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At-risk Students Can Use Survival Skills To Succeed

December 09, 2009 09:02 PM
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Dear Dr. Fournier: I am currently employed as an inner-city social worker and am also finishing my master’s degree in guidance counseling. Soon, I’ll be starting an internship in a high school guidance department. Can you send me information on strategies to motivate failing or low achieving students using positive and enjoyable study skills? I know from my social work experience that many of the parents of these high-risk students need help with their children at home. Do you have any help you can offer me on this as well? Anita M., Cleveland, OH


Dear Anita: Helping high risk and at-risk students succeed in school is not a new dilemma, though the definition of these types of students seems to be constantly changing. Your first challenge is to answer a basic question: At risk to whom?

The Assessment: The first thing to understand about at-risk students is that they are survivors. Rather than being weak and at risk of failure, they are actually strong in important areas such as perseverance and resilience. They have learned to cope with life on the fringe when they were declared to be outsiders.

History plays an important role in understanding at-risk people. In previous generations, the outsiders were immigrants from Europe. Ancestors from Italy, Germany or Ireland today talk about how hard work overcame prejudice.

What they found was that rather than coming to the melting pot of the United States, they came to a country whose social recipe admitted only certain groups to the pot and declared others to be cultural outsiders.

Today the pot has changed.

Over the last few decades as the U. S. indigenous population declined, our society needed to admit more outsiders in order to keep the pot stewing. There was the need to open the pot to traditional outsiders and to do so in a hurry or the pot will burn. It is society that is truly at risk, because it cannot continue to thrive without the strengths and talents of those whom it previously kept out.

To work with at-risk students, we must shed any arrogance that comes from an insider’s perspective and deal with our own fears and prejudices. Once we can admit that we are the ones at risk, then perhaps we are ready to enter into a partnership with students rather than believing we can save them with out idea of guidance.

What To Do: As you make the transition from at-risk counselor to student-collaborator, you need to raise your level of awareness in the following ways:

  • Recognize how your perspective differs from your students’. Even if you are of the same ethnic background, they will consider you a part of the pot if you have a job, receive a paycheck, and spend your free time thinking of your next purchase. No matter how pure your motivation, look at the situation from an individual student’s perspective and realize that your efforts may stir up mistrust and hurt.
  • Recognize that as part of the pot, your goal is to stay there and hold on to your secure position. But for the students you deal with, security has eluded them and survival is their area of expertise.
    • Recognize that a person holding on to security doesn’t break the rules of acceptance. A person holding on to survival must break those rules. So, on a daily basis, make rules to deal with a world that rejects him or her.
    • Recognize that a rule-follower has little to teach a rule-maker. Because at-risk children must constantly develop new strategies, our nation should look to them as our hope because in their constant thinking mode we can find strength that becomes the value-added strength our nation needs.

    Once you can recognize these four factors, you are ready to start the transition to becoming a guidance counselor, not to guide students into copying the rules that make you secure, but to help them recognize personal strengths and strategies and how to apply these to learning.

    Have your students list five things they know intuitively (without testing) that make them fail in school. For example: “I can’t read a lot of big words,” or “I really listen, but I can’t understand what the teacher is saying.” Then have them pick one and begin to develop a strategy to overcome and survive. For example, “I’ll underline words I don’t understand and ask my guidance counselor to read these to me,” or “I’ll tell my teacher that I’ll write one idea I think I heard and ask him to correct it.”

    With guidance, redirect the capacity to develop strategies toward the “pot.” Don't attempt to establish what success is, because you may pick something that makes you look good (such as an increase in achievement test scores) instead of what will make the student achieve with trust.

    In dealing with parents, let them know that you guide their children from trust rather than from fear. Help the parents ensure their own recognition of the strengths they and their children have, the strength to survive.

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