What Do You Have in Your Classroom? Improving Engagement and Learning by Combining Acceleration Learning Theory With Established Methods in Schools

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Background

The structural problems faced by traditional learning theories are significant and have long impacted classrooms in a variety of ways. More recent research has discussed remediation-focused classrooms, both in structure and learning content, and has integrated these ideas into core principles in educational psychology in how children and adolescents learn. While remediation strategies, in the form of focusing on deficit-oriented strategies that focus on gaps in knowledge/skill, is useful, integrating models that position the learners’ strengths are important. Rather than a deficit approach, we explore the ways in which acceleration-based theories (e.g., McKeon, 1995) can impact practice across a number of instructional supports, including scaffolding, repetition, relevancy, and restorative practices. Acceleration learning theory differs from contemporary theoretical approaches by focusing on holistic learning at speed in sequence, rather than parallel, and by integrating older concepts, better learning and engagement may be achieved. By leveraging Accelerated Learning Theory's focus on holistic learning, it may be possible to enhance existing restorative practices as well. According to acceleration theory, students learn best when they are:
• not affected by negative emotions, with educators who build, maintain, and repair relationships.
• engaged in the learning process.
• find relevance through personal association, personal usefulness, or personal identification/
• at the edge of their learning zone and experience challenge, including productive success and productive failure.
• required to practice and over-learn through repetition.

The focus of this collection is to examine how Acceleration learning theory can be used in conjunction with repetition, restorative practices, and customised relevance efforts to improve engagement (through a variety of measures like actual amount learned and voluntary use of learning tools). Our goal is to build an article collection that all educators and leaders can use for learning development, both within themselves, their classrooms, and their communities. We want to foster a nuanced understanding of contemporary educational practices, contributing to a more robust and innovative landscape of teaching strategies, with this topic. Specifically, we would like to create a clear, open collection of research into the power of repetition, engagement, relevancy, and restorative practices in the classroom for educators and researchers to use. Our focus is on research related to or including acceleration theory.

We invite scholars to submit papers that explore themes around the intersection of acceleration, repetition, engagement, relevance, and restorative practices. Submissions may include data-driven experimental studies, case studies, review articles, and opinion pieces that illumine the key thematic areas. We are particularly interested in papers that integrate the ideas of how effective application of restorative practices within classrooms can be accomplished via psychological and pedogeological theory/evidence, and how such practices foster resilient learners while bridging learning gaps.

We welcome community case studies in this topic, as we would like to see diversity in classrooms. We are willing to consider international evidence, as context-based education is key to this topic.

All papers must directly state at least one theory (ideally Acceleration Learning Theory) and integrate ideas of at least one of the key themes of repetition, engagement, and relevance.

We are willing to consider research on higher education students who are aiming to be teachers in primary and secondary education, as long as it fits the above criteria.

Keywords: Restorative practices, Remediation, Acceleration, Student engagement, Relevance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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