ABCD’s for Working Successfully with Struggling Learners

Authentic – Be authentic in your intent to Interrupt the Failure Cycle of the struggling learner you are working with.

Accept – Suspend judgement about who the child is, the limitations you attribute to him or her, and regardless of age or grade level, accept what (s)he knows as a starting point for your work together.  Know that poverty has nothing to do with the ability to learn.

Acknowledge the limits of your own Mental Models, be willing to explore your own biases and what you percieve as real.   IQ vs MI.  How smart are you vs How are you Smart?   MBTI- Understanding self and Understanding others.  Learning to Type watch.

Ask – Engage your child/tutee in meaningful dialogue.  Observe, and uncover his or her thinking. Get their POV

Advocate for and on behalf of your child/children.  Be child-centric.

Applied – Make it real.  It is as “clear as mud” to your students, even if it was clear to you when you delivered the lesson.  Make clear the abstract by engaging students in real “applied” experiential learning activities in the teaching of both reading and mathematics. See Draw below.

Brains – Understand how the brain works, what it needs to grow,  and how to build dendrites and make connections for yourself and your tutees. Gardeners don’t blame the plants, they find out what the soil needs, what additional nutrients the plant needs and ensures that there is adequate sunlight and water.  What are the equivalent factors that these children’s brains need to grow?  We have to do more than blame the victims,  i.e. the children or their parents.  There are in school factors that can be provided to support and to ensure success for the struggling learner.   The Buddies are there to provide some of that support.

Brains needs challenges  – Provide challenges with structured, consistent support to grow brains.

Brains don’t function well under stress.

Brains like the feeling of  learning & winning – Experiencing Success in Learning – a Dopamine inducing activity

Brain capacity & ability to learn are not determined by skin colour, race, ethnicity, income, class or SES.

Brain – Using the whole brain.  Engage the musical and artistic areas of the brains in service of learning to read and do math.  These are not isolated curricular activities.   Build understanding and mastery in math and in reading through the inclusion and integration of the visual arts and music. Visual Representation of Data provides for externalising that which is internal.

Brains like novelty…using basketball and sports to teach math.  Make it interesting, to keep them interested.  At least until their own brains begin to feel the effects of their small successes, and are motivated to experience more successes at new and even more challenging activities.

Buddies – unconditional love and support from at least one person who will provide POSITIVE PROXIMAL PROCESSES to allow each individual child the opportunity to learn in a way that the individual child needs for learning and development.

CONTEXT of teaching & learning – Systems Thinking & Organizational Learning as mechanisms for improving the conditions and context of learning , especially for struggling learners.   Crossan, 4I model of Organisational Learning, Intuiting, Interpreting, Implementing, Instituionalizing.  Creating in-school, in-classroom catalysts for Organizational Learning.  Stuggling learners transformed as catalysts for school improvement and classroom leaders.

CONTENT – Curriculum content must be customised for the individual child, not differentiated .   There is no teaching if the child has not understood what was taught.  Teaching and learning are inseparable sides of the same coin.  The teacher’s work is not done, until the child has learned and shown evidence of having mastered the lessons taught.   This must be individualised for the struggling learners, for the children that have been left behind.  The lone classroom teacher cannot differentiate enough to meet the needs of the entire class.  In theory, but not in an applied setting.  Individualising the teaching and curriculum content for the lowest performers, providing them with time to mastery, TTM, helps not only the children in question, but the  classroom teacher and the entire class.

Reading & reading difficulties.  Understanding levelled texts.   Reading Wars, whole language vs phonics, explicit & systematic teaching of sound symbol relationships.  Building Background knowledge, and developing vocabulary.  Importance of dialogue.

Mathematics – Going back to the beginning, filling holes, building strong mathematical foundations, and debugging math errors.  Using geometry,  art and hands-on concrete construction as a doorway and mechanism for understanding, teaching and re-teaching mis-understood or missing math concepts.

CONFIDENCE in self as a Learner.  Motivation, resilience, confidence.  Building resilience, finding motivating factors to support learner, and removing in-school barriers to learning that negatively impacts your tutee.  Advocating and communicating with classroom teacher for and on behalf of your tutee.  Creating a trusting and safe place for child to work towards mastery and confidence in self as being able to learn.

DIALOGUE – Struggling learners/readers can comprehend at much higher levels than they can decode.  Don’t talk down to them.    Engage them in meaningful dialogue, stretch their minds  and expand their vocabularies.   Allocate time every day to have conversations with your tutees, and maintain a journal/book of new vocabulary words.

DRAW – Externalise the internal. Graphs, charts, maps are all visual representations of data.  Creating Visual Representations of Data – VRDs and interpreting charts, graphs and other VRD’s are skills that must be explicitly taught.  Follow up  activities after reading include, creating sequential art, comic books, pop-up books, drawing  to ensure understanding. Making meaning through the process of creating/drawing/visually representing information.

DOCUMENT progress and change.   Goals, Barriers, Alternatives, Strategies, Success.  GBASS – A dynamic, not static,  tool for documenting the child’s progress and continuous improvement & change.  Create a GBASS spreadsheet for each child and update it every two weeks or more often if necessary; Record their challenges and their progress.

DIGITAL PORTFOLIOS – Create digital portfolios of student work to document and share progress and accomplishments.

INTERRUPT FAILURE – Interrupt the failure cycle.   Break the cycle.  Teach.

POSITIVE, PROXIMAL, PROCESSES – First Be POSITIVE.  Watch for the negativity that creeps into your language when working with children who have experienced failure.

PROXIMAL as opposed to DISTAL PROCESSES.  

Proximal – near, close; Distal -far, remote.  Good teaching is a PROXIMAL PROCESS.   Computers introduce a DISTAL PROCESS…Distance learning.   Children need POSITIVE, PROXIMAL, PROCESSES…that is, teaching that is positive, up close and personal and is a process that takes time, not just an event or a lesson introduction.

PROXIMAL Nearest; proximate. Nearer to a point of reference such as an origin, a point of attachment.   DISTAL – Remote from the point of origin.

PROXIMAL = Closer in PROXIMITY.  When teaching or working with a struggling learner, get near.  Get next to them, on their level.  Get physically near and next to the learner. Sit next to the child.  You can’t reach him/her by standing at the front or back of the room, at some distance away.  Get close up and personal.

PERSONAL…Learning is personal.  Teaching is personal.  Get personal if you want the child to learn.  Get to know them.  You have to REACH them, before you can TEACH them.

VRD – Visual Representation of Data…externalising the internal so that it can be shared, discussed and understood. Getting inside the learner’s head to see what they are thinking. They must draw, visually represent their understanding of math problems, as the very FIRST step in problem solving, and B4 attempting to “find the answer” as they have been programmed to do. You must get to “see” their thinking process, and de-bug any misunderstanding of mathematical concepts.

After reading, readers should also draw, visually represent their understanding of the text. You are not working on making them artists, but providing a mechanism for them to externalise their understanding, so that you can be certain that there IS understanding of the text that was read. At this stage of their learning, the understanding is not automatic, and not to be assumed to be automatic. Slowing down the process, and helping them to think out loud with their drawings and their VRD’s, will help both the learner and you the tutor/teacher to “see” what the student is thinking and where you need to intervene.

VIDEOS to be watched.     Nina Jablonski breaks the illusion of skin color | Video on TED.com*