As a teacher, you may experience a child exhibiting learned helplessness. If you’ve ever heard, “I can’t do this,” “I don’t even care,”I can’t do it, just show me what to do,” or “I’m not good at this” then you’ve experienced learned helplessness within a student.
Learned helplessness occurs when a child repeatedly experiences failure or lack of control over their environment, leading them to believe that their efforts will not change outcomes. It also directly impacts a student’s critical thinking skills, meaning it reduces a child’s problem solving persistence, lowers a child’s confidence in reasoning, and limits their curiosity and questioning.
And as students get older, it becomes more difficult for teachers to help students break through the learned helplessness and increase their critical thinking skills. And, too, without the help and collaboration from parents at home, it can be difficult to see a break through in the classroom… making teaching more difficult.
Why Understanding Learned Helplessness is Important for Teachers
But why is knowing about this helpful for teachers? Learning about learned helplessness is crucial for teachers because it directly impacts student motivation, academic success, and emotional well-being. When students believe their efforts don’t matter, they stop trying—which can lead to long-term struggles in learning, confidence, and independence.
Executive functioning also plays a huge role in how our students show up in the classroom, especially in special ed. A lot of what looks like refusal or shutting down is really just overwhelm. Many of our kids genuinely don’t know where they’re stuck—and they don’t always have the words to explain it.
That’s why breaking tasks into smaller, bite-sized steps is so helpful. It gives them a starting point when everything feels too big.
It also takes time. You’ll likely need to walk through the task with them a few times to figure out what part is causing the hang-up. Sometimes it’s the writing piece that trips them up, even if they can say the answer out loud just fine. Other times, they just don’t fully understand what the question is asking—but they won’t tell you that because they don’t know how to.
The more we slow down and help them figure out where they get stuck, the more we can build their confidence and help them move forward.
How Can a Teacher Help a Child with Learned Helplessness
To support a child experiencing learned helplessness, you must first recognize the signs of learned helplessness, then implement a structured approach to rebuild confidence, promote persistence, and encourage critical thinking.
So what does that look like?
- Identifying the Sign of Learned Helplessness
- Avoidance of challenging tasks or giving up quickly.
- Low student motivation
- Indifference to successes and failures
- Refusal to ask for help or an over-reliance on asking others for answers
- Display of fixed mindset
- Reactions of frustration when mistakes happen; behavioral and emotional responses
- Negative self talk
- Fear of failure or making mistakes
- Inconsistent performance
- Build a Game Plan for the Student
- Have private conversations to validate feelings
- Model positive self-talk and provide structured support and feedback
- Introduce the power of “yet” (growth mindset)
- Break down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks
- Encourage questioning and use think alouds to work through problems
- Create opportunities for risk taking
- Reinforce a student’s effort over the lesson outcome
As you are working with this student to increase their critical thinking skills, remain in contact with the child’s IEP team – namely the child’s family. Their support and work at home will have a direct impact on the success you see in the classroom.
Classroom Games and Activities to Help Build Critical Thinking Skills in Students
Increase activities that promote problem solving, like “what would you do?” games. You can present real life or imaginary situations, or have students take turns coming up with the scenario, to encourages students to analyze, evaluate, and develop solutions independently.
Increase deductive reasoning by playing games like 20 questions. Students can take turns thinking of an object, while the rest of the class asks questions about the object to try and figure out what it is. These types of games build logical reasoning, questioning strategies, and categorization skills.
Increase logical thinking and collaboration by using escape rooms. Set up puzzles, clues, and riddles that your students must solve to escape or unlock a mystery object or reward. This type of activity encourages teamwork, problem-solving, and persistence.
Increase overall thinking and creativity by uses STEM activities in your classroom. STEM activities promote experimentation, engineering skills, and persistence. To further increase creativity and communication, you can start a story chain; this is where you or a student would begin a story with one sentence, and then the next person would add on to the story with another sentence or two… and so on. These types of activities help develop sequencing, creativity, and adaptability.
Increase categorization and justification by giving students a list or images of 3-4 objects and asking students to choose which one does not belong. This type of activity encourages classification, reasoning, and justification.
Increase lateral thinking and reasoning by having a daily riddle in your classroom. Not only would this be a fun brain break activity for students, but it would also encourage students to think out-of-the-box and perseverance.
Introduce “first, then” charts that give students a list of things that they have to complete first before they can do other activities. This helps create natural consequences for not getting work done.
Most of the activities above are low-prep and can be utilized at home or in the classroom to increase critical thinking skills. Plus, they’re all games that students won’t even realize they are learning.
When a student exhibits learned helplessness, the goal is to encourage effort, persistence, and problem-solving while avoiding language that reinforces their sense of failure or dependence.
If left unaddressed, learned helplessness can impact a child’s academic achievement, critical thinking, and long-term resilience. Recognizing these signs early allows teachers to intervene with strategies that build confidence, persistence, and problem-solving skills.
By systematically breaking down tasks, reframing failures, and fostering a growth mindset, teachers can help children move from helplessness to empowerment—building persistence, critical thinking, and self-belief that lasts a lifetime.
Writing effective IEPs is so much easier when you have the right tools in your toolbox! Inside The Intentional IEP, you’ll get access to expert-led trainings, 10,000+ pre-written, standards-aligned goals, and ready-to-use resources that take the guesswork out of IEP writing. With the right tools at your fingertips, you’ll save time, reduce stress, and feel confident in creating IEPs that truly support your students. Join today and fill your IEP toolbox with everything you need!