Lesson 3: Why do students with emotional disturbances struggle with writing?

Go back to the course home page: Writing Strategies for Students With Emotional Disturbances

Go back to the unit 1 page: Unit 1: Emotional Disturbances and Our Students

Overview

Students with emotional disturbances tend to lack confidence and become frustrated with traditional school tasks very easily. Collaboration, multistep problems, abstract tasks, and tasks the involve significant focus tend to be extremely difficult for these students.

Lack of Focus

For some, writing is a very laborious task because there are so many sub-components which need to be pulled together. It is difficult for students to pay attention to minor tasks due to hyperactivity, depression, and external distractions. They need to focus extra hard on simple tasks such as writing legible letters, making sure they use proper grammar, and correct sentence structure. Also due to this lack of concentration, they have a difficult time even generating ideas for a writing task and when they can, they are so worn down from creating these ideas, that the thought of writing them down becomes a frustrational level for them. These ideas could also be very scattered and when trying to put them down on paper, they do not make sense. This also can agitate the student. The writing process is also slow especially for a child with ED.

Lack of Confidence

All of the issues students have that stem from a lack of focus roll into a lack of confidence. They have a very low self esteem. Every time they make a mistake, every time their words become jumbled, every time they forget what they wanted to write, it only drops more. In addition to this, they feel as though their work is never good enough. It's sloppy, unorganized, incorrect.

Assignment

Discuss a time that you have felt like you were not good enough, a time that you were in these students' shoes, what they go through everyday. How did you get through it? Who helped you? How did they help you?

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References

Understanding Why Students Avoid Writing. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2016, from http://www.ldonline.org/article/5892?theme=print