Attention Parents!

Johnny can’t read.  Or to be accurate, Johnny won’t read.  He’s a bright, personable, energetic kid who can focus on a video game for hours.  Yet, in class, he is disengaged.   How can you make him “like” school?  Whose fault is it?  the teacher?  your home environment?  his friends?  heaven forbid, your genes?  In the audio that follows,  Ellen Stowers gives us basic information about reluctant learners, based on her 40+ years of dealing with these challenging students at every level of the school system.

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Definition of the Reluctant Learner

We define the reluctant learner as a person (of any age) who is cast into the role of a student (at any level) who fails to participate fully and meet the prescribed objectives in the educational model chosen for him (for one of a variety of potential reasons) and who ultimately stumbles, fails, or falls behind his peers for no apparent reason. Johnny appears to be reluctant to participate in the program of learning, the learning group, and in his own success. – for reasons unknown to those who supervise him and sometimes to himself.

• Johnny claims that “Nothin’s wrong…I’m fine…This is a stupid class…The teacher hates me…My classmates are a bunch of misfits, #$@%, etc…”
• Any reluctant learner may have issues with his own perceptions of his environment, his family, his role in the family, the school, his future, or his sense of self, his self-concept or his self-esteem.
• Whatever the causes may be, and we’ll uncover a number of possibilities there, if the reluctant learner is to be helped, his perceptions need to change.

How do we change a reluctant learner’s perception of the learning environment?

First we have to identify the observable behaviors that indicate there is a reluctant learner in our midst.  Sometimes those behaviors are very obvious and sometimes they are very, very subtle.  We need to be detectives to find them out.  We need to get inside the student’s head and see the world as he sees it.

If we can identify a specific behavior, we can often (eventually) identify a specific cause for the aberrant behavior, we can also identity some possible strategies to resolve the issue.

Next, we need to find the underlying causes for the identified problem behaviors. The issue with Reluctant Learners is that they become reluctant learners for many reasons – and some of them are simple misperceptions of a child with a particular mind set but other times, the behaviors exist for some very valid (and sometimes very painful) unidentified reasons.

If we can find the causes of the student’s uneasiness in his role of student, we can help him unravel the problem with some tested and true strategies.

In our Reluctant Learner email message series, Ellen addresses:

• How do we know that our reluctant learner’s perceptions are not “normal”?
• After you’ve confirmed your student is a reluctant learner, what do you do?
• Where did the term, “reluctant learner”, come from?
• What role does teacher personality play in dealing with a reluctant learner?
• Why is there not an easy way to define and “fix” a reluctant learner?
• What strategies do you suggest if all that you’ve offered just doesn’t work?

If you find this information interesting, we encourage you to tell family and friends about our site and provide us your email address  so we can begin sending you more information about reluctant learners.  This information is especially valuable for parents.  You know your child better than anyone else.  You need to be able to communicate well with every new teacher.

Thanks,

Jim Patton and Ellen Stowers

New Millennium Education