Tips for Teaching
Discouraged Students
By Beverly Elliott
1.
Focus on your students. Discover their interests. Spend some time learning your students’ interests
and concerns. Student needs and interests can be addressed even in a classroom
with mandated teaching expectations and goals. Of course, in a homeschool or
tutoring setting it is easier to accommodate individual student interests.
2.
Provide choices among several options to help
create ownership of the learning process.
Help them find books, magazines, and topics they find interesting.
3. Teach to the
student’s strengths before remediating weaknesses whenever possible. Discouraged students are most likely to be
interested in learning new skills and facts once they have experienced success.
Self-checking materials often appeal to both students and
teachers. Immediate reinforcement helps
students feel that learning is easy.
Once a student has independent learning skills progress can begin to
accelerate.
5. Provide
opportunities for working with younger and older students. Working with younger
students helps increase student confidence.
Working with older students who have learned to compliment and encourage
younger students can bring new perspective to the learning.
Provide for student collaboration with peers when possible.
Learning to cooperate with others can be build friendships and introduce
students to new learning strategies.
Working in groups is a valuable skill for life.
6. Provide plenty of
space for illustrating and showing work.
Task cards that present one concept at a time help keep the student from
feeling overwhelmed.
Writing, drawing, tracing, coloring, and speaking helps the
thinking process.
Check off each item accomplished before moving to the next
item when possible. With flash cards or
task cards, place completed cards where they can be seen or counted as
successes. In a full classroom I walk
around checking off correct answers one at a time as the students work through
a page. They love seeing that they are
on the right track and tend to work faster to get more items checked.
7. Teach students to
pace their work. Provide break times for
brief positive experiences. Look at
something of interest, color a picture, pet an animal, get a drink of water, listen
to a silly poem, recount a recent experience, or eat a bit of healthy
snack. Refocusing is again possible.
8. Graph progress
when practice can improve the skill.
Learning basic math facts can be graphed easily, and can help motivate
students to practice. Graph the number
of flash cards mastered, or how many facts are answered correctly in a specific
time period. Graph the number of sight
words identified correctly.
9. Permit some working
in comfortable or unusual locations when practical.
10. Teach the use of “check-off
lists” to build a feeling of accomplishment.
Example: Work list Tuesday:
o
Practice 6’s – Color by Multiplication page
o
Write spelling sentences #8
o
Read chapter 4 Number the Stars
o
Write pen pal letter on Chrome Book
o
Science experiment - filter water
o
SS – start research Alaska Brown Bears
o
Choice reading
Summary:
Students conquer discouragement when they feel successful. Feeling success motivates to try more
difficult tasks. Success helps us like
what we are doing or learning.
Thanks for reading my Tips for Teaching. I hope you have
learned or been reminded of a few ideas that help your teaching experience.
©Gramma Elliott Educational Tools and Clip Art
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