Episode 24: Help! My students' skills are still not emerging
Every teacher wants to see their student’s skills improve. We plant the seed, lovingly nurture them and work with them to hone this. That being the case, it can certainly be disheartening to see little to no improvement. You can’t help but ask yourself, What could be causing this? Am I doing something wrong?
In this episode, I’d like to have a little real heart to heart talk with you about what to do when your students skills are not emerging. We will address the questions above and also talk about how the pyramid of learning framework can help us understand our student’s development.
When you aren't seeing the amount of progress that you want to see from your students, here are a few strategies that can be considered.
Remember that development is multi causal.
Multicausal means that all developmental skills emerge only when every single piece of them are fully developed. There were specific studies done on motor development, especially in younger kids and proved that in order for us to see their arm move, every single aspect of that skill needs to be fully developed before we would see it. So, take a breath and extend a little more patience.
What we're looking at is not really what we need to be looking at specifically.
Just how do you measure your student’s success? Do you look at the higher level skill? As I mentioned above, I am obsessed with this pyramid of learning framework. When this is implemented with exactness it can promote young children's healthy development. So if we think about this in like that iceberg metaphor, you only see the tip of the iceberg at the top of the success. But what we don't see are the months and months and months of work that led up to that, or the failures or the amount of times that, you know, either she fell or a dancer went out of step or something didn't work.
Determine the underlying cause of the problem.
It is easy to dismiss an issue and label it as a problem. However, a much more effective approach is to determine the cause of this problem. We have to look beneath the problem. We need to take a step back and really think about this situation and assess the situation to see if there is something else going on. This way, you can pinpoint exactly what foundational skills need support
Get all of the team members to follow through.
You are not expected to stay with your student 24/7. So, if the student isn't showing the skills that you expected to be seeing by now, then I would suspect that not everyone on the team is taking the situation as seriously as you and it's time to bring it up. Regroup with your team, discuss and come up with action plans.
Finally, change your strategy.
Once you've gotten all the above done and it's still not happening, then maybe try looking at asking your questions in a different way. If you haven't already, maybe there's a fun game.
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