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Post by brittanysinitch on Mar 24, 2016 11:56:42 GMT -5
Hi friends!
After having my first meeting for Project Connect, it opened up my eyes to something. This student seemed as though he did not want to be helped. He had every reason in the world to take the help being provided to him, but he was so closed off to this idea. One of his mentors said to him, we can't continue to help you if you do not want to help yourself. This student has new goals to get home by curfew, to speak to his teachers about working on his grade, and respecting the people around him.
As a mentor in this program and a life coach, we have an opportunity to bond with these students, take them into the outside world, and help them grow as people. Now, I can't help but think of what this would be like for me if I was this students teacher. I would be more restricted and would not necessarily be allowed to take a student out to lunch and to get a job... At least at my old high school, this would not be as acceptable. My goal as a teacher though is to of course educate my students, but I also hope to be a mentor in my students life.
So, I ask you all.. How do you plan on helping a student who does not want to be helped? How do you plan on inspiring them and engaging them? How do you find that happy medium between teacher and mentor?
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Post by brittanysinitch on Mar 24, 2016 12:03:36 GMT -5
Also, please feel free to take this in any direction. I'm curious as to how you all plan on engaging students, but if you have other ideas of what may be happening in your classroom and what that might look like, feel free to share!
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Post by savannapoulson on Mar 25, 2016 13:40:05 GMT -5
Brittany, I'm glad you brought this up as it is an important issue that we will all face at some point in our teaching careers. I feel like there are many reasons for why a student would refuse help; they may have been belittled by someone who had tried to "help" them before, they may have been instilled with the belief that receiving help is a sign of weakness, and so on. Regardless of the reason, I think it is important to build trust between you and your students and to maintain appropriate relationships with them. At my high school, a lot of teachers would let students come into their classrooms during lunch, just to sit down and chat or anything really. Those teachers always had great relationships and trust between them and their students, and from the teachers I had who did that, even students who wouldn't try in class or accept help would eventually make some improvement. It can be hard to remember that your students (or anyone for that matter) are people with their own thoughts, feelings, and lives. However, we need to remember that and build that trust in order to get anywhere with our students. Also, a referral to the guidance counselor may also help, as sometimes students may just need to talk to someone who doesn't have that authority over them.
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Post by morgan on Mar 27, 2016 15:32:03 GMT -5
Savanna, that is very true about establishing a relationship before trying to help the student. I sometimes think when we try to come in and help the student but we don't really know anything about them besides what their grades are and how well they succeed in our classroom, that student would probably think to themselves that we know nothing about them and therefore, shut us out like the boy at Project Connect. When we listen to what they have been through, what they're going through, and really focus on them as a person, not as just our student, then we can move into a relationship where there is room for us to know them well enough to show them that help in our class is worth it.
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Post by colemanaj1776 on Mar 28, 2016 13:20:51 GMT -5
I feel that helping this type of student takes two. We as teachers need to try and motivate these students in the right direction. However, there is some effort that needs to be taken by them. I think it's hard to pinpoint exactly how to find the happy medium without experience as a teacher and mentor. In my practicum, it seems to come naturally. The students who truly want mentor ship seek it.
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Post by rachelhinder on Mar 29, 2016 12:52:07 GMT -5
Yesterday in class our guest speaker, Mr. Stinchfield, made such a relevant point - we can't expect our students to trust us if they don't trust each other. Something like requiring students to communicate in group discussions by addressing each other by their names is a simple task that helps students start to respect each other. Also, like Savanna mentioned, opening your classroom during lunch for students to chat or whatever is nice. I think it is important to not go so far out of your way to be a mentor for a specific student you've deemed in need of help, but rather presenting yourself and your classroom in a way that inspires and gives students the opportunity to thrive and grow if they choose to do so.
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Post by rachelgoodbar on Mar 29, 2016 14:46:21 GMT -5
This is something that i have been thinking about as my project connect student is getting out of Juvie on the 5th. After looking at all of his charges and seeing how that he is 17 and in 9th grade I think it is really important to find a way that to reach out and help motivate him to work hard and get an education. I think we will need to, as everyone said, establish a relationship based off of trust where he knows that I am here to help him and not get him in trouble. I think the main way to help these students is just letting them know that we are there for them and willing to help whenever they are ready to accept it. Especially with project connect I don't think that we can force them to do something that they don't want, and they will take their time to come to us, but knowing that we are there is a huge step.
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Post by SophinaA on Mar 30, 2016 14:30:35 GMT -5
I definitely have thought of this many different times and i used to be so frightened by it but now that I have worked Orientation and have experienced students who just don't care about being helped, I have come to the decision that connecting with them is so important. In my own experience, when a student wasn't feeling it, I had to kind of cut out the "authoritative" role and just being a human being. That tended to help a lot because they saw that I was just like them they were able to build that trust with me. I think that by building that trust and forming that connection with our future students (obviously in a teacher-student manner) they will be more likely to want to do things in order to keep that respect even if they personally don't agree with what is being done. Talking to students is so important and I think that all teachers need to truly recognize that.
