Why some kids 'can't learn'

Teachers are increasingly concerned about student behaviour as a result of social changes over the last 30 or so years. Many more children are reaching school age poorly equipped to learn.

Children are born into a way of talking, thinking and behaving that's already established, a society that they have no control over. This way of talking, thinking and behaving determines their attitude and how easy it is for them to 'get on' in life.

Usually children begin interacting outside the immediate family in their early years before school. They learn and develop some 'secondary' skills in talking, thinking and behaving in different social situations.

Family situations of one kind or another may not allow enough of this wider interaction to occur, however, and consequently some children may have very limited 'secondary' communication skills when they arrive at school. The results can be disastrous for their academic learning.

Building basic social-emotional skills can be a daunting task for teachers.

Children who don't have them rarely can just sit down and learn. The school environment is alien and they don't know how to cope. Often they don't know how to listen or talk to other people, ask a question, sit down to eat, come into class quietly, listen to a story, share things. There's so much to learn. While the teacher teaches them school's way of talking, thinking and behaving, there are going to be many frustrating experiences for everyone in that environment.

Children with poor social-emotional skills often can't learn much academically because most of their attention is on learning to survive in the school environment.

The teacher will usually teach them explicitly how to listen and co-operate with other people. They'll structure groups and group tasks to bring them in and allow them to practise what they've been taught in a safe and scaffolded way. This works very well as long as the teacher remains committed and is very patient. But it can take six months or more to have fully-independent groups where every group member is truly responsible for his attitude and behaviour. By this I mean a situation where each group member speaks and listens to the others respectfully, talks and works with others to learn without needing to be stood over or reminded. Depending on the students, every single social skill may need to be taught explicitly and practised extensively, even down to practising looking at the person who's speaking to you.

Now this type of learning is part of the school curriculum but what's notable is that children who have had plenty of social interaction in lots of different situations have a huge advantage over those who haven't. They have far less to learn about how to talk, think and behave in a school situation and so they have more 'room' to get on with learning other things.

So my advice for anyone who has a child who 'can't learn' is to think first about how he's functioning in the school environment. Do you know? Does he have this 'room' to learn?

If you feel it may be a social skills issue, the best thing you can do to help with that is get him involved in different social situations that have a structure, eg footy, library, cubs, shopping in different types of shops, visiting people in hospital, eating out in restaurants, and help him broaden his social skills.

If you know this isn't the problem, read my article How to motivate a child to learn.