Studying an individual child helped me to better understand some problems of the struggling reader because it allowed me to see a real world example of how difficult it can be for the learner and to see some of the unique obstacles to learning that the student encountered. It is one thing to read about it on paper, but it is quite another to actually experience it in real life. In real life, there is more than just the intellectual impact of having to deal with this issue, which is typically all that you experience in a case study in a book. In real life, there are other effects as well: there is an emotional effect, because you really feel for the child struggling; there is a self-doubt effect, because you begin to question yourself as a teacher, wondering if you are taking the right steps or if you are really good enough to help this individual to succeed. You wonder whether you will be able to identify what is wrong, or if there is someone more qualified to help this child. But you also build some self-confidence because in working directly with the child, you o notice some improvements and you do begin to trust in the process that you have learned, how to make assessments, how to individualize the approach and find ways to help the student overcome the issues.
My project helped me to find new strategies to implement as a teacher by getting me to see the student as a unique individual who had special needs. As Reschly (1996) shows, every student has to be approached as an individual because every student is special and has qualities and characteristics that distinguish the student from every other student. Each student has his or her own background, his or her own culture, own family, own friends, own influences and factors that affect the student’s life in a variety of ways. What I determined was that by finding the context of the student’s struggles, I was able to pinpoint areas that might yield some positive result....
For instance, by seeing that the student was having difficulty with certain words that shared common characteristics, I could focus on these words and use images to help provide the student with visuals of what the words signified. I could also provide some better context in which the words might be used so that the student could begin to have some greater familiarity with them. I tried to use context from the student’s own background to build on these examples so that they would be more meaningful and that seemed to work well. However, there was also the problem of just getting the student to respond with words and I encouraged the student to respond in her native language just to get her talking; I wanted her to feel comfortable with the communicative process even if it was not in the L2. We could build on this development of comfort and I could ease her into using the L2 even if she stumbled over the language quite a bit. I made her feel comfortable with making mistakes and she grew more willing to participate in this way. She was more willing to communicate what she read, to ask questions and to puzzle over meanings with me and even the rest of the class. It was really about letting her know that she belonged and that no one was judging her.
Studying an individual in depth better enhanced my teaching because it showed me that sometimes you have to assess whether a student has a learning disability and if the mental faculties are all there then the problem might be with the educative process. As Maria Montessori showed, students should be able to learn at their own pace—but what I have found with studying this individual student in depth is that students who are struggling can really benefit from one-on-one attention time, because this extra attention allows them to reflect more critically without feeling overwhelmed by the social pressures that exist in a large classroom. One-on-one reading time is…
