Professional Development: Supporting Struggling Students Workshops

Supporting Struggling Students Workshops

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If we want our students to succeed, we cannot afford to leave our support strategies to chance.



What if you could catch students the moment they begin to struggle and quickly get them back on track before they get caught in a free-fall of failure?

  • Are you frustrated because so many of your students are unprepared for rigorous learning standards?
  • Do your teachers struggle to provide effective support for struggling learners?
  • Are your students falling behind with new, more rigorous standards?
  • Do your struggling students get frustrated and give up?
  • Have you tried other support strategies and programs and gotten inconsistent or lackluster results?

You’re not alone.  We all have struggling learners who desperately need our support. And while we can clearly see that they are struggling, so often we don’t know exactly how to help them. We need something that will actually work rather than a system that will not only let them down, but lead to further frustration and giving up.

You’ve waited long enough.

Often we don’t intervene with struggling learners until after they have failed. Only then do we look for some strategy or magic bullet so that they can catch up. This reactive cycle of failure and remediation is exhausting for teachers and frustrating for students. What if you could create a built-in support system that would prevent most students from ever struggling in the first place? What if there was something you could do to make student success much more likely for every student you serve?  And what if you could do all of this without creating a ton of extra work for yourselves or your students? The Student SUCCESS Support System shows you how.



With the Student SUCCESS Support System, you can help your teachers…

  • Develop a system of support that catches students before they fail. Most of the time, we offer students support only AFTER they have failed. Wouldn’t it make more sense to catch students before they fail? You’ll learn how to be proactive, recognize the signs of struggle early, and do something to get students back on track before it’s too late.
  • Feel confident that the support strategies you do use will actually work. Sometimes our support strategies are a little like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks. The Student SUCCESS Support System takes the guesswork out of your support strategies. You’ll know exactly what kinds of supports to provide students and the exact structures you will need to put into place to make student success inevitable for ALL students.
  • Help more students “get it” the first time. Your teachers will learn specific strategies for setting students up for success by making learning more clear and accessible to students. That way, fewer students will struggle in the first place.
  • Make Student Support Automatic. Student support takes a lot of work. The Student SUCCESS Support System helps teachers make their supports automatic so that they can spend less time spinning their wheels dragging students through the curriculum and more time actually teaching and inspiring students.
  • Feel more confident that your supports will work this time. Because teachers spend time carefully understanding why students struggle before mapping out exactly how they will help all students succeed, you can feel more confident that their support efforts will yield immediate and lasting results.
  • Customize their supports to their subject, grade, students, and teaching style. This isn’t a one-size fits all approach to support. Your teachers will be able to take what they learn and make it work for their own students, their own subjects, and their own way of teaching. When their supports feel organic, more teachers will stick with the plan.
  • Make learning stick through hands-on, interactive, and customized content that addresses your challenges. We've designed this training to go much deeper than one of those "off-the-shelf" workshops that get you all excited and then leave you alone to struggle your way through finding the time and the focus to get going. Sorry, we care too much to do that to you. Instead you’ll have a chance to co-create each day’s agenda with your concerns and your needs. We also study your district and customize our content to directly address your needs.

This workshop is for you if:

  • You are tired of random supports and want a clear support plan all of your teachers can implement and will actually use.
  • You worry that your students are falling further and further behind
  • You are frustrated that most of the supports you’re using aren’t working or aren’t working as well as you’d hoped
  • You feel trapped in a remediation cycle and worry that some students will never be able to keep up.
  • You want to stop remediating and start catching students before they fail in the first place
  • You want a practical learning experience that helps you focus on your own practice, not a bunch of theories you can’t use.


Here’s just a taste of what you’ll get:

  • Three simple secrets to providing proactive support that keeps students on track rather than always playing catch up.
  • The REAL reasons most students struggle. Once you understand these reasons, your student support efforts will be MUCH more effective.
  • When to offer remediation .. .and when you SHOULDN’T remediate.
  • Exactly what you need to do to set students up for success. This one process alone will save you hundreds of hours of remediation on the back end.
  • How to build an entire cycle of support that takes into account every stage of the learning process. Use this process and your students will never slip through the cracks.
  • How to make your supports automatic so that you can meet the unique needs of each of your students without working yourself to death in the process.

What will you learn?

This is a complete support system. You'll be able to start using these strategies right away with your own students and see immediate results.

This series can be booked for 3 consecutive days or 3 days throughout the school year.

Day One: Supporting Students Before Instruction. You’ll get started working on your support plan right away. First, you’ll learn the 2 biggest reasons students struggle and learn how to anticipate confusion prior to learning. That way, you’ll know exactly how to set students up for success from the very start. You’ll also learn how to activate background knowledge (or create it if students don’t have it already), use vocabulary as a support tool, and select the right organizing strategies to ensure that students are supported from the very start. By the end of the day, you will have all the tools you need to shift from catching students up to helping the keep up from the very start saving you time and your students tons of frustration in the process.

Day Two: Supporting Students During Instruction.  First, you’ll find out the difference between productive and destructive struggle. Then you’ll dive right in to learn exactly how to recognize when students are struggling destructively and specific strategies you can use to catch them early and get them back on track. By the end of the day, you’ll have a complete proactive intervention plan you can put on automatic pilot to respond right away the moment students struggle and get them quickly back on track.

Day Three: Supporting Students After Instruction. Even with your best efforts, there still may be some students who take longer to get it. In this session, you’ll learn everything you need to know to effectively remediate struggling learners and help them catch up quickly. We’ll show you how to set up short-term and long-term remediation processes that have been proven to be really effective and we’ll help you get everything organized so that you can keep track of your students’ road to success over time.


Which Workshop is Right for Me?

We recommend that you order the entire series. It’s the best way to fully develop a rigorous instructional program. But, you can also select just one day of the series to get your team started. You won’t get the full benefit of the program but you will get valuable tools and strategies you can immediately apply in your school.

How do I order?

Ready to schedule one of these workshops at your school? You’re just steps away. Start by clicking here and following our simple 3 step process.

Related Resources
Please visit our Supporting Struggling Students Resource Page for more Resources.

Related Books
How to Support Struggling Students

Related Workshops
AP Training for Teachers


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