Motivation is a powerful thing but it is also very fragile. When children come to me to test or even to begin intervention often the first hurdle is convincing them that I know what I'm doing. If you think about it that is a valid concern the child has because in his mind there is a school full of teachers, a house full of adults, and sometimes tutors that have come before Mrs. Melissa that all claimed they were going to "help" him and things are still hard and he is still not successful. The child often feels stupid and has no reason to believe Mrs. Melissa will be any different.
Children enter school with skill sets that vary significantly. Some children enter school and with little effort from themselves or the teacher these kids thrive in the educational environment. Some children begin school just a little behind and everything is so new they are excited and in awe of it all. These kids will often seem to get off to a slow start but after a few weeks turn a corner and join the first group of peers. Some children start off and are clearly lacking the skills needed to be successful in the classroom. Most of the time these children, if not already identified, are easy to recognize and begin the process of referrals for testing, intervention, and possibly speech language or occupational therapy services.
There is at least one more group of children. Now these students are the trickiest because our first impression is that they fall into one of the first two groups mentioned, immediate success or a slow start but quickly succeed. Maybe these children have great communication and social skills. They are eager to share a wealth of knowledge that impresses the teacher because surely if they are that successful orally that will transfer to success in written language. Maybe they start out weak in some areas but seem to "catch up". However typically after Christmas when classroom demands change parents and teachers witness these students begin to separate from their peers in their progress and level of success on critical academic skills like reading, spelling, and writing. Everyone is baffled because "he is so smart" and "he is so articulate and engaging".
The desire for answers and the need to come up with a plan to promote success begins to add pressure to both parents and teachers. Teachers have to begin to make decisions for the next school year so bold statements are made without tangible factual evidence as to possibly reasons WHY this child has moved into a different group. Here are some of the statements I have been told. Even though I am using the pronoun "he/his/him" these comments are not unique to boys it's simply that boys are most often the ones who stand apart. I know these things are said about girls as well because my parents were told some of these things about me!
1. The work is getting harder and the he isn't trying or he isn't motivated to do the work.
2. He is lazy and gives up easily. He doesn't care about school.
3. He is successful if he likes what he is doing but he simply doesn't like school.
4. He isn't on task and is frequently doing other things, I think he may have some attention issues.
5. He is struggling with the increased responsibilities of middle school. He just needs to grow up.
6. He needs another year to mature so retention is in his best interest.
7. He just needs to read more.
8. He watches too much TV or spends too much time on some other electronic device.
In order to be able to support these statements many other possible causes need to be ruled out. Here is a list of some things that could explain the same kind of behaviors children exhibit in the classroom.
1. Different people process auditory information at different rates and levels of accuracy. Some children need more time to process information or they need the information and instructions to be delivered in smaller chunks. Since we have a lot we are trying to accomplish each day in the classroom we will often rattle off a list of things for the students to do. For children who processes information at a slower rate or have a limited memory capacity, often hear the first part of the instructions or the last part but ultimately "loose" or miss a part. As a result the child does not perform the desired action because they can't remember it. So they either stall out at whatever the last step they remember thus looking like they are refusing to do the activity or got distracted in the process. Sometimes the child does what he thinks he heard because he knows there is something else and he doesn't want to get in trouble. The behaviors that are observed are often attributed to being distracted, not following directions, or being noncompliant. But if I need more time to process information or I struggle to hold information in my working memory I honestly don't remember or didn't accurately process what the teacher said.
2. Some children have a set of strengths in their oral language skills that allows them to be successful in the classroom in early elementary years because the nature of the classrooms provide a lot of visuals they can rely on to help them remember information. Also the books they are expected to read and discuss are often on topics they are familiar and therefore can rely on their prior knowledge to "read" a word even if they say turtle when the word is actually tortoise but they see in the picture an animal with a shell and they know the word turtle so it is a logical conclusion. Their comprehension of the material is not compromised because they know enough about the topic the book doesn't really add to any information so I can answer the questions regardless of how inaccurately they decoded each word.
Also one of the first strategies we encourage children to use when reading is to look at the pictures "read" an unknown word. I'm not sure why these strategies are taught and encouraged because research has repeatedly proven they work less than 10% of the time when pictures are available. As for the child, the teacher observes success and then suddenly, usually later int he school year or in the next grade, the child isn't experiencing the same level of success. He must not like reading or isn't trying hard, right? He must not be paying attention to what he is reading, right?
Well think about the environmental and curriculum changes that naturally occur as a student progresses through school. The ratio between the number of words and number of pictures on the pages in a book changes until there are only words and no more pictures. The strategy, look at the picture and think about what you are reading, we have encouraged from day 1 of instruction, the strategies the child has not relied upon are no longer available. So now the child is forced to rely on his decoding skills in order to read but have had very little practice with this skills therefore it is not his first line of defense. Besides sounding the word out will slow him down so he can just skip it because it can't be that important, right?
Also, less and less information is displayed in the classroom and eventually children begin going to different classrooms for different subjects so even if something helpful like a word wall was displayed the child may not be in that classroom when he needs that support in order to be successful.
Finally, as a child progresses through school there is a shift away from learning to read towards reading to learn. This means there is no more direct instruction provided in how to read, decode, or spell. We assume that if the child can read single syllable words with relative ease they will generalize that skill to multi syllable words. The thing we forget is that some of the sound symbol connections change as we increase the number of syllables in a word and one needs knowledge of syllable rules and spelling rules in order to be able to independently read those unfamiliar words. Also the vocabulary and content in the written material is beyond the child's oral language comprehension and vocabulary. So the strategy of stumbling through words and/or sounding a word out until it matches a word they know steadily decreases which is exacerbated because the words the child is being exposed to are the words he needs to grow and develop his oral language skills. It's a viscous cycle.
I've only given two possibilities here but there are many more and all can be rules out by assessing specific skills. If a child is experience anything described above the behavior they will exhibit is similar to the behavior we attribute to attention deficits, behavior problems, or laziness. Can you confidently claim ADHD, behavior, or laziness are the culprits behind the behaviors observed in the classroom or at home? Of the two examples given above is there anything mentioned that could possibly describe your child or a student in your classroom? As educators, the decisions we make for children and the comments we boldly make can impact not only a child's progress in school that year, but also set the stage for academic progress and opportunities years down the road which sets the stage for the possibilities available to the child in adulthood. For me that is a lot of responsibility and I do not want to make a judgement based on observed behaviors without tangible and reliable information to support my claims. I wouldn't want a surgeon performing surgery where he thinks I need it based on observations. I would demand specific tests because I would want surgery at all to be the last resort. Shouldn't we apply that same expectation when making decisions about children?