Promoting Academic Success

I often work with students who struggle to be successful by narrowly-defined parameters of academic success. Academic success often promotes harmony at home and positive interactions with others---it’s an important pathway for many short and long-term outcomes. However, in the midst of bolstering student confidence and skills, sometimes we miss opportunities to support students with technology or strategies that can have an empowering impact on performance more immediately. Of course, it is imperative and sometimes dramatically course-changing, to support students with instruction and remediation in academics to be successful in school. This kind of change takes time. What are students to do in the interim? As students prepare to go back to school, here are a couple of ways to help students find academic success in reading and writing as they hone their skills and strategies:

• Think more broadly about what “counts” as reading. Listening to audiobooks and using software that reads text to students is reading. Importantly, accessing text in this way can foster a love of reading in a child who may otherwise find decoding printed text laborious and frustrating. It also allows students who can comprehend material beyond what they can decode word-by- word to access stories and content that they might otherwise avoid or be unable to read on their own.
• Leverage technology to promote writing. Dictation software and word prediction software are excellent options for students who struggle with writing, whether they’re not yet a proficient typist, or cannot keep up with the flow of getting ideas down on paper efficiently. These technologies support students as they are receiving instruction in organization of ideas or how to write for a variety of purposes.

Expanding our view of how to support students and leverage their strengths (e.g., savviness with technology), may situate students to be poised and confident to better navigate so of their academic challenges.