The Blue Blog

Overall, Brophy’s ideas for helping discouraged students are focused on individualizing teaching strategies for effective coping through modeling and classroom practices.  My first thoughts when I read some of his suggestions were about the more difficult nature of putting some of those suggestions into practice in a secondary school setting, where each student has several teachers and each teacher has upwards of 180-200 students.  Even if a student with failure syndrome, for example, were to get support from one teacher in the form of efficacy training or attribution retraining, they may not be getting this kind of help in other classrooms.  Teachers who identify students as needing help with low ability, failure syndrome, focus on learning goals, or underachievement should notify other teachers that the students has to let them know what they are planning to help that student.  Hopefully, if the methods are used well, the student may be able to generalize some of the coping strategies, such as goal setting, to other classroom settings as well.  However, having support in other classrooms would definitely help the student as they work towards these goals.

Running along this same theme, I was very pleased that Brophy included in the strategies to help learners some suggestions for how to enlist the help of others.  This is showing recognition that teachers are only one of many people that influence a student’s life and that what the teacher does in the classroom will be even more effective if supported by others.  (It is also helpful for those of use who will be dealing with 180+ students at a time!)  On page 124 of the reading, for example, Brophy suggests enlisting the help of other students, parents, or other adults to help low achieving students.  I think that this would be a crucial part of enhancing other strategies for helping low achieving students, such as extra monitoring and consistent feedback, because the student would feel supported from many other angles, not just teachers.  These extra helpers would be able to give meaningful feedback to the teacher if they were able to spend some one-on-one time with the student.

Brophy offers up two more suggestions that I feel are particularly noteworthy in this excerpt and would like to comment on.  The first can be found on page 125 and deals, again, with low-achieving students.  Brophy says that in order to help students master material, they could be assigned as a tutor to a younger student who needs help.  I can’t think of a better way to help someone enhance their understanding of a topic- when you want to teach something, you have to have the material organized in your head and be able to explain it to yourself.  After helping out a classmate with work, I always find that the information sticks in my head much better than if I merely repeated it to myself, often because I have to think of a few different ways to explain it.  Not only will this help with comprehension but it could certainly give the student a feeling of self-worth at the same time by showing them that they can help another student.  The second suggestion has to do with students with failure syndrome and can be found on page 136.  He simply says that students should be given an opportunity to signal for help in a discreet manner.  While this is a very uncomplicated idea, it could make a world of difference for a student who really has the ability to improve yet has very uncomfortable feelings about asking for assistance.  If they have come so far as to be able to identify when they do or do not need help, I think that working out a system for them to ask for help would give them that extra opportunity needed to continue to change their attitude about what they can achieve.