Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.
Feedback lands very differently when the low scores are players who need training rather than facts about who someone is. Do it with their own results in front of them, in their language, and leave room for questions. Children often reply with something like so there is nothing wrong with me, which tells you exactly what they had been carrying around until that afternoon.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Among His signs is the diversity of your languages and colours (Quran 30:22). Difference is presented there as designed and worth noticing, which is a kinder frame than a scoreboard.
وَمِنۡ ءَايَٰتِهِۦ خَلۡقُ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَٱخۡتِلَٰفُ أَلۡسِنَتِكُمۡ وَأَلۡوَٰنِكُمۡۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَٰتࣲ لِّلۡعَٰلِمِينَ
Another of His signs is the creation of the heavens and earth, and the diversity of your languages and colours. There truly are signs in this for those who know
Qur’an 30:22read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A single session teaching adolescents that abilities can change reduced anxiety and depression symptoms nine months later compared with a control activity, which is some evidence that how a young person understands their own capacity is worth working with directly. A scoping review of these beliefs in professional education notes the wider literature is still mostly descriptive. So this is a well supported way of talking rather than a treatment in itself.
Schleider J, Weisz J. (2018). A single-session growth mindset intervention for adolescent anxiety and depression: 9-month outcomes of a randomized trial.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Wolcott MD, McLaughlin JE, Hann A, Miklavec A, Beck Dallaghan GL, Rhoney DH, Zomorodi M. (2021). A review to characterise and map the growth mindset theory in health professions education.. Medical education doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Shame makes a child look away from their own results, and a picture that puts the difficulty outside them lets them look.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Speech arrives on its own if a child is spoken to. Reading, writing and arithmetic do not, and it is no failing that they have to be taught piece by piece.
Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.
You do not need to become a reading specialist to be useful in a school meeting. A few hours with the current material on how reading is learned will put you ahead of most of the room, and you can carry it in kindly rather than as a challenge.