Dealing With A Struggling Student

When working with students at home, whether as a new or a seasoned parent, a vast amount of worry and apprehension about learning can surface. These questions revolve around the student’s and parent’s ability to understand the homework and how to provide help with homework when needed.

Although these are valid concerns, they point to a trend in how people in the United States think about learning: that students should “get” things right away. We tend to assume that students should be able to do one lesson and have a new skill mastered.

Some of the questions that teachers hear:

• “Why does it take so long for my student to understand this?”
• “What can I do to get my student to understand things faster?”
• “What’s wrong with my child?”

People tend to think that smart people learn things without much help or hard work. It is ingrained in our culture that success in school is based on intelligence, and that intelligence is something you have or you don’t have. Another, and perhaps a more accurate, way to look at intelligence is to think about it as something gained through hard work and struggle.  This means that we should change our frame of thought and our folk theory to see struggle as a good thing.

Having to struggle can teach children to work hard for something and to stick with it. With the right mindset and strategies in place, we can help them develop emotional strength and learn to persevere . When they reach their goal, you can then decide if you want to give them a reward for seeing it through to the end.  With this approach to learning, the focus is on not giving up, which is the road to success and to building personal grit.

The way we approach challenges affects our behavior as students, teachers, and parents. If we think of struggle as an indicator of low intelligence, then students will feel bad about themselves when they run into difficulty. Within this framework, teachers will worry that a student isn’t capable of doing the work or that they failed to teach the material appropriately. Also, parents become concerned that their child isn’t smart enough or that they neglected to provide the support he or she needed.

Why not consider changing how we think about struggle? If we redefined struggle as an indicator of strength and recognize that it teaches students to face down challenges, then we would view challenges that students face as positive experiences. After all, our goal is not just to teach students academic knowledge, but to also teach them skills that will assist them in all areas. Helping kids learn to overcome difficulties is a lesson that will last a lifetime.