What Do You Do When Your Student Isn't Getting It?

Despite all these strategies, there will still be times when you hear the words, I just don't get it. There are many reasons a student may not "get" the homework. Sometimes, students think they don't understand an assignment because they feel overwhelmed and anxious. In these cases, asking the student to read the assignment or problem aloud and clarifying expectations can be enough to put him at ease. When there is a true breakdown in understanding, however, your job as a homework helper is to try to identify it. Ask questions such as: What part are you having trouble with? Where are stuck? Which parts do you understand? Encourage the student to be as specific as possible about areas of difficulty so you can help accordingly.

For example, imagine a child who is working on a division worksheet, and says he doesn't understand. By asking a series of questions, you learn that he understands the concept of division, but not the idea of a remainder. Now you can focus your time on the concept of remainders, rather than starting at the beginning with division.

Or envision a child trying to read a textbook chapter on the water cycle. After a page she says she doesn't understand. After careful questioning, you realize that the lack of comprehension is due to her inability to decode certain words specific to the topic, such as precipitation and evaporation. Now you can target strategies for dealing with new vocabulary in context.

Creating a mini-lesson. After you have determined the difficulty, provide support with a mini-lesson. A mini-lesson is exactly that–a very brief lesson focused on a specific concept or strategy. Mini-lessons can help make abstract concepts more concrete and provide practice on an isolated strategy. The new learning can then be applied directly to the homework.

Use the following strategies to develop a mini-lesson for a struggling student (an example follows below):

• Determine the child's difficulty and isolate the necessary concept or strategy.
• Start with a simpler example not connected to the homework assignment. Check for success.
• Ask the student how he figured it out. What did he do to accomplish the task? Note or chart his responses.
• Invite the student to apply what he has learned to the homework assignment and provide support as needed.

To return to the example of the student struggling with remainders in division, the mini-lesson might look like this:

• Ask questions to determine what the breakdown is (in this case, understanding exactly what a remainder is).
• Provide an alternate, simpler example: Ask the child what he would do if there were a plate of four cookies on the table to share with his two friends. More than likely, he will respond that each of them would get one cookie and split the last cookie three ways (no remainder). Then ask him to imagine a group of five friends on the playground who want to divide into two equal teams. What happens? The child may respond that you can have two equal teams with one person left over—the remainder.
• In explaining, the child might say that if the friends were cookies, you could split the extra friend in half; but, in this case you can't cut a person in half, so you have a remainder.
• Transfer the understanding to the actual math division problem, using the cookie versus the person as a concrete example.

Recordkeeping and Assessment