Supporting vulnerable or looked after students with complex needs or difficulties around behaviour, emotional wellbeing or social development is challenging.
In this SecEd Best Practice Focus, Darren Martindale draws on 20 years of experience to outline in detail his five golden steps for supporting these learners.
These steps, if fully committed to by schools, can make a real difference to learning and wider outcomes and include identifying barriers, engaging students, building resilience, the right teaching strategies, joined up working, and evaluating impact.
In this Best Practice Focus, Darren Martindale also advises on how adopting metacognition strategies can help this group of learners and he also discusses issues of intrinsic motivation and how this can be fostered and developed.
The article offers a number of ideas and approaches for augmenting your existing teaching methods and building resilience. It also offers some options and techniques for evaluating the impact of your work with vulnerable learners.
This SecEd Best Practice Focus has been produced with support from Academy 21 and a free eight-page pdf is free to download here.
Best Practice Focus: Supporting vulnerable learners: Five golden steps: Click here to download