Why do students struggle to ask teachers for extra help? Why do they sit in silence or confusion when raising their hand could bring help? Failure to ask for help can affect students’ academic performance, self-esteem, and potentially their access to learning in the future. There are several reasons why students struggle to ask for help, but the good news is that there are many strategies that can help them become stronger self-advocates for their learning.
Students must first recognize that they’re struggling. This requires honesty and self-awareness—some students don’t think they need help even when formal or informal assessments indicate otherwise.
Once students acknowledge that they’re struggling, they may feel shame or embarrassment. Many students have told me, “I want to be independent and try it on my own. I don’t need help.” They fear that asking for help signals weakness or failure in their character, though adults could tell them that asking for help is instead a sign of maturity and strength.
Teachers can help students understand how they learn best and empower them to be advocates for their own learning by teaching them how to ask for help.
1. Strengthen students’ metacognition: One strategy to help students acknowledge that they need help is to strengthen their self-reflection and metacognitive skills. Teachers and parents often act as external monitors of student progress, but they can begin to shift the responsibility of self-monitoring to children as early as elementary school.
Teachers can encourage and guide students with explicit metacognitive teaching to think about their learning. After a test, for example, have students answer questions about how they studied, how much time they spent studying, their test grade, and what they’ll do differently for the next test.
Asking open-ended questions about their learning helps students learn to gauge their progress and identify areas where they’re strong and ones where they need support. Teachers can incorporate metacognitive prompts such as:
- This project required a lot of hard work. How did you prepare for it?
- How do you think you’re doing in this class? How do you know? How does this compare with graded work you’ve received so far?
- Can you identify one strategy you’ve been using that has helped you to be successful? Can you identify one strategy you want to try using more often?
2. Help students understand that teachers want to help: Asking students of any age why an adult would choose teaching as a career can be an eye-opening—and often humorous—activity.
Have students pause and reflect in small groups about why they think Teacher X became a teacher. This is extra fun if Teacher X can visit your classroom to hear the brainstormed ideas. Guide students to the final answer: “Teachers become teachers because they like to help.”
I’ve used this exercise at the beginning of a year for relationship-building and to show students that I care about them and want to help them. This allows me to talk to my students in a lighthearted way about asking for help.
3. Brainstorm conversation starters: Students who are introverted or shy may feel overwhelmed or anxious about initiating a conversation with their teacher. Practicing or role-playing this kind of conversation can help shy students build confidence. Teachers can also suggest that students use just two words to signal that they need help: “I’m struggling.”
Evidence shows that having students brainstorm increases their mental flexibility and creative problem-solving. After they think of ways to initiate a conversation, have them role-play talking with a teacher. This can be done as a small group activity in the classroom or one-on-one with a trusted teacher, social worker, parent, etc.
Students can approach teachers with conversation starters like:
- I’m struggling with _____. Can we talk about it later?
- I’m working hard, but I’m still not understanding _____. Can you help me?
- I’m not sure what I need. Can you please talk with me?
- Can you give me advice about _____?
4. Create a secure environment: Students need to feel safe in order to be vulnerable and honest enough to ask for help. Would you speak up and admit you needed help if you thought your peers would laugh at you?
Teachers should encourage a climate of curiosity, risk taking, and openness. You can use team-building activities to increase the sense of community in the classroom, create posters that reiterate your classroom rules and values, or hang inspiring quotes on the walls.
Another great strategy is for teachers to model self-talk when doing something that requires risk taking. When I make mistakes as a teacher, I use them as opportunities to talk about imperfection and how to be resilient. Students enjoy catching their teacher making mistakes, and I love it when they catch me too because I get to remind them that everyone is imperfect.
5. Help students see themselves as capable of success: In order to ask for help, students need to believe in their own capacity to be successful. If students feel defeated or helpless, they’ll be less likely to seek assistance.
Create opportunities and activities in your classroom for students to identify and highlight their strengths. One activity for elementary classrooms is creating an “I Am” bulletin board: Ask each student to create five or 10 “I Am” statements: “I am strong,” “I am good at basketball.” Next, have students find images online or in magazines that illustrate their statements and create a collage of words and pictures.
For secondary classrooms, I recommend an “Expertise” bulletin board: Students (and teachers) can identify two or three expert-level skills they have—“I’m an expert at spelling,” “I’m an expert at geography—I can name all the state capitals.” Display these on a classroom bulletin board, and when students need help they can check the board to find a classmate—or teacher—who can help.
Preparing teachers to be more well-rounded educators.
Credit: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.
Today's schools face enormous challenges. In response to an increasingly complex society and a rapidly changing technology-based economy, schools are being asked to educate the most diverse student body in our history to higher academic standards than ever before. This task is one that cannot be "teacher-proofed" through management systems, testing mandates, or curriculum packages.
What do teachers need to know to teach all students according to today's standards?
What Teachers Need to Know
First, teachers need to understand subject matter deeply and flexibly so that they can help students create useful cognitive maps, relate ideas to one another, and address misconceptions. Teachers need to see how ideas connect across fields and to everyday life. (Shulman, 1987.)
Interpreting learners' statements and actions and shaping productive experiences for them require an understanding of child and adolescent development and of how to support growth in various domains -- cognitive, social, physical, and emotional. Teaching in ways that connect with students also requires an understanding of differences that may arise from culture, family experiences, developed intelligences, and approaches to learning. Teachers need to be able to inquire sensitively, listen carefully, and look thoughtfully at student work.
Teachers need to know about curriculum resources and technologies to connect their students with sources of information and knowledge that allow them to explore ideas, acquire and synthesize information, and frame and solve problems. And teachers need to know about collaboration: how to structure interactions among students, how to collaborate with other teachers, and how to work with parents to shape supportive experiences at school and home.
New Strategies for Teacher Learning
Acquiring this sophisticated knowledge and developing a practice that is different from what teachers themselves experienced as students requires learning opportunities for teachers that are more powerful than simply reading and talking about new pedagogical ideas. (Ball and Cohen, in press.) Teachers learn best by studying, doing, and reflecting; by collaborating with other teachers; by looking closely at students and their work; and by sharing what they see. This kind of learning cannot occur in college classrooms divorced from practice or in school classrooms divorced from knowledge about how to interpret practice.
Better settings for such learning are appearing. More than 300 schools of education in the United States have created programs that extend beyond the traditional four-year bachelor's degree program. Some are one- or two-year graduate programs for recent graduates or mid-career recruits. Others are five-year models for prospective teachers who enter teacher education as undergraduates. In either case, the fifth year allows students to focus exclusively on the task of preparing to teach, with year-long, school-based internships linked to coursework on learning and teaching.
Studies have found that graduates of these extended programs are more satisfied with their preparation, and their colleagues, principals, and cooperating teachers view them as better-prepared. Extended program graduates are as effective with students as are much more experienced teachers and are much more likely to enter and stay in teaching than their peers prepared in traditional four-year programs. (Andrew and Schwab, 1995; Denton and Peters, 1988; Shin, 1994.)
Many of these programs have joined with local school districts to create Professional Development Schools. Like teaching hospitals, these schools aim to provide sites for state-of-the-art practice and for teacher learning. Both university and school faculty plan and teach in these programs. Beginning teachers get a more coherent learning experience when they teach and learn in teams with these veteran faculty and with one another. Senior teachers deepen their knowledge by serving as mentors, adjunct faculty, co-researchers, and teacher leaders. (Darling-Hammond, 1994.)
These new programs envision the professional teacher as one who learns from teaching rather than as one who has finished learning how to teach.
Professional Learning in Practice
Countries like Germany, France, and Luxembourg have long required two to three years of graduate-level study for prospective teachers on top of an undergraduate degree in the subject(s) to be taught. Education courses include the study of child development and learning, pedagogy, and teaching methods, plus an intensively supervised internship in a school affiliated with the university.
In France, all candidates now complete a graduate program in newly created University Institutes for the Preparation of Teachers that are connected to nearby schools. In Japan and Taiwan, new teachers complete a year-long supervised internship with a reduced teaching load that allows for mentoring and additional study. By Japanese law, first-year teachers receive at least twenty days of inservice training and sixty days of professional development. Master teachers are released from their classrooms to advise and counsel them. (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996.)
In their study of mathematics teaching in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, Stigler and Stevenson note: "One of the reasons Asian class lessons are so well-crafted is that there is a very systematic effort to pass on the accumulated wisdom of teaching practice to each new generation of teachers and to keep perfecting that practice by providing teachers the opportunities to continually learn from each other." (1991)
Without these supports, learning to teach well is extremely difficult. Most U.S. teachers start their careers in disadvantaged schools where turnover is highest, are assigned the most educationally needy students whom no one else wants to teach, are given the most demanding teaching loads with the greatest number of extra duties, and receive few curriculum materials and no mentoring or support.
After entry, teachers are expected to know everything they will need for a career, or to learn through occasional workshops mostly on their own, with few structured opportunities to observe and analyze teaching with others. As one high school teacher who had spent twenty-five years in the classroom once told me: "I have taught 20,000 classes; I have been 'evaluated' thirty times; but I have never seen another teacher teach."
Some school districts have begun to create new approaches to professional development that feature mentoring for beginners and veterans; peer observation and coaching; local study groups and networks for specific subject matter areas; teacher academies that provide ongoing seminars and courses of study tied to practice; and school-university partnerships that sponsor collaborative research, inter-school visitations, and learning opportunities developed in response to teachers' and principals' felt needs.
For example, at Wells Junior High, a Professional Development School working with the University of Southern Maine, the whole notion of staff development was turned on its head. The emphasis shifted from outside consultants to in-house experts. Collaborative learning groups replaced the traditional lecture/demonstration format. Problem-posing and problem-solving supplanted the recipes and prescriptions for effective schools that teachers had heard for years and never managed to implement. (Miller and Silvernail, 1994, pp. 30, 31.)
Similarly, at Fairdale High School in Louisville, Kentucky, teachers' research coupled with shared decision making produced major changes.
As part of a self-study, ten teachers followed ten children through a school day. When it was over, teachers said things like, "It was boring," or, "You know, this isn't a very humane place to be." Teachers read and began to trade articles from the Kappan, Educational Leadership, and Education Week. Even before participative management was initiated at Fairdale, the teachers started changing things. "Make no mistake about it," [the principal] said, "we are building a professional culture." (Kerchner, 1993, p. 9.)
Professional development strategies that succeed in improving teaching share several features. (Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin, 1995.) They tend to be:
- Experiential, engaging teachers in concrete tasks of teaching, assessment, and observation that illuminate the processes of learning and development;
- Grounded in participants' questions, inquiry, and experimentation as well as professionwide research;
- Collaborative, involving a sharing of knowledge among educators;
- Connected to and derived from teachers' work with their students, as well as to examinations of subject matter and teaching methods;
- Sustained and intensive, supported by modeling, coaching, and problem solving around specific problems of practice; and
- Connected to other aspects of school change.
The Benefit for Students
Growing evidence suggests that this kind of professional development not only makes teachers feel better about their practice, but it also reaps learning gains for students, especially in the kinds of more challenging learning that new standards demand. (Darling-Hammond, 1997; NFIE, 1996.) Creating a profession of teaching in which teachers have the opportunity for continual learning is the likeliest way to inspire greater achievement for children, especially those for whom education is the only pathway to survival and success.
This article is adapted from Educational Leadership Vol. 55, No. 5, February 1998, and is excerpted with permission. That article draws in substantial part on the author's book, The Right to Learn (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).
Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education at Stanford University and a former member of Edutopia's National Advisory Board.References:Andrew, M. D., and R. L. Schwab. (Fall 1995). "Has Reform in Teacher Education Influenced Teacher Performance? An Outcome Assessment of Graduates of Eleven Teacher Education Programs."Action in Teacher Education17, 3: 43-53. Darling-Hammond, L. (1997).Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching. New York: The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. Darling-Hammond, L., and M. W. McLaughlin. (1995)."Policies That Support Professional Development in an Era of Reform." Phi Delta Kappan 76, 8: 597-604. Darling-Hammond, L., ed. (1994).Professional Development Schools: Schools for Developing a Profession. New York: Teachers College Press. Denton, J. J., and W. H. Peters. (1988)."Program Assessment Report: Curriculum Evaluation of a Non-Traditional Program for Certifying Teachers." Unpublished report. College Station: Texas A&M University. Dewey, J. (1929).The Sources of a Science of Education. New York: Horace Liveright. Kerchner, C. T. (1993)."Building the Airplane as It Rolls Down the Runway." School Administrator. 50, 10: 8-15. Miller, L., and D. L. Silvernail. (1994)."Wells Junior High School: Evolution of a Professional Development School." In Professional Development Schools: Schools for Developing a Profession, edited by L. Darling-Hammond. New York: Teachers College Press. National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. (1996).What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future. New York: National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. National Foundation for the Improvement of Education. (1996).Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning: Transforming Professional Development for Student Success. Washington, D.C.: Author. Shin, H. (1994)."Estimating Future Teacher Supply: An Application of Survival Analysis." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans. Shulman, L. (1987)."Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform." Harvard Educational Review 57, 1: 1-22. Stigler, J. W., and H. W. Stevenson. (Spring 1991)."How Asian Teachers Polish Each Lesson to Perfection." American Educator 15, 1: 12-21, 43-47.