Approaches to Learning Difficulties
Approaches to Learning Difficulties
Mrs Moqheeta Mehboob
Teacher Trainer
Edutop,
School Development Service Provider, Hyderabad, 500028
0091 8106559082
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the learning difficulties faced by students in any common school setup. This paper has highlighted the difference between clinical learning difficulties and the other subtle learning difficulties which are often overlooked by school management. The learning styles of the past and present have also been looked into. The students of the past were more sincere and passionate towards learning with the limited resources available to them.
Main objective of this paper is to emphasise the learning difficulties faced by students
which are often thought to be inconsequential hence given less attention.
We see schools popping up in every nook and corner, but sadly the quality of many schools lack even the minimum expected standards. Making change in schools is essential. Through this paper, we will look at the common difficulties faced by students in their learning. Lack of purpose, parental involvement, motivation, acknowledgement and varied teaching styles are some of the most common barriers against successful learning.
This paper suggests an array of solutions to the problems faced by students during learning. Language is the first key to connect to a person. If schools facilitate language opportunities for new students, it will help them adapt quickly to the new environment and comprehend and participate in the learning.
School teachers as well as management need to realise that learning doesn’t have an end, and they too need to continue with their learning and equip themselves with new teaching techniques and tools.
Collaborating with all the stakeholders is another approach suggested in this paper. Positive school climate can be achieved by strong partnerships between schools and their communities. Everybody in the community benefits if all the stakeholders work together and take responsibility for student learning. All stakeholders should communicate more openly about needs, issues, and concerns that will make a difference in the lives of students.
If schools work towards a student centric learning style, the students will flourish in the new school environment and will be able to embrace any type and level of information and challenge.
Key Words: learning difficulty, student centric, collaboration
Introduction:
Learning is a lifelong requirement and it happens everywhere and not just school. But school is the place where the student goes solely for this purpose and the teacher plays the crucial role in making the child a life long learner.
Are our schools engaging their students in the learning process? Do the school practises increase the students’ attention and focus, motivate them to practice higher-level critical thinking skills and promote meaningful learning experiences? Research has demonstrated that instructors who adopt a student-centered approach to instruction increase opportunities for student engagement, which then helps everyone more successfully achieve the course’s learning objectives.
The ability to meet the child’s curiosity by making the learning process simple and eventually making the child an independent learner is the challenge every teacher faces. The futures of students depend on their schools. The world is changing rapidly, demanding new knowledge and skills, and offering new learning environments and ways of learning. Yet some educational institutions often continue to look at reality through the rear-view mirror.
Literacy and numeracy form the basic learnings and the challenges faced by the students at this stage are the primary challenges. But to be able to achieve the basic learning objectives, sometimes students face numerous difficulties which the teachers don’t notice.
Learning in older times:
In olden times Education was given lot of reverence therefore it was taken up by individuals who were passionate about learning and had a vision for themselves. Religion and wisdom were always a part of education hence morals and values were given due importance. Education was never a means for any profession as skills were the means of employment. Education mainly catered to legal and administrative fields in the early days and in the middle ages it contributed to the scientific development. Since knowledge wasn't the means for any profession there was less competition and the purpose of learning was related more to living than livelihood. Teachers always inspired the students with their principles and set very high moral standards and demanded respect. The students were equally enthusiastic about learning and followed the then prevalent learning style. The culture of the institutions then, the environment and the pace of learning supported the teacher centric learning.
Current learning style:
The fast pace of life, the technology, flood of information and frequent distractions have contributed significantly to the change in the nature of the present generation. They have mostly become impatient and visionless. Contrast to early times, nowadays knowledge has become the basis of employment, therefore morals and wisdom have taken a back seat and survival has become the purpose of life. The teachers are a product of the same environment and they too lack purpose and passion.
Research has demonstrated that students find it difficult to follow what is being taught, many a times because they lack the sincerity towards learning and an equal number of times because the teachers fail to teach in appropriate and appealing manner.
Learning difficulty as understood by many isn’t always about dyslexia, dysgraphia and other such labeled difficulties. Learning problems can be of any nature, where the brain is not able to take in and processes information. As a result, some people learn differently.
A person with a learning difficulty may be described as having specific problems processing certain forms of information.
Differentiating between learning difficulties and learning disabilities is quite a complex issue.A learning difficulty does not affect general intelligence, whereas a learning disability is linked to an overall cognitive impairment.
Some commonly addressed learning difficulties are:
dyspraxia
dyslexia
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
A child’s learning might be impeded due to many reasons other than the disorders stated by the educational psychologists. At a glance, these reasons might look very insignificant but when investigated closely, these factors do prove to have an adverse effect on a child’s learning.
