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Bright students rarely struggle because of the subject, the teacher, or how hard they’re trying. Far more often, they were never taught how to manage their own learning: how to plan, how to study, how to tackle challenging material. That gap between what school asks of them and what they’ve been taught to do? That’s the skills debt.
The first step to helping a teen who is struggling in school is to ensure they’re clear on what’s causing the struggle in the first place. That sounds obvious, but it’s where many families get stuck, because the visible problem is seldom the real one.
I’ve worked with thousands of students who were struggling in school; different ages and stages, different goals and personalities, different learning profiles. On the surface, you’d think they were struggling for completely different reasons.
Here are four real examples, described the way their parents described them to me.
“My Grade 7 daughter is convinced her English teacher hates her, and no matter what she does she will never get an A.”
“My Grade 9 son doesn’t like writing and is immediately overwhelmed when he gets an essay assigned.”
“My Grade 10 daughter is an athlete who trains 20 hours a week and just doesn’t have time to compete and win while getting As.”
“My daughter got straight As in high school and has gotten bad grades so far in her first year of university. We cannot understand why.”
So it looked like we had a teacher issue, a writing problem, a time management issue, and a transition going badly.
Each of these students was stressed and frustrated with school. They ranged from blaming everyone around them to blaming themselves entirely, and the parents of course felt it too: stressed and unsure how to help.
Here’s what turned out to be true: the root cause of each student’s struggles was the same in all four cases.
None of them had a system
Homework and studying were approached piecemeal, day to day or week to week. The goal was to get it done. Keeping up with each subject was a game of Whac-A-Mole. Plenty of effort and intent, little to no actual strategy.
No wonder school felt hard.
Once these students had a clear, step-by-step process for doing school, their grades improved while their stress and frustration diminished. The “reasons” they’d been struggling evaporated, because it wasn’t actually about the teacher or the essay. Those were symptoms of not knowing how to manage school.
This is what the skills debt looks like
Success in school (and life) is facilitated by skills that are rarely taught explicitly: scoping and planning the workload, managing time, studying for retention rather than recognition, focusing, self-monitoring, knowing what to do when the work gets hard.
When a student moves from grade to grade without those skills, the gap between what they’re asked to do and what they’ve been taught to do widens. The work keeps getting harder while the skills stay stagnant. That widening gap is the skills debt, and it compounds.
It’s also why the skills debt often surfaces at a transition point. The student who coasted on natural smarts through high school hits first year university, where the work is way more challenging and no one is checking in on them. They need to use skills they haven’t built; their skills debt was accruing throughout high school, and university is where it gets called in.
What students believe is happening instead
Teens seldom see any of this. What they see is that school is harder for them than it seems to be for other people, and they draw the obvious conclusion.
They decide they’re bad at math. Or that they’re not smart enough. Or that they just need to try harder and work more hours. Some decide they can’t focus, no matter what they do. Others land on the idea that none of it is their fault, and start pointing at teachers or the class itself.
These conclusions help them make sense of what they’re experiencing, when the real culprit for their struggles has nothing to do with their intellect, abilities or teachers. The underlying skills that make learning and school feel easier are missing. A student who doesn’t know how to study often finds that studying doesn’t work. A student without a plan keeps running out of time. The teen who doesn’t understand how motivation works never “feels like” doing the work and procrastinates late into the night, over and over again.
This is the real cost of the skills debt. Not grades that are lower relative to what the student is truly capable of earning, but the story they tell themselves to explain why that’s happening and the limiting beliefs that start to govern their thinking as a result.
The difference between a student and a learner
A student does the work that’s assigned. A learner knows how to manage the work, how to tell whether their approach is effective, and what to change when it isn’t.
Many teens are students, but every teen can be a learner – they just need the right skills to develop their innate learning capabilities.
The shift matters because it transfers. The planning, studying and self monitoring a student builds in one course carry into every other course, into university, and into their career. Content stays in the subject. Capability goes everywhere.
That shift is built through deliberate practice: skills developed explicitly and systematically, using the coursework they already have.
Where to start
The first question isn’t whether your child is working hard enough. It’s this:
Does your child have clarity on how to do their school work? Do they have a process for managing their classes day to day and week to week?
If the answer is no, or you’re not sure, that’s the thing to look at. Not the effort. Not the subject. Not the teacher.
Skills are built, not born. The skills debt can be paid down at any age, and students who see the cost of the gap often move faster than anyone expects.
Want help supporting your teen?
On a free Learning Audit, we do a deep dive into your child’s situation with school to get crystal clear on why they’re struggling and how to turn things around once and for all.
Kelsey Komorowski is an educator and the founder of Komo, where she helps high school and university students close the skills debt and become confident, capable learners. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto and began her career at Ontario’s Ministry of Education, in the Student Achievement Division. Over the past decade, she has worked with thousands of students and been featured in The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail.
