An Awesome Self-Advocacy Email to a Teacher
Back when I was a middle school classroom teacher, I had no idea how hard it was for students to talk to me outside of class.
I thought: “I’m a friendly teacher! I smile a lot and am supportive, too. Surely my students feel free to talk to me if they ever struggle.”
I’m friendly! Shouldn’t that make it easy for students to ask for help?
After becoming an academic coach, however, I got a much more intimate view into students' minds. I was shocked to hear how intimidated students are by their teachers, even the “nice” ones!
The fact that teachers are authority figures with the power to assess a student creates an intimidating power dynamic, “niceness” notwithstanding.
Turns out this is even true for educators who come to me to learn the Anti-Boring Toolkit, and get support starting their own private practices as coaches, as well.
It’s amazing to me how hard it is for anyone, it turns out, to ask for help, and as an academic coach, it remains my biggest challenge with teenage students.
In today’s blog I’d love to address the challenge of self-advocacy via a video and updated reflections based on an entry I posted in February 2021 on my previous website:
Self-Advocacy is one of the most challenging skills to learn
Here’s a newly-edited version of the original post:
Do you ever have a hard time speaking up for your needs with a teacher, coach, or parent?
If so, you aren’t alone! Self-advocacy is one of the more challenging skills a student can learn, and often it’s one that a student learns late in their academic career, if ever.
For this reason, I am so proud of one of my clients! She has had an assignment hanging over her head for a while that will always be more difficult for her than the teacher intends.
This week, she and I looked at that assignment, figured out why she hadn’t done it, and determined what we think the teacher’s purpose was in assigning it. Then she wrote a fantastic email to her teacher asking what she needed to fulfill the assignment’s spirit and get it done.
Want to know know what she wrote?
Listen to this video, or keep reading below the video for more.
Is the missing work the teacher’s fault, or Amanda’s?!
The situation started with this email from my client’s dad on April 22, 2020. Let’s call her Amanda:
Hey Gretchen (Amanda calls you Gretch haha)
Thanks for the update, I’m really excited about the help she’s getting and it sounds like she is really processing the process it takes.
We have been pretty chill about things with her grades but we have gotten onto her a little about the averages. As of yesterday she had a B, C, C-, and an F for this last 9 weeks. Most of this is due to her having some missing or late assignments. I am trying to be understanding that the distance learning may be especially challenging for her.
Just a brief program note: This was the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, and Amanda was just a month into learning from home. It makes sense that her grades would be faltering given the enormity of what we were dealing with as a globe, not to mention having to work from home as a student with ADHD.
Her dad went on:
The F is in Spanish from about 10 missing supersite assignments. Amanda says she does them but it doesn’t show up as completed for the teacher's end. The teacher and her both do not communicate well about how to resolve this. This happened some last semester so I think Amanda is partially correct. However, there is likely at least a couple of the assignments that she really did miss and she just assumes it’s part of the ones she says she completed.
Sigh! What the father describes here is so typical of students who have exacerbated executive function challenges.
There was clearly a problem with the software the teacher used to track assignments, either that or a user error on the teacher’s end. This had indeed happened the previous year; I remember the issues, as I’d been coaching Amanda then, too!
It’s so easy for the student to assume that the problem is fully on the teacher’s end, and that they don’t have any culpability. Except in Amanda’s case, she often had a hard time tracking all the small assignments expected of her, and so she was responsible for some of the missing work.
How do we help her (1) speak up for the areas in which she is not responsible, as well as (2) take ownership for her part in the situation?
Because I’m writing this after the fact, I don’t remember exactly how I handled the situation after the father alerted me. Luckily, I keep all my session notes on a document I call the “Habits and Grades Tracker.”
(Note: if you’re curious what the Habits and Grades Tracker is, and how to implement it in your coaching or teaching, I have a whole micro-credential about it in the Anti-Boring Toolkit; the coaches and tutors in the Learning Lab often credit this Tracker as a game-changer in their work with students).
The power of learning to write a self-advocacy email
According to my notes on May 4th, 2020, here’s how I addressed the issue of the missing Spanish work with Amanda:
Amanda and I spent the entire session reviewing the Spanish situation, figuring out what the exact problems are, and writing a long email to her teacher detailing the issues that need solving. I was willing to focus on this topic for the whole session because we were practicing all kinds of tasks in one fell swoop:
- Looking for patterns as a way to diagnose the problem
- Describing the patterns in written form
- Figuring out what questions need to be asked/answered by her teacher
- Owning her own responsibility
- Writing a formal email
- Preparing her thoughts before a meeting
- Getting communication with official people in WRITING so she has proof that communication happened (this is an important ADHD skill for the rest of her life).
What do you think about this list I left the parents, detailing my decision-making about what I focused on in my session with their daughter?
In hindsight, I’m guessing that I felt a little worried they would judge me for spending an entire session doing only one thing — writing an email to her teacher! I wanted to justify my choices so they’d think their money was well spent.
However, I’m also really glad I wrote this list out because it’s a great example of how rich coaching sessions can be!! That’s a lot of skill development we were doing all at once. I highly recommend that coaches and teachers take time to be explicit in their notes about what skills they’re working on with students. It’s a helpful reflective activity for you, as you might discover you’re accomplishing more than you think you are in your coaching sessions. I certainly discovered that when I wrote this list out after the session!
Here’s what we did next, according to my notes in the Habits and Grades Tracker:
I had Amanda forward the email she sent her Spanish teacher to her parents. I also had her make a video walking her teacher and me through the VHL site work that she did do, and I asked her to send that to her teacher before the meeting tomorrow.
So what was the content of the letter my client wrote during this session? Here you have it in full:
Dear teacher,
First of all, I would like to apologize for my inconsistency with communicating with you and turning in my assignments. I have had some time to think about why it’s so hard for me to do the work in this class.
My ADHD and executive dysfunction make it hard for me to track assignments that have lots of different parts to them. These assignments take me 5x longer than they’re supposed to take me, making it hard to even start working on them. I can tell that the purpose of the notes and homework is to help us retain the information from the lectures and would like to respect the intent. My tutor offered some accommodations she thinks will make the work and I more compatible.
Some accommodations could be:
—typing the notes directly into the document on schoology during the lecture
- submitting the notes directly
-simply taking assessments that prove I’m learning the material you are teaching without needing to upload notes. (ex. Would be quizlets or other online resources that are available for students in this field)
My preference is the last one but I am open to alternatives. I really want to do well in your class and appreciate the time you have taken to help me.
Thank you,
Student
What a great letter, huh? As you can probably tell, there was a lot of prompting from me. Would the student have said “executive dysfunction” if left to her own devices?
(Side note: these days I wouldn’t use the word “dysfunction.” As my colleague Susannah Cole reminds me, everyone has executive function challenges; let’s not turn it into a dysfunction, but normalize the fact we have challenges and find strategies to address them.)
Asking for help doesn’t ensure the situation gets fixed, but it’s still worthwhile
So how did the situation turn out? I went back to my “Habit and Grades Tracker” for this student and looked up the next session’s notes:
May 11, 2020
- Talked about Spanish. Quizzes have not been taken yet b/c the teacher didn't open the quizzes on Thursday, or respond to Amanda's email sent last Friday. We sent an email together, but Amanda's email was glitchy so it didn't go through. I re-wrote the email myself, and sent it to her teacher and copying Amanda
- We fixed her email glitch! Yay.
Sigh. So many technical errors. So much waiting on the teacher, who I don’t think we ever heard back from. Does that negate all the work we did to teach Amanda to advocate for herself? Absolutely not.
Her semester grade ended up being a C-, and there were still some F’s that we didn’t understand, but oh well. The process is more important than the outcome. And we were in a global pandemic after all. Let’s give everyone in this situation grace — the student, the parent, the teacher, everyone.
Are you a classroom teacher? If so, I’m curious how YOU would receive an email like this?
Are you an academic/EF/ADHD coach? I’m curious if this is how you would have handled the situation, or if you would have done something different?
Feel free to post below.
Want to learn more ways to help students self-advocate?
Did you know that in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we not only teach a 9-module course equipping you with study skills and executive function strategies for students… but we also produce four new micro-credentials ever year, on a hot topic inside the world of academic coaching, tutoring, and teaching?
For our July 2023 micro-credential, I’ve invited several executive function specialists to teach their favorite tips and tricks helping students develop metacognitive capacity.
Sean McCormick of the Executive Function Coaching Academy will share his PING method for writing self-advocacy emails. I just love the way he has broken down how to think about the parts of an email (a skill that is rarely taught to students), as well as how to communicate professionally and persuasively. I’m also so impressed with the templates he provides students for various kinds of emails. He’ll be breaking it down for us as one of the guest experts in this new micro-credential.
I invite you to consider joining us in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, to get access to these impactful trainings as well as take advantage of one of the most supportive and collaborative communities of educators I’ve ever experienced.
We open the doors several times a year, and you can click here to put your name on the waiting list, to be the first to hear when we open the doors again.
Also, you don’t have to wait to play! I host FREE monthly office hours on Zoom, during which we discuss all things related to teaching learning-to-learn skills to students. Click here to find out when the next one is, and to RSVP if you’re interested.