For this week’s Wise Wednesday’s post, I wanted to draw your attention to an informative book that I have found by Robyn Jackson called, Mastering the Principles of Great Teaching: How to Support Struggling Students. What drew my attention to this book was that the book was written in a way that was very relatable to myself as an emerging educator. As my inquiry question may indicate, I do have a few struggling students – this experience is relatable to many teachers, I am sure. As Jackson says in her Introduction chapter, “All teachers have had that moment in the classroom where we’ve just finished explaining what we thought was a simple concept and then see our students staring blankly back, completely lost. We have all experienced the frustration that comes when students continue to struggle and constantly lag behind.” (p.13) Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Jackson provides readers with many different practical strategies that educators can use to ensure that even our most struggling students are succeeding within our classroom. She discusses strategies that have been touched on in this blog, such as having support for the students, meaning that teachers are guiding students throughout the entire learning progress, through modeling and scaffolding, and for preparing for instances when students may struggle with certain concepts. In these cases, it is imperative that teachers set up opportunities prior to the summative assessment, for students to re-engage with the material and to learn the things that they missed. I believe that providing for these different opportunities of learning similar concepts will help alleviate the anxiety and frustration among students in the classroom. I have seen this happen at my own practicum school, where there is a lot of scaffolding provided to my students. Key concepts are constantly being repeated and students get a lot of time to play and work with the topic. I know that when I was in elementary school, I had often become frustrated with learning math concepts. Word problems in particular were difficult for me, and it was a frustrating process. I was not given the opportunities to re-engage with the material and to re-learn the things that I had missed. To this day, word problems in math continue to be one of my biggest struggles.

One of the biggest positives in the book is the discussion about how teachers should keep their students in mind when planning a lesson or unit. It really is about knowing your students, such as knowing what their skills and struggles are, and what kind of prior knowledge they bring into the classroom. Jackson brings up this excellent point: “Students who struggle because of a lack of background knowledge don’t have the vocabulary or the experiences they need to make sense of new information.” (p.18) This diagnostic assessment is critical in preventing students from feeling frustrated right off the bat in a new unit, for example. This is something that I will definitely be keeping in mind during my practicum. Asking myself questions such as: “What kind of prior knowledge do my students have?” and “What are some struggles that some students may have?” will help me to give the support that all of my students need in order to help prevent frustration and instead, create success for my students.

Reference:

Jackson, R. R., & Lambert, C. (2010). Mastering the principles of great teaching: How to support struggling students. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development (ASCD).