What is the Most Important Thing I can do to Support a Struggling Student?

When students are struggling it can be hard to know where to start and what the most important steps are in providing support to get them to where they need to be.

After working with hundreds of students, and evaluating thousands of students, we’ve realized that the most important thing that parents and educators can do to support struggling students actually has nothing to do with intervention or tutoring, accommodations, modifications, IEP or 504 Plans…

Now you know we absolutely advocate for all of the above. Those pieces are critical to providing the best opportunities for students to meet their true potential. But they aren’t the most important thing. Not even close.

The most important thing you can do to support struggling students is to make sure they understand there is nothing wrong with them.

When students struggle, it’s because the way in which we are providing instruction isn’t matching the way in which his or her brain best processes information. We aren’t teaching the way that he or she learns. It’s not that a struggling student’s brain can’t process information - it can and it does when we provide the information in a way that works for his or her neural wiring.

The analogy we like to use is that having a learning difference is like being left-handed, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being left-handed, it’s just different. And up until the last few decades - being left-handed WAS considered wrong. Check out this article from TIME to learn more about it. Now that we have accepted being left-handed as a normal part of our neurodiversity things are easier for lefties - well other than of course needing to learn strategies so as to not completely smear their writing and having to get used to living in a right-hand dominant society.

Soon having different learning styles will be the same. We will provide more universal accommodations in the classroom and will provide instruction that doesn’t leave this significant portion (20% or more of students when considering all learning “disabilities”) of our population of students out because our teaching styles don’t align with the way they learn. We just need curriculum publishers and administrators to get on board. And so far the charge has been positive, things are changing - but students are still feeling the impact of their struggle.

So the most important thing we can do is to let them know - there is nothing wrong with them.

There is just something not matching up between the way they are being taught and the way their brain learns.

There is NOTHING standing in the way of them being successful in their lives and those who support them (you) are here for them every step of the way.

So while we will never stop advocating for appropriate supports, plans, strategies, and so on and so forth - we have to remember the most important thing is just being there and letting them know that they are perfect, worthy, and intelligent in so many ways despite the struggles they may be feeling.

For more information about effective structured literacy (set up in a way that CAN connect with our struggling students’ brains and how they learn) check out our FREE course - 7-Steps to Reading Intervention that Works.