Helping Students Overcome Learned Helplessness

Students who have moderate to severe disabilities are more prone to having what is known as "learned helplessness". Learned helplessness is when a student learns to be dependent upon other through years of disempowerment. Here are a list of strategies to help teachers help students overcome learned helplessness:

• Build daily expectations for students to communicate through different ways, i.e. choosing the activity for recess/break time, choosing a book for a read aloud, or choosing their seat during a lesson or at lunch time.
• Help the students conduct a brief daily report of things that had happened during the day, i.e.  a list of subjects that were taught, special (art, gym), what he/she ate at lunch, which book was read etc.
• Allow natural consequences to occur and provide ways for the student to rectify the situation. 
• Provide choices for student to exhibit control over environment, assignments, and will provide opportunities for students to communicate their wants/needs
• Provide powerful words or phrases on the communication device that will allow students to show support/approval, disgust/disapproval or emotions/feelings

Holding high expectations for students with disabilities is imperative to ensure that they will not developed the "learned helplessness" syndrome that could be a potential threat to living life independently.