By Sara Finegan

When we’re working with kids who struggle to learn, there are several things at play within us:

• Compassion – who doesn’t remember times when we were trying to learn something and found it hard?  And when we remember, don’t those awful feelings of frustration and panic come right back up?
• Desire to nurture – you don’t have to be a parent to feel that primal urge to take care of, to coddle and to make things easy and lovely for someone.
• Urgency – whether you’re in a separate classroom or in the middle of a group of gen. ed kids, there are deadlines and we can’t spend 6 hours learning how to carry and borrow right this minute.
• Curiosity and interest – I don’t know about you, but I’m fascinated by how my students’ minds process information and learn new things.  When I’m working directly with a child, I am utterly absorbed with what I’m seeing and hearing from them – even if what I’m hearing is silence.  I’m watching and noting the smallest details, and putting those details together with others and reframing my picture of the kiddo.
• Jumping ahead – There’s a part of me that is always looking forward to the desired outcome, the longterm one.  As I observe and show a child what to do now, I am thinking about how to release the responsibility fully back to him or her, and what I want to see him/her do. 

Many of these factors war with one another, and I think it’s a learned skill to master them sufficiently to be able to give just the proper support to an individual or small group of kids.  I often have to deal with the “urgency” factor by mentally chunking what we’re doing into smaller increments and focusing on just getting one tiny step done now, with the rest to come later. 

I frequently have to remind myself that I’m not the one who is struggling right now, so get over it.  And it is absolutely essential that I control my mothering instinct, because if I didn’t, I’d be an enabler or a crutch, not a teacher.

More damage is done to kids by helping them than by not.   That may sound far-fetched, but I believe it to be so.   We’re often so busy sheltering and scaffolding and supporting kids that we forget to release responsibility back to them, and as a result, kids are dependent on us.     

Who hasn’t worked with a child who quite obviously doesn’t know how to persevere and try a bunch of different ways to solve a problem?  Who hasn’t encountered a kiddo who says “I dunno” within 2 seconds of realizing he doesn’t know the answer?  What about those kids we see, in every school, who are passive learners, expecting everything to come to them, rather than reaching out and grabbing at knowledge? 

On my caseload over the years, I’ve seen quite a few.  In some years, they have approached the majority of my students; in others, about a third.

It’s not the kids’ fault.  It’s ours.  We’ve helped too much in the wrong way.

This doesn’t mean that we need to stop providing support .  It means that we need to change the manner in which we support, and be ever-vigilant about the effects of our help.  

Watch yourself.  Catch yourself if you:

• Find yourself giving the answer when the child should be finding it himself.
• Are jumping in to a silence instead of giving a child extra time to think and respond.
• Are cutting corners to get through a task with a child faster than he or she can process or work
• Are feeling frustrated and impatient – maybe you’ve taken on too much with the child
• Think, even subconsciously, that getting it right is more important than learning it. 

We are all susceptible to lapses, of course.  But the more we let the child do the thinking , reasoning, puzzling and work, the more he will be learning.

chunking · high expectations · independence · role · Sara Finegan · support · supports · teaching strategies · tips