Through this paper, the other factors which disturb a child’s learning will be studied. The most common difficulties faced by students in an Indian educational set up is discussed and later the possible solutions to overcome these difficulties are also stated.
Difficulties in learning
Language barrier: Language plays a huge part in knowledge generation, acquisition and dissemination. Many school children have very little or no previous classroom language experience. The use of formal English language makes it difficult for children to follow the concept or to express his understanding. A student who doesn't know the classroom target language could exhibit issues in mastering subject matter. Thus, language barriers can correlate to comprehension barriers which cause difficulties in learning.
Lack of purpose: Working towards any goal and achieving a good result becomes much more meaningful and interesting when one knows the purpose behind doing it. Children mostly are not given the learning objective of what they are going to learn. A class can finish the entire chapter of Fraction or Solar system, without being told what and why they are learning it. Lack of purpose makes the learning dry as well as difficult for the learner.
Attention deficit: Many children in today’s time suffer from attention deficit disorder (ADD). It is a weakness in the brain's ability to focus on important sensory information and may also affect the brain's ability to filter out information that is not important. People with ADD cannot tune out distractions that others may barely notice. Comprehending capacity is short lived. Due to this students find it difficult to focus and accomplish a given task.
Impatience: Children of this generation are used to quick results and do not have the patience to work towards a long term goal. This impatient nature is initially allowed to take roots by the parents when they satisfy every demand instantly. Also the culture of video games and its immediate outcome announcement has aggravated the nature of impatience in children.
Lack of motivating environment: Motivation has been centre of attention among teachers throughout the years because it constitutes the backbone of learning process. Learning is a complicated and dynamic process, and learning in real sense gets completed through motivation. Since will to learn builds one of the basic elements of learning, students take an important step on the road to learning through motivation. However, students may sometimes lose their willingness and interest towards lesson, which puts a major barrier in front of effective language learning.
Lack of acknowledgement: As adults we know how important acknowledgement of someone’s work is. The classroom environment can be changed by simply focusing on the positive behaviors of children. But teachers fail to notice and acknowledge children’s appropriate behaviors, and only point at the negative activities which charges them to continue to use those behaviors. Negative is acknowledged, not the positive.
Lack of Challenging environment: Challenge is the core of the growth mindset; it forces one to grow. Schools that do not challenge students, don’t give the opportunities to learn, to fail and to figure out how to pick themselves up again. This “sense of progress” as Dweck calls it, is central to developing growth mindsets. When something is not challenging, it’s easy – and an “easy” learning environment is hardly one that encourages appropriate development – it may rather lead to boredom.
Lack of varied learning styles: We all are aware and agree that the policy of ‘One size fits all’, is a failed approach at schools. But sadly we see almost all the schools using this practise. All students are taught and assessed in one fixed pattern. The theories of VARK and MI are brought to light only in workshops and training days, but during the real teaching time, they all go for a toss. Every child learns differently and should be taught differently, lack of this practise is making it difficult for our students to perform and achieve well.
Bullying: Bullying is one of the most silent and deadly cause in the decline of a child’s learning standards. Bullying, a process in which one person repeatedly uses his superior strength or influence to mistreat, attack or force another person to do something, is one of the main problems of schools environment (Unicef, 2007b).
The school attendance negatively depends on the level of bullying to which each student is exposed to; those students who have never been bullied by their peers have the highest rate of school attendance while those who were victims of bullying spend less time in school. A second way in which bullying can have a negative effect on performance is through lower peer effects because, according to Brown and Taylor (2008), victims have
fewer friends and worse relationships with their peers and therefore fewer opportunities to learn from them.
Lack of parental support: The society is mainly split between two types of parents. One that are so highly placed which doesn’t give them the time to know what is happening in their children’s life. And the other types are the uneducated and visionless parents, who do not have any clue about their children’s struggles or achievements. Both type of parents fail to connect and support their children in their learning. The aware and involved parents are few in number but thankfully not totally absent from our society.
Children learn first by mimicking behavior they see modeled for them. Children who have parents who show interest and encourage academic success are more likely to develop an interest in their learning.
Personal issues: Family issues is a very common reason for a child’s learning impairment. Reasons such as Financial crunch, Health problems, Emotional or Physical abuse, are not being able to concentrate in his learning.Researchers at the Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University shared that “when (the) home is not stable…executive function skills may be impaired, or may not develop at all, limiting a child’s success in elementary school and later life.” This affects their psychological health adversely, takes a toll on their development and shows up as bad behaviour and poor results in school.
Inept teachers: A nationwide problem plaguing our country since decades is the lack of competent teachers. With so many schools mushrooming up in every corner of the street, availability of passionate and skilled teachers has become a great concern.
Due to the unskilled teachers, students are missing out on quality education and as a result find difficulty in following the concepts.
Solutions to learning
Connect with students: Educators could learn a great deal from listening to students describe their experiences in schools and their hopes for learning in and beyond the classroom. Students live in a very different world than the one we lived in at their age. “You are, by definition, not ‘one of them.’ You don’t need to and should not be ‘one of them.’ If you want to connect to them, however, they must immediately sense that you value them”. Sturtevant urges us to learn about students’ musical tastes, the movies and T.V. shows they’re into, and the slang terms they use. “These actions show you care enough to pay attention to their world, even if it pulls you a bit out of your comfort zone to do so” (2). When teachers bond with students, it creates a magical atmosphere where learning thrives! For students, such classrooms are life altering!
Show the purpose: By definition, purposeful learning focuses the students on the “why” behind learning goals and ensures that students understand how class activities, assignments, and lessons relate to those goals. (1)
Involve parents: Parents are the direct beneficiaries if students perform well at school and score good ranks. But schools usually have a very strained relationship with parents. Parents think the school doesn’t do enough and the school thinks, the parents have unreasonable expectations from school. Whereas, research has proved that healthy parent involvement with school, positively reflects at a child’s learning achievements. The kinds of parent involvement should include telephone and written home-school communications, attending school functions, parents serving as classroom volunteers, parent teacher conferences, homework assistance/tutoring, home educational enrichment, and parent involvement in decision making and other aspects of school governance. If a school is thorough and perfect with his vision and approach, it will not shy away from building relations with their parents.
Upgrade teaching styles: It is high time for all school teachers as well as the Management team to upgrade their teaching and admin skills. Schools need to take out time to sharpen their saws. One practical approach would be to hold quarterly self assessment meetings and deciding three growth areas for themselves. The growth areas should be showed to all so that everyone helps each other stay on track and not waiver from their plan. The growth plan could include mastering a skill, introducing a new strategy, bettering the student engagement, use of technology. All the improvement plans of a teacher will eventually benefit students and their learning. A better teacher, teaches better.
Differentiated learning: Differentiated learning, is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing all students within their diverse classroom community of learners a range of different avenues for understanding new information. By considering varied learning needs, teachers can develop personalized instruction so that all children in the classroom can learn effectively. In differentiated instruction, teachers respond to students' readiness, instructional needs, interests and learning preferences and provide opportunities for students to work in varied instructional formats. A classroom that utilizes differentiated instruction is a learner-responsive, teacher-facilitated classroom where all students have the opportunity to meet curriculum foundation objectives. Lessons may be on inquiry based, problem based and project based instruction.
Bridging with other organisations: Collaborative work has always proved to be beneficial. Positive school climate can be achieved by strong partnerships between schools and their communities. Everybody in the community wishes for a better generation to evolve. This is possible when all partners of the community take responsibility for student learning and work together. All stakeholders should communicate more openly about needs, issues, and concerns that will make a difference in the lives of students.
Emotional Quotient: Today's world calls for learning to live together, with so much hatred and selfish attitude all around emotional intelligence is one area which cannot be ignored. Therefore equal importance should be given to improving emotional quotient(EQ) along with IQ. Without EQ living together cannot happen; ie. collaboration which is one of the 21st century skills along with communication, critical thinking and creativity cannot happen.
Conclusion:
Identifying a struggling learner is the key to effective teaching. Schools are for students to learn, not for teachers to teach. Schools should call for a revolutionary teaching methodology which has to be student centric and most of the times individual centric. Schools have to start thinking progressively and be ready to adapt quickly to the good teaching practices. If the schools do not work on easing the students’ learning difficulties, then the schools haven’t really achieved their purpose.
Until the teaching profession gains its past glory and becomes one of the most sought after and respected profession, the onus will lie on the conscious teachers to inspire the students to learn and live a life of purpose.
References:
http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0120-35842014000200007
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/learning-disabilities/a-to-z/l/learning-difficulties
https://www.livestrong.com/article/562595-family-factors-that-influence-students-behavior-in-school/
https://mrswintersbliss.com/challenging-all-students/
http://www.teachhub.com/teaching-strategies-balance-between-challenge-and-frustration
https://www.verywellmind.com/understanding-attention-deficit-disorders-2162405
http://www.asosjournal.com/Makaleler/121323120_13%20-%20G%C3%B6k%C3%A7e%20Di%C5%9Flen.pdf
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/connecting-with-students/
https://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/parent-involvement-in-education.pdf
Tomlinson, Carol Ann (1999). "Mapping a Route Toward a Differentiated Instruction". Educational Leadership. 57 (1): 12.
2) Cindy Crimmin, MASCD President
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