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Helping dependent underachievers achieve their potential
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Computers In The Classroom, Dealing With Stress, motivating students, positive climate, The way I see it
photo by anniebee
Underachievers. We’ve all had them in our classes. They have so much potential yet don’t live up to it. Their poor work habits, their lack of focus, their poor organizational skills, their perfectionism, etc., etc, etc, can be very frustrating.
In my last post, I talked about the nature of underachievers. In this post, the second in the series about underachievers, I’m going to share with you an approach that can help dependent underachievers reach their potential.
As I said in my last post, underachieving is a learned behaviour. Since it is a learned behaviour, it can also be an unlearned behaviour- so to speak. Underachieving students can learn behaviours that will help them reach their potential. For this to happen, teachers and parents must work together as a team, each supporting one another. Consistency is the key. What happens in the classroom has to happen at home, and what happens at home has to happen in the classroom.
The dependent underachiever has learned to depend on others. Well meaning teachers, parents or caregivers have habitually stepped in and have done things for him before he’s had a chance to figure things out for himself. The dependent underachiever has had little chance to experience challenges, struggle and work them out. Someone, some well meaning person has stepped in and denied him the opportunity to solve the problems that help build positive self-esteem. The dependent underachieveing student has learned that others can do whatever he’s been asked to better than he can, so there’s no pointin him doing it. His experience tells him the prudent thing to do is to let others do it. That way it get’s done properly and everyone is happy, and to be honest he rather likes all that attention he’s getting all the time.
I have to confess here, sometimes I am that well meaning person who steps in too quickly to help a student. I’m always fighting that tendency in myself. I have to remind myself that when I step in too quickly and help a student, I’m not really helping him at all. In fact, I’m doing the opposite.
Students do need help and teachers and parents do need to help them. Don’t get me wrong. The trick is to help students just enough so that they can do most of the task on their own. I think of it like priming one of those old vintage pumps that used to be popular at one time. To get them to work, sometimes you had to put in a bit of water to get it started. Once they got started, they worked fine. Thank you very much!
The ultimate goal of course is to have the dependent underachiever responsible for his own learning. But, we can’t expect him to do it cold turkey. That just won’t work. It has to happen in small doable steps at home and at school. We can help the underachiever develop positive self esteem by letting him experience success that he is responsible for, not his well meaning teachers, parents, or care givers. This means priming the pump of organization, priming the pump of doing assignments and all the other pumps that are needed to help the dependent underachiever learn to be responsible for his own learning.
In subsequent posts, I’ll share some strategies for priming those pumps.
The first post in this series can be found here- Nine things I’ve learned about students who are underachievers.
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5 Responses to “Helping dependent underachievers achieve their potential”
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Hi, How are you?
I am now reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Have you read it? It’s an excellent read.
He refers to an experiment by Martin Seligman. When I read it, I had an incredible AHA moment because it reminds me of what you are talking about. In short, Seligman found out about learned helplessness, and how it affects many areas of our psychology.
Chris,
No, I haven’t read The Paradox of Choice yet, but it sounds like I should. Thanks for drawing it to my attention.
Elona-
As an 8th grade special education teacher, I see this all the time.My students come to me so dependent because we have never let them deal with a challenge on their own. They don’t understand that ALL students struggle with assignments. When I tell the parents that 8th grade is all about developing independence, many are terrified and resist my efforts because they too are so used to us “making” their children successful. It takes some doing to slowly pull away the crutches they are used to, and it’s hard to watch kids struggle, but it can be done!
Nancy,
Thanks for sharing your insight on the topic.
You have written so beautifully about literacy and
underachievers and how to tackle underachievers ,
1)what happens at school has to happen at home to be consistent,
2)then parents and teachers to work as team members
3)Teachers and parents to just act as facilitators
I myself sit with my kids and help them study or rather have made them on dependent on me.We as parents also need to change our outlook and make them independent