How do teachers involve parents in helping struggling students?

Teachers want their students to succeed academically. Sometimes, this is difficult for struggling students. But, with the help of parents, this becomes easier. Every student needs some form of assistance. So, it is the responsibility of teachers to do what they can to ensure all students have a good learning experience. This includes involving parents in the learning process. This is most especially for parents with struggling children.

Teachers involve parents in helping struggling students through various ways. They;

Encourage parents to hire a tutor

To help a child struggling academically, teachers encourage parents to hire a tutor. One of the reasons why a student may be struggling is a missed skill. For instance, failing to understand foundational skills in one class, means a student will struggle in the next class. This means moving forward that student will face challenges. This means that the student will lag behind, achieve low grades, and face challenges applying learned concepts.

To solve this issue, teachers encourage parents to hire tutors. With a good tutor, a student can be helped to overcome the academic challenges they are facing. The tutor will give individualized attention to the student essential for identifying the skill gaps. This helps in quick-fixing the problem. Remember this might be tutors from essay writing service website, but he/she must be a qualified tutor.

You may be wondering, what then is the role of the teacher? Well, the role of the teacher is to help every student succeed academically. But, sometimes they are overloaded and may not have enough time for every student. This is the problem that a tutor eliminates.

Encourage parents to set boundaries

Some students struggle because they are not disciplined and are lazy. For a struggling student to succeed, they must prioritize studying. This means increasing the amount of time spent studying. A teacher may be able to control this time in school but not at home. So, they encourage parents to help their children to set priorities. Some children spend more of their time at home playing games. While this is healthy, spending excess time playing video games can be harmful. It tends to reduce the amount of time spent studying. Studies have associated video game playing with poor scores and negative school reports.

By setting boundaries, parents help increase studying time. Parents do this by restricting to a reasonable amount the time of playing the video games. Apart from video games, smartphones and social media distract children from studying. Placing boundaries around these activities are beneficial for struggling students. It ensures that studying is given the required priority.

Parents are however not expected to restrict children from participating in sports. This is considering that some sports are good for brain development and improved cognitive function. Such activities are good for struggling students.

Encourage parents to ensure that children get proper diet and sleep

Studies link poor diet and lack of enough sleep with academic struggles. These two are issues that teachers may not address directly. So, they encourage parents to ensure that their children get a proper diet and enough sleep.

Research has shown that students who get limited sleep in class, have attendance and lateness issues, and get low grades. The solution is to ensure that the child goes to bed early. Sleeping and waking up at the same time every day is also helpful.

Apart from sleep, parents are expected to check on the student’s diet. Eating fiber, protein, vegetables, and fruits impacts academic performance positively. It is also important to avoid excess intake of calories. Parents are also expected to focus on breakfast. Good breakfast is good for energy. Without energy, students may struggle to pay attention in the classroom.

Encourage parents to ensure that children do homework

Practice and more practice helps struggling students to perform better. This is why teachers give them . Failing to do the homework can worsen the efforts of helping the students. Teachers encourage parents to ensure that the homework is done.

Parents are expected to follow up on turning in homework. They should always insist on seeing every piece of homework. Asking whether a child has done the homework is not enough. He or she can easily say they are finished when they have not even started. It is thus important to insist on seeing it.

Parents can even insist that the teacher signs after checking the assignment. This way, the student will take responsibility for doing the assignment. As a result, the teacher will be able to identify areas causing the struggle. Eventually, the student will be assisted and start performing better.

This means that parents have to take responsibility. Blaming the teacher for a kid’s failure is no solution. It only wastes time that would otherwise be used in helping the child. Parents can make a big difference by ensuring that homework is done and done appropriately.

Refer students to outside resources

Sometimes, the struggling student may need outside resources for academic interventions. In this case, teachers encourage parents to approve getting help from these resources. For instance, a student may be referred to a psychologist to determine their learning difficulties. Eventually, an individualized program is designed. This means that the student gets additional support whose purpose is addressing the identified struggles.

Encourage parents to provide academic and emotional support

Struggling students may require additional learning materials. Securing these materials is essential. This role can only be fulfilled by parents. Teachers may not be able to provide this support to all struggling children. Also, teachers require parents to provide emotional support to struggling children. This includes letting the child know that he or she is valued regardless of their challenges. This improves self-esteem which is very important especially for struggling students.

A struggling child that comes to school with high self-esteem makes the job easier for a teacher. Otherwise, the teacher would have to spend time boosting the self-esteem and teaching the student the difficult concepts. So, with the involvement of parents, more time is spent doing the most important thing, learning content.

Conclusion

It is clear that struggling students need more assistance. Sometimes it is difficult for teachers to provide this help alone. More resources are required to ensure that every student succeeds academically. Among these resources are parents. Parents with struggling children can really be of help to teachers. Both can successfully help struggling students to improve their academic performance.

Parents should thus not leave all responsibility with teachers. Helping academically struggling children should be a combined effort. Parents should do their part. Teachers the same. Eventually, struggling students will overcome the challenges they are going through and perform better.