Learned Helplessness and Dyslexia Part 3: Motivation

This is the last part in my three-part series about learned helplessness and dyslexia. By now, we’ve established that learned helplessness is a vicious cycle that often affects people who have dyslexia.

In part one of the series, I discussed how providing opportunities for success is the first step in breaking the cycle.

In part two, I described how developing a growth mindset can further help create a new, more positive, cycle of success.

Both providing opportunities for success and developing a growth mindset will go a far way in increasing a child’s motivation to learn. Even so, I wanted to touch on some other ways to get a child with dyslexia more motivated to practice and learn.

The first thing to understand is that reading and writing often have hugely negative associations for students with dyslexia. Repeated academic failures, feelings of frustration, mental exhaustion, and teasing from peers are common experiences for kids with dyslexia. This creates a lot of negative feelings towards anything literacy related.

What we want to do in order to increase motivation, then, is to develop new, more positive associations with reading and writing. Note that it takes a lot of positive experiences to overwrite negative associations. Because of this, we have to be diligent in providing as much positivity as possible when introducing reading and writing activities to our loved ones with dyslexia.

4 ways to create a positive association with reading and writing:

1. Start Slow

Reading and writing can be quite mentally taxing for people who have dyslexia. Provide materials at their level, and keep the duration of practice small. I often recommend starting with just five minutes, because the last thing we want to do is to overwhelm or frustrate them.

2. Give them Ownership

Give the child a sense of ownership over what and how they’re practicing. Even simple choices like “Would you like to do your five minutes of reading at bedtime or before dinner?” can make them feel like they have some power over what they are doing. Letting them choose which decodable book they’d like to read from, or which learning game they would like to play, are other ways of providing them this sense of ownership.

3. Use high-interest materials:

Keep them connected and engaged by using materials, games, and activities that interest them.

4. Fun, fun, and more FUN

Make reading and writing practice as fun as possible. Really go crazy and think outside the box here, because the more fun they’ll have, the stronger the chance is that a positive association will develop. Build a special fort for reading, go on reading day trips, create crazy and silly games. I’ll be writing a separate post about this topic because having fun is very valuable when it comes to creating positive associations with reading and writing.

I hope you enjoyed reading my three-part series about learned helplessness as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you have any ideas of your own for making reading and writing practice fun, please let me know below in the comments :)