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Post by daniell on Mar 30, 2016 16:06:00 GMT -5
You can't help a student that doesn't want to be helped, the "trick," as it were, is figuring out how to convince them that they do, in fact, want to be helped. That might sound weird, but that's what it ends up being. You need to turn it toward a social focus and try to connect with them and find out what motivates them, then work through that in order to try and convince them that your help is a useful asset instead of something to be ignored.
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Post by kcornelison93 on Mar 30, 2016 17:21:34 GMT -5
You can't help a student that doesn't want to be helped, the "trick," as it were, is figuring out how to convince them that they do, in fact, want to be helped. That might sound weird, but that's what it ends up being. You need to turn it toward a social focus and try to connect with them and find out what motivates them, then work through that in order to try and convince them that your help is a useful asset instead of something to be ignored. Exactly this. It all has to do with motivation: autonomy, competency, and connectedness. If they don't feel like their teacher and/or classmates are allies they aren't going to engage. If they think they aren't competent, they aren't going to engage. They have to be motivated by some kind of intrinsic, extrinsic, or situational motivation. All three of those components are necessary.
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Post by wmm12d on Apr 5, 2016 20:56:39 GMT -5
Just keep offering help, try to find "entry points", and most of all, never stop trying.
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Post by rachel1827 on Apr 6, 2016 17:34:48 GMT -5
I find that if a student doesn't want to participate it can be a challenge. When this happens I try to modify the lesson to make it interesting to them. Like what are they interested in? I had one kid that did not want to learn about conversions which is a huge part of math. So I changed the lesson and said instead of converting numbers we would be converting interesting things. So my example was converting puppies to dogs. There are 14 puppies to every 2 dogs. It was a random change but the kids were laughing and engaging in the material. Suddenly the kid that didn't want to participate was actively engaging and want to participate. So I might have pulled and Alice and Wonderland on my class but it was enough of a fun change that it got everyone engaged.
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Post by seanwillis on Apr 7, 2016 22:35:26 GMT -5
Brittany,
I knew a few kids in high school who were good friends of mine (mostly kids I met through athletics) who ended up dropping out of school basically due to them not giving a shit about academics as well as a resentment toward accepting assistance from pretty much anybody. As a peer and friend to kids who went through this process, I noticed that a lot of the time it was the result of environmental factors (eg. being egged on by peers, low income background, and so on). Obviously as educators we have to believe that every student has potential and every student can learn, but when the student is literally actively blocking out the message we are trying to send what options do we have? Especially when a lot of what is promoting this resistance involves factors far beyond our control?
Obviously giving up is not the answer, but sometimes there are things outside of our influence.
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Post by savannapoulson on Apr 8, 2016 22:23:11 GMT -5
Sean, while I agree that there are outside/environmental factors that affect students motivation to learn/accept help, I still feel like there are ways to reach nearly all students. When I was in high school I took a mixed grade level Earth, space, and science class. The class consisted largely of seniors who were in there because they failed one or more of their science courses, and these guys (the class had like three girls including myself and the rest guys) were the type of guys you'd see in that type of situation; jocks, class clowns, and troublemakers, all having in common the issue you mentioned. They didn't care about academics and they resented teachers and wouldn't accept help from anyone. However, throughout the year, our teacher somehow got through to them. He built a good relationship with his students, letting them talk while they worked and letting the class watch youtube videos on the projector in class during free time, to name a few things. Over time, they actually started putting effort into the class; they started completing assignments and getting good grades on tests as well as studying for said tests. Through many of my eavesdrops on their conversations (not that it was intentional, they were really loud, but being the quiet kid in the class does mean you get to hear some pretty interesting things)I heard them say (paraphrasing here of course) that they didn't try in their other classes because the teachers would just look at them as those students who didn't care about academics and as such they shouldn't try to reach out to them in any way other than to punish them, regardless of the transgression. They were aware of their situation, and it is not that they weren't completely unwilling or uncaring about school, its just that through years of being treated badly by teachers and being left behind to fall through the cracks, they just grew to not care, because as mentioned before in class students think it's better to appear apathetic than to admit that they're struggling.
I know that there will be some kids who drop out, that some kids may be too resistant towards help, but I really feel that as long as one puts the effort in and is persistent, then even the most difficult of students can be reached.
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Post by rachelgoodbar on Apr 10, 2016 13:47:22 GMT -5
One strategy that I've seen used in my own highs school to get students interested and help them was using peer mentors. As a senior we would go in and work with freshmen students and help tutor them and help them realize why being in school is important. We could talk about whatever they wanted and really find a way to make it meaningful to them. I feel like having someone that a student can connect to and look up too helps them want to be helped.
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