The following are ways teachers can think about and respond to students caught in a cycle of failure.
Brophy (1998) found that highly effective teachers and other teachers generally implemented similar strategies to help failure syndrome students—such as including encouragement and shaping strategies in their responses to the student, engaging in supportive behaviors, providing reassurance, and making personal appeals to the student to improve performance. But the higher-rated, more-effective teachers appeared to place greater emphasis on insisting on better effort and seemed to have greater confidence that the improvements the student could achieve would be stable over time rather than merely temporary. They tended to assume that the demands made on students were appropriate (and therefore that failure syndrome problems stemmed from the students’ mistakenly pessimistic attributions and self-efficacy perceptions), while lower-rated teachers were more likely to fear that their task demands were too difficult for the student to handle.
Dweck and Elliott (1983) argued that students who have developed an “entity” view of ability (e.g., who see it as fixed and limited) stand to benefit from direct training designed to shift them to an “incremental” view (e.g., seeing ability as something that can be developed through practice).
Teacher behaviors that encourage incremental rather than entity views of ability include:
(adapted from Brophy, 1998)
For teachers who differentiate according to readiness and RTI, there are a variety of opportunities to 1) encourage students in general, 2) provide coaching based on the anticipation of errors, 3) emphasize personal effort, and 4) spotlight intrinsic motivators. Recall that in Dr. William Glasser’s view, the student who appears to be unmotivated in the classroom should still be viewed as being motivated – just not in the ways that we as teachers think are best. Glasser’s view (1992) is that we are “always motivated all the time” (p. 42). A student has a formulation of his “quality world” (p. 57), which probably entails a certain level and feeling of accomplishment. Students who experience success feel empowered and take pride in their learning achievements. Students who experience failure in ways that don’t make sense to them will begin to draw conclusions as to whether it is worth the effort.
In some cases, students even start becoming “good at being bad,” which takes on many unfortunate forms depending on the age of the student and the context. Students may produce low quality work – but very quickly – so that they can simulate what they image to be a standard of successful learning (i.e., smart people get done first or win). Other students may act out by sabotaging activities or learning groups (i.e., “If I can’t learn this stuff I’m not going to let others learn it either”). Still other students may develop outwardly defiant attitudes, protest the work, or create power struggles in an attempt to divert attention away from a lack of the student’s readiness to be successful. Teachers who differentiate look at student failure as an opportunity to review what’s not working for that student rather than concluding that the student is not working for the teacher.