What are the characteristics of educational intervention?

Let's see what educational intervention consists of and what are its characteristics and procedures.

The educational system has many mechanisms to ensure that all students meet the goals set. One of them is educational intervention..

This concept will be the guiding thread of this article, so that it will allow us to know all the facets of this method, its advantages and main applications, as well as the different types that we can find.

What does educational intervention consist of?

When we speak of educational intervention we are referring to a series of measures carried out by the educators to achieve that the students who are in their charge manage to fulfill the established goals. for the level of education in which they are.

In other words, the purpose of this technique is to ensure that every student achieves the objectives that have been established in the curriculum corresponding to his/her educational level, and therefore achieves a complete achievement of all the subjects of the course he/she has taken.

The function of educational intervention is to have a system in which no pupil is left behindThe function of educational intervention is to have a system in which no student is left behind, but rather that educators know how to provide these children who are experiencing difficulties with the resources they need to overcome those barriers and finish the course having achieved the goals set at the beginning.

Therefore, educational intervention will take place whenever a teacher observes that one of his or her students is experiencing problems in acquiring certain knowledge or skills. It is then when the professional should initiate the protocol to assist the student and promote their learning through customized tools.

If the educational intervention is applied in a favorable way, the result will be that, at the end of the educational cycle in which the students are in, all of them will have been able to achieve their goals, either through regular classes or thanks to this extra support, all of them will have been able to achieve the goals that correspond to them, either through regular classes or thanks to the extra support received by those who have required it..

Main characteristics of the educational intervention

We already know the general idea behind the educational intervention. Now we must focus on all those characteristics that would make up the most correct action and therefore the one that will provide a higher success rate.

Even so, we must never forget that each case is unique and even more so when we are talking about individuals.Therefore, what a student needs at a given moment to overcome an educational gap does not necessarily have to be exactly the same as what one of his peers requires when faced with a similar problem.

It will therefore be the educator's job to know how to adapt all the characteristics that we are going to see, so that the effect of the educational intervention is optimal and so that the students overcome all the possible obstacles that may arise throughout their educational process in the classroom.

1. Concreteness

The first of the characteristics of the educational intervention has been anticipated in some way in the previous lines, and it is none other than concreteness. That is to say, this technique must be specific to the case at hand and as such must be adapted to the student in question who is experiencing difficulties in achieving a certain objective.

In this sense, the educational intervention will be a procedure between only two parties, the educator and the student. Between them, they will design a plan to achieve the goal that is putting the child in trouble. The steps to be followed to achieve this goal will be established.

2. Integration

But the educational intervention, although developed by the educator, together with the student, should not be limited by them. On the contrary, the family context must be a support for the student. Therefore, the child's parents must also provide the child with the tools he/she needs to overcome the impediments he/she has encountered.

Family members also have the important role of identifying possible educational elements that are causing problems for the child, in order to be able to anticipate the problems.The family also has the important role of identifying possible educational elements that are causing problems for the child, in order to be able to anticipate and communicate them to the teacher, in case he/she has not yet noticed the difficulty. In this way, they will gain valuable time, and the educator will be able to start the educational intervention as soon as possible.

In this way, they will get the student to retrace his steps to consolidate the knowledge that he had not achieved at first, avoiding the dreaded snowball effect, which occurs when a concept that is key to understanding the following ones, and so on, is not understood.

3. Assessment

A fundamental part of educational intervention is that which refers to evaluation, i.e., to the verification that, indeed, it has been effective and therefore the student has managed to integrate the knowledge that previously generated a certain difficulty for him/her. that previously generated a certain difficulty for him/her.

For this process, the role of the educator is key, as he/she must be the one who evaluates and also proposes self-evaluation techniques with which the student can check for him/herself whether he/she is now able to handle these concepts or, on the contrary, they are still causing him/her problems.

The evaluation must be continuous, because in this way the teacher will know if the educational intervention process is being effective or if, on the contrary, he/she must continue adapting it to the student's needs in order to achieve the goal that both have proposed.

4. Active role of the student

It is important to be clear that the student has to maintain an active role during the whole procedure of the educational intervention, so it cannot be limited only to an exposition of the lesson by the teacher. On the contrary, the student must be a participant in the process, carrying out the activities that the educator entrusts to him/her and even being proactive..

Only with this involvement will we really get the child to adequately process the concepts he/she is facing, consolidating them and thus surpassing the goals set in the corresponding curriculum. In this way, educator and student will act as a team with a common goal, and success will be born from the interaction between them.

5. Time frames

An educational intervention cannot be a tool that lasts indefinitely.. On the contrary, a time frame must be established from the beginning where both the time frame and the goals to be achieved during that period are clear.

If the set deadlines are reached and the objectives have not yet been completed, a new educational intervention should be established, reviewing what went wrong in the previous one in order to adapt the next strategy without falling into the same situations that caused the failure of the first attempt.

In any case, as we saw before, this must be an active process and in constant evaluation, so that, generally, when the teacher detects that the system is not working properly, he/she will be able to make a new intervention, when the teacher detects that the chosen system is not succeeding, he himself anticipates and modulates it to adapt it to the new needs detected. In one way or another, he finds the way he is looking for to help the student to overcome the difficulty.

How to create a good educational intervention

Although we have already reviewed the main characteristics that a correct educational intervention must fulfill, we are now going to know another series of questions that will undoubtedly be of great use to the educator who wishes to use this methodology with the greatest guarantees of success, and thus be able to help his students.

1. Be clear about the objectives

Of course, the teacher will hardly be able to identify the difficulties of a student to achieve a particular goal if he is not absolutely clear what these are. Therefore, the first task of the educator will be to to know perfectly well the educational goals included in the curriculum, in the short, medium and long term.in the short, medium and long term.

2. Knowing the students

Not only must the teacher know the objectives, but he/she must also know all his/her students in depth, because only in this way will he/she realize that some of them are struggling to assimilate a certain subject and will be able to design an educational intervention to help them.

Each child has certain characteristics and, while some will ask the teacher as soon as they realize they are not understanding an issue, others will opt for silence and others will not even realize they are not understanding it.. The work of the educator in discerning between these scenarios is fundamental.

3. Creativity

The educator, likewise, must have varied and creative resources in order to be able to to the student with difficulties those concepts that are generating a problem for him/her.. As in the previous point, we must keep in mind that each student is different, and the technique that works with some does not necessarily work with others.

Therefore, the educational intervention must be creative and designed for the student in question.

Bibliographical references:

• Barnett, W.S. (2011). Effectiveness of early educational intervention. Science.
• Gallardo, B. (1995). Learning strategies. State of the art. Proposals for educational intervention. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.
• Jordán, M., Pachón, L., Blanco, M.E., Achiong, M. (2011). Elements to take into account to carry out an educational intervention design. Electronic Medical Journal.