Teaching Vulnerable Learners: Strategies for Students who are Bored, Distracted, Discouraged, or Likely to Drop Out

The practices that work—and those that don’t—to reach and teach students at risk.

When schools fail to address the problems of struggling students, the consequences can be dire: course failures, absenteeism, suspensions or expulsions, dropouts. Those effects continue to ripple after school with lower rates of college attendance and graduation, underemployment and lower wages, and even incarceration.

Yet many of these students can experience a very different trajectory when their learning diff...