Blog

January 27, 2025

Self-advocacy: How to get students to ask for – and accept – help

By Mandy Cohen, Instructor

Help me. Those two little words have a powerful stigma around them, as asking for help is a significant struggle for so many students. In this article, we will examine the reasons why students struggle with self-advocacy skills and also provide concrete tips and strategies for supporting student growth in this area.

To start, let’s dive into defining the problem. Asking for help falls under