines both the current situation of primary schools in the context of its shortcomings and difficulties, and demonstrates how and what innovative technologies and methods can make the primary education system more humane to the child and more effective in terms of educational and educational outcomes.
The purpose is to give an expert assessment and consider innovations in the primary education system in the context of their impact on the future of the education system;
Tasks:
1. Review the current primary education system and identify its shortcomings;
2. Identify the pool of innovations in the primary education system and identify the most promising ones among them;
3. Consider the future in the context of transformations in the educational system of the future;
Keywords: primary education, innovation, the future, 21st century skills, gamification.
The impact of primary school on the future of a person's personality is difficult to overestimate. Of course, man is a social being and it is during childhood that a number of significant transformations occur in the human psyche that affect his socialization. Omissions on the part of the teacher in the educational aspect of development can lead to almost incorrigible consequences, but it is probably much more terrible that omissions on the part of the teacher in the psycho-emotional plan, since it is during this period of childhood that images and images of actions that he unknowingly absorbs very strongly affect the child. For example, a lack of love, care or attention from both teachers and parents at this age can significantly affect a child's anxiety in the future [1].
And at the same time, the role of the teacher as a psycho-emotional support for the student, on the one hand, is considered by many today to be the most important function, especially in the context of corrective therapy in elementary school [2], and on the other, many experts are convinced that such a phenomenon is considered pathological and is marked by its "transfer" and "countertransference" [3] Meanwhile, often highlighting the healthy facet of mentoring and pathological forms of such a relationship.
Speaking about the importance of primary education in human life, it is impossible not to note the words of I.P. Podlasyi about the teacher: "... the teacher is a special person, since only she knows what, where, how to do it, how to do it correctly, in accordance with pedagogical laws" [4, p. 421], and also it is impossible To note the attention of the UN and Unicef to providing primary education to children all over the world, which is designated within the framework of SDG number 4 [5].
The most important goal of primary school is to prepare the student for educational activities, because, within the framework of preschool education, the child was more engaged in play activities and most often the teacher allowed the child to freely move around the educational and play area, interact with any objects, etc. In elementary school, especially in grades 1-2, there is a gradual transformation of this way of learning and the child must gradually adapt to a learning system that is replete with specific rules, has its own schedule and features of communication between peers (business, procedural and operational relationships), and in the relationship between a teacher and a child (mentoring, tutors, workers, etc.).
Here lies a very big drawback of the modern primary education system. On the one hand, the teacher has the task of integrating game forms of learning into educational practice to facilitate the perception of the material and improve educational results, and on the other hand, game forms of learning often interfere with the disciplinary function of primary school, that is, the upbringing of obedience and perseverance in a child.
The second most important goal of primary education is to foster tolerance and mutual assistance in a child. For this reason, the phenomenon of an inclusive approach is developing all over the world today. This approach to primary education implies the introduction of children with special needs among average students as well. During this period, habitual social behavior is formed, and for this reason, the introduction of inclusion in primary education should allow children to get used to the fact that there are also people with special needs in society who need their help, support and understanding.
However, despite the fact that the introduction of inclusion contributes to the development of tolerance and support in children, this approach can significantly complicate the learning process, since primary schools, like education in the world as a whole, are not ready for a differentiated approach to learning and cannot provide equal opportunities and different levels with modern methods to the same extent the presentation of knowledge. In turn, this may even lead to the opposite effect, if the teacher himself will be annoyed by his example that a child with special needs does not keep up with others and has to pay special attention to him. In addition, if the teacher pays more attention to a special child and to a lesser extent to other students, this can cause them to rage and envy, similar to how it happens in family relationships, since it is still difficult for children at this age to perceive the teacher's attention as a purely business aspect of the relationship.
Meanwhile, one of the key steps towards the future in the primary education system has already been taken. The fact is that, as we have already seen, the most important function of primary school is precisely education, since during this period there are many age-related crises and the task of the teacher is to teach the child to cope with them and react sensitively to changes in the psyche and confusion of the child due to the emergence of new psychological and social concepts unfamiliar to him. In this regard, the role of traditional summative assessment in primary school education is being questioned. First of all, we should not evaluate the student's knowledge, but rather assess the degree of development and support of mental neoplasms.
All over the world, in particular in the Republic of Belarus, the summative assessment system was abolished at the early stages of primary education, however, many teachers are returning to it. What is the reason for this? The fact is that teachers have not been trained on how to give feedback to a child otherwise. Of course, without feedback, there is no educational, developmental or educational impact. In order for the process of education to really take place, the student needs to track his progress and it is desirable that this progress be visible and measurable.
In this regard, the topic of formative assessment in primary school is particularly relevant. Thus, formative assessment is "a set of practices, techniques and activities that help to evaluate learning in the process. The teacher or teacher receives feedback from the students in order to understand how they perceive the material, and thereby adjust the program, differentiate (that is, make learning more personalized)" [6, p.1].
Of course, everyone knows the techniques of formative assessment with instant feedback, for example, the "Traffic Light" or "Smart charging" technique and many others, however, they do not allow the student to record his own progress throughout the entire training or certain periods of it.
Therefore, other technologies of formative assessment are no less important, for example, timelines, clusters, mental maps and, in particular, various types of progress diaries or "travel notes". For example, thanks to the latter, it is possible not only to help the child to fix his own elements of progress and allow him to look at himself earlier and now, but also to introduce elements of gamification to a certain extent, since the teacher can formulate this educational task in the form of an adventure game, which should also change the perception of the learning process by students.
And finally, I think it is advisable to also mention here the possibility of transferring learning in general to the virtual reality space. During the active covid threat, teachers all over the world faced the transfer of education to a distance learning format. Many had to conduct their classes through video communication platforms such as ZOOM, Webinar, Google meetings and others. It was at this moment that it became obvious that they were completely unsuited for independent activation by elementary school students, and it was absolutely impossible to keep the attention of younger students through such a format.
As an alternative to such training, TV training was proposed. Educational videos for elementary school students were shown on television and on specialized websites, and the school teacher only gave the children assignments for evaluation and then checked their work, giving a grade.
Of course, this approach is completely incomparable with the traditional training format because:
1. It is asynchronous in nature. As we have already said, children at this age learn discipline and strict order, and asynchronous shows that a child can do his job at any time, which is not true due to biological and social rhythms.
2. Does not contribute to socialization. A child cannot play with peers, does not see patterns of their behavior, and cannot inherit social culture;
3. Does not set the teacher as an example. The teacher on the TV is impersonal, he does not respond to the student, cannot enter into a relationship with him. He is a source of knowledge, but his educational and prognostic functions are absent and therefore the student cannot receive from him a positive example of patterns of behavior and worldview ideas;
4. It forces an assessment. One way or another, but most of the standard and familiar forms of feedback for students become unavailable, which forces teachers to use formal assessment of knowledge even more often;
5. Does not provide individuality. Since the teacher in rare cases may have a full–fledged connection with the parents or the student himself directly, this does not make it possible to assess their knowledge or the effectiveness of the educational process. For this reason, it is impossible to design an individual educational trajectory for a student, especially for students with special needs. Similarly, the presentation of the material by the video lecturer is designed for the average student and does not take into account the individual characteristics of the students.
And so, as we can see, distance learning is extremely harmful to the process of forming a child's personality in primary school, however, one cannot be so categorical because distance learning technologies are developing by leaps and bounds.
In the future, I assume that all these problems will be solved and in order to justify my own opinion, I will give a number of conclusions based on current problems and innovations in the primary education system.
So, let's look at the first problem – this is the problem of student socialization. To a certain extent, today this problem can be solved with the help of professional or business games related to simulation games. So, by simulating the work environment for a certain profession, the teacher demonstrates the norms of behavior for this work area. Moreover, in this way it is possible to simulate not only working patterns of behavior and working vocabulary, but also to demonstrate what qualities we expect from a child. Yes, alas, we cannot fully immerse children in the work environment today due to their individual preferences. If we simulated, for example, training tasks "for little nurses", those who want to become, for example, firefighters or policemen would be against it. It is not possible to completely differentiate tasks in a similar way, and due to the peculiarities of the psyche of children of this age, namely, rapid variability and flexibility, it is impossible to group children in connection with their professional interests.
For this reason, in the future we will face an urgent task in developing full-fledged professional game simulators with a design function in which the teacher will be able to develop and implement ready-made tasks for certain professional simulations. In such simulation worlds, children will be able to unite to solve certain tasks and thus the function of socialization in elementary school will not be disrupted.
Similarly, the problem of inclusion can be solved, since it will be possible to create an inclusive avatar in the game space, and violence will be absent from the program script. In addition, specially trained neural networks will identify, record and prevent the phenomena of bullying and aggressive behavior, transmit information to a teacher or an educational and psychological group. At the same time, thanks to the modular component of the platform, the teacher will also have the opportunity to design the world in such a way that inclusive children not only perform certain work tasks, but also their features allow teams to perform certain tasks more successfully.
Of course, in such worlds there will also be no assessment as such, and students will be able to assess the success or failure of actions by completing certain tasks. At the same time, in such an artificial world, there must be creative tasks to track your own changes and progress.
Finally, such learning worlds will allow children from all over the world to learn on equal terms, and perhaps even cooperate to ensure the development of key 21st century skills such as cooperation and communication, as well as social and cultural literacy.
Conclusion:
From all of the above, it follows that today there are a number of problems in the primary education system, which both the educational community and scientists from the fields of neuroeducation, cybernetics, computer science and the like are still struggling to solve.
Among the key problems, we were able to identify the following:
1. The problem of forming discipline and working relationships instead of gaming;
2. The problem of forming an inclusive culture;
3. The problem of evaluation and perception of evaluation;
4. The problem of distance learning.
As we have established, the creation of virtual gaming and educational worlds is not only an impossible fantasy, but also the real future of primary education and it is able to solve all the above problems and create ideal conditions for the education and upbringing of our children.