Theres a particular feeling when I realise that a student is falling behind on their content. It's not nessacerily that they are falling behind on a specific topic but that their gap between their current and expected knowledge is widening and that can be a scary feeling for the student. The problem with this is that by the time that the student or even the tutor realises it, there can be a lot of work that needs to be done. My first instinct used to be to speed up the learning, cram in more content, try to close the gap as quickly as possible, but from trial and error, I've learnt that that is not the way to go. Speeding up only works if the students foundation is solid which it almost isn't in these situations. The first thing that I do now is stop and actually find whats missing, not the current work but the earlier concept that the student never retained or even learned in the first place More often than not, a student struggling with something like quadratic equations just has some gaps in their factorising, working on more quadratics questions wont fix that, but fixing the gaps in the factorising will.
I've also learnt that if a student reaches this point in their learning, it can heavily affect their confidence, they probably have some story made up like how they are just stupid or they will never understand, but the key is to seperate the emotions from the logic, its just something that went wrong along the road, it's not a concept that the student is completely unable to grasp. The most important thing that I have learnt regarding this is that small wins really matter, small progressive steps to catching up to their peers, understanding the subject and closing their gaps is all that they need to get right back on track!
