Need Help? Most Students Wait Until It's Too Late
by Valerie Erde
As a tutors, Vickie and I are frequently called in only after things have gone wrong or without enough lead time to really make things go right. Often, the students—and even more often, the parents—are in a bit of a panic, wondering if there's enough time to cover material and bring up class performance and/or test scores before it's too late.
This leads us to wonder: Why do so many students wait to ask for help? What's holding them back, and how can we teach students to advocate for themselves when they don't understand something?
Barriers to Seeking Help
The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University has an entire web module devoted to understanding why students don't ask for help and tips to overcome these issues. Some of the barriers include:
Not recognizing when they need help
Over-confidence about their skills and knowledge
Not knowing what resources are available
Personality traits that inhibit them (including shyness, fear, and shame)
Cultural mores about asking for help
Incorrect beliefs about learning (innate talent vs. effort)
Mental health issues
Whatever the reason your child may hesitate to ask for help, it's a crucial skill to develop. To help them tackle it, let's look at the most important questions to answer when it comes to getting help in a challenging subject.
When to Ask for Help
It can be tricky to know when to ask for help. There's a balance between challenging yourself and getting in over your head. Learning to recognize when you need help requires metacognition—the skill of thinking about your thinking. Many teachers actively address metacognition with students through exercises in reflection and with ongoing assessments like exit tickets, mini quizzes, and homework check-ins.
If your child isn't able to tell when to ask for help, try setting a "deadline" for understanding. For example, if the quadratic formula isn't making sense by the end of the week, ask for help. A deadline will give your student time to try to solve the problem on their own while still providing a clear strategy to move forward before grades dip.
Grades are, of course, the classic indicator of when extra help is needed, but this is only helpful if your student is actively tracking grades (or if you are, via an online grading system). If an average drops by a whole letter grade, it's time to ask for help.
Late fall (with enough lead time before midterms) and early spring are important times to assess how things are going. March is a crucial period, as AP exams and SAT Subject Tests are just two months away, state administered ACT/SAT tests take place, and finals come in just after that, Ant now your student has covered over 50% of the material they will learn for the year. If there are gaps in understanding after the first semester, early March is the time to take action while there's still time to recover before end-of-year assessments.
Why Ask for Help
If your child is reluctant to ask for help, understanding the benefits may help persuade them. The reasons why are obvious to adults, but may not be so clear to teens younger learners.
First, students tend to look at learning a series of unrelated tasks, but this isn't true. Much of the curriculum, particularly in math and world languages, is scaffolded — meaning that early lessons are a direct foundation for later lessons. Missing pieces of the scaffold can cause the whole knowledge structure to collapse, so it's critical to get help with skills before moving on.
Researcher Carol Dweck has studied student attitudes toward failure, and discovered that students either have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Students with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is a matter of innate talent and can't be changed, while those with a growth mindset essentially believe that practice makes perfect. Guess who does better in the long run? Fostering a growth mindset in your child and letting them know that it's okay to fail as long as they try again build resilience and a more sustainable type of academic excellence. Asking for help is an important skill that helps students overcome challenges and fosters a growth mindset.
Finally, asking for help has some very practical implications for your student. Meeting with the teacher in person shows real determination. When it's time to ask for that college recommendation letter, the teacher will remember the student who took the time to go the extra mile—these are meaningful encounters. Learning to ask for help now will also make it easier to take advantage of a professor's office hours later, since your child will have a little "muscle memory" to fall back on as they become a more independent learner in college.
How And From Whom to Get Help
There are plenty of resources out there! Here are some of the most effective:
Teachers: The classroom teacher should always be the first stop. They know the curriculum and can clear up common misunderstandings quickly. Showing extra effort can also lead to a bump to a borderline grade at report card time.
Parents or Older Siblings: Sometimes all it takes is a slightly different explanation to make things click. If someone in your family is good at a particular subject, this can be a good solution to occasional problems.
School Resources: Many schools offer dedicated study periods where students can talk to a subject teacher to get extra help. Check with the guidance department to see what's available.
Online Resources: Googling the answers is a Band-Aid, but there are great resources out there that actually explain concepts really well. Some of the best options are Khan Academy, WatchKnowLearn.org, and Brightstorm.
Tutors: Tutors offer subject matter expertise and individual attention. Working on-on-one makes it possible to ask specific questions and takes away much of the pressure to perform in the classroom setting, so it works for a wide range of learners.
Veridian Insider’s Tip: You will eventually need two teacher recommendations for college. So, going for help after class, serves a dual purpose: getting help you need, but also getting to know your teachers better and them getting to know you better both as a learner and a person - which is easier to do outside of regular class hours. This also applies to seeking help once you get to college!
There Shouldn’t Be A Stigma In Asking For Help
One final note about asking for help: Many parents are reluctant to hire a tutor for a struggling student because they feel that it carries a stigma. This is unfortunate, because it models the attitude that asking for help is somehow shameful. We recommend talking about seeking out a teacher or finding a tutor to your child—and your friends, neighbors, and judgy relatives—the way you would talk about a private sports coach or piano teacher. These professionals simply have skills that you do not, and they know how to teach them to your child.
By modeling the right attitude and supporting your child in asking for help, you'll make their academic life easier and help instill a valuable life skill. And that's something to be proud of.