In this 12‑minute presentation, literacy specialist Lois Letchford draws on Jo Boaler’s research on growth mindset to explain how fear puts children’s brains into a survival state that blocks learning, while a supportive, executive state enables growth. She shares personal anecdotes about her son’s struggle and describes how she shifts students from fear to confidence by normalising mistakes, reframing errors as learning opportunities, and using child‑centred, drama‑based activities. Letchford critiques the common assumption that decoding a word equals comprehension, urging teachers to probe understanding through discussion, acting out, and targeted questioning. She outlines concrete classroom practices: asking “does it make sense?” after reading, using word‑level tasks (e.g., TO, TWO) to reveal gaps, and encouraging students to think aloud and correct themselves together. The talk concludes with a call to value struggle, create safe learning environments, and adopt these strategies to foster brain growth in struggling learners.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and a literacy problem solver, talking to you today about the brain and growth when a child struggles. And this comes from watching Professor Jo Boaler talk about growth mindset and the brain in mathematics. So you can watch this on YouTube. It's all of 12 minutes long, but she talks— the first thing she talks about is fear in the brain and what it does to the brain. And I have this picture here that I've talked about a lot about fear and the brain and what it does. And I relate to this significantly because my second son Nicholas went to school and failed. And during that whole year, he bit his fingernails, he wet his pants, and he stared into space. He was in a state of fear. He was unable to learn. The teacher shouted at him. He looked like he had no memory. All of those components stop a child from learning. And then when we do the testing, what are we doing? Are we putting them in an emotional state where they can actually take a test, or are we putting them in a survival state, giving them a test and saying, well, look, they can't learn anyway, can they? So we have a problem with the way things are set up. So what's our mindset? How can we get our children to feel comfortable around us so that they are in an emotional state State where they're not only asking, am I loved? Am I okay? But rather, I want them to be in the executive state when they are relaxed. They know they're comfortable. Whatever they are doing is of value, and then the brain starts to work. And why this is so important to me is I watch not only my son, But I watched my students move from the survival state, and when they came to me, they were heads down, eyes shut, I don't want to be here. And how I moved them from there to saying, it's okay, it's okay, we'll be okay together. Students have to learn that. It's not enough for me to say it's okay. They have to learn. Yes, working with this lady is okay. And how do you do that? By reaffirming that it's not their fault that they have failed to learn. It's mine. And my job here is to make sure you learn everything. And give them confidence to say, making mistakes in my class is acceptable. And then I watch my students grow. And when a child doesn't know something, It's up to me to work out how am I going to teach them. Language, I think, is actually harder to teach than mathematics. Look at why. And, you know, looking at the— our brains can be rewired. Why is language much more difficult than mathematics? Because I don't think we value the struggle in learning. When a child reads a sentence, we assume They have the comprehension. That's a problem. Make no assumptions about what a child knows and doesn't know. We have to ask them questions. We have to ask them to act it out. What do you mean? We need more discussion on what it means. And then in a classroom, what often happens is the skilled readers take over and answer all the questions, and those who are unskilled get left behind or slink down under the desk. Because they may have mistakes. The second is making mistakes is okay. In fact, making mistakes is a real positive because we can correct them. And then I go back to my saying, when students read a word, it does not— read a word or a phrase or a sentence, whatever they're reading, we have to know that they have comprehension because if they don't, they are leaving our classrooms thinking, I've done it. It's alright. And that's a problem for what we do. We want— when our children make a mistake, that's when they start to learn. We want to push the edge of their understanding. This is what I do well, and I do it through drama, through reading materials that my students love. I read to them and then we start discussing at every level. What do they understand and what they don't? I don't say, what do you understand? What do you not? But it becomes obvious when I'm asking my questions. What do they understand? What don't they understand? And it's okay to get things wrong. Let's reread this again. Let's change these words from pronouns to nouns. Let's do something else so that we, the students, are at the edge of their understanding. And then they are saying, this is okay. And Jo Boaler in her little 12-minute clip said brains are more active when students or learners make mistakes. So we have to make making mistakes acceptable. And again, I go back to the literacy problem. We accept when a child reads a sentence accurately, they have the comprehension. And that's the fallacy I think we have to get through. Just because they can read it doesn't mean that they fully comprehend it. And when we start thinking and working like that, then we know that our students are pushing at the edge of the comprehension, making mistakes, and we're valuing the struggle of learning. So that's what I'm saying about that. Next thing, what do we as teachers do when a child reads a word Incorrectly. Do we immediately step in and correct, or do we say, look at that again? What is our response to a child's error? Because our response can create fear, it can create an emotional state that says I'm safe, or it can create an executive state. What one are we creating? Are we asking our students to think? Or are we just expecting them to get it right? When my students make a mistake, my first question is, did that make sense? In fact, that's the question I ask when they don't make a mistake and when they do make a mistake. And it's deliberate on my part because I want my students thinking, have I read that sentence and does it make sense to me? If they've read it correctly, fine. It makes sense. Makes sense to me. It makes sense to them. If they've read it incorrectly, my next question is, where did the sentence go wrong? Where did it stop making sense? I want my students to be doing the thinking. They are at the edge of their understanding, and then we can celebrate the errors. Or the correction of the errors. You made a mistake and you got it right and we worked it out. We worked it out together and it was good for both of us. And that's the way we create a classroom that encourages and engages our students to think. It's not just in mathematics that these problems occur. It happens in literacy too. And I go back to always one of the first things I do with my students who struggle is look at the words to, T-O, and T-W-O. To. I put T-O on a piece of paper in front of them and so I say, read the word. Now give me a sentence with that word. And if a student comes back with a sentence like, I have 2 hands, or with the word F-O-R, a dog has 4 legs, I know they have not got the accurate comprehension of that word. And it's been taught by saying, read the word, I think you've got the comprehension of it. And that's a problem. So then I go back and say, And get them to act out. We go to the locker to pick up our books. We go to the bus to go to school. Or whatever the child does. And I make my learning child-centred. Because when children come to me at any age, but particularly if they're teenagers, and they have not got the accurate meaning for the word to, their comprehension is compromised. And they're reading a sentence that makes no sense to them. And they've read this sentence for many years in school. That's a problem. So we have to correct that error and then make them say, yes, I can do this. That's my goal in teaching reading all the time. I have to show them how the written language works. So we're talking about brain growth for when a child struggles. Allow our children to struggle, but allowing them to struggle and not get it right does nothing for them, particularly in literacy. We must uncover the problems that they are having that stops them, that stop them from learning to read effectively. And it's more than just decoding. Thank you. Hit like, hit subscribe, and connect with me.
