Modern teaching methods and the obstacles it presents to parents

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Published on Thursday, 08 December 2011 10:47

Last Updated on 03 February 2012

Monica Costa

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Number chunking, number lines and synthetic phonics – new teaching techniques brought in with the Labour Government’s 1999 Numeracy and Literacy Strategies – now mean that 95% of parents keen to help their children boost their grades are simply, ill-equipped to do so.

“Most parents do not understand how their children are taught, and it really isn’t a surprise”, says Geoffrey Wheating, Founder and Director of www.tute.com

Geoffrey (Former Director of Strategic Development, Reuters UK) and Sean Gardner (Former CEO of Moneyexpert.com and former Head of Campaign Planning and Communications at Orange) together with their educational advisory board, have ambitious plans to help parents to better engage with their children’s education.

They have just launched a comprehensive portfolio of ‘how to’ teach videos and supporting downloadable resources, designed to close the gap in learning, enabling parents to positively contribute to their children’s development and educational attainment.

“There are thousands of excellent ‘how to’ videos online, covering everything from physics to finance, which provide students with instruction on what to do”, says Sean.

“What the videos don’t do is show parents how children are taught in school, and the methods deployed today by teachers in the classroom e.g. number chunking, number lines, synthetic phonics. They also do not highlight where children commonly get stuck, and remedies to overcome this.

For example, fractions are commonly misunderstood – 1/4 +1/5 does not make 2/9ths – you can’t add fractions of different denominations. In this instance, a Tute diagram would be used to easily resolve this misunderstanding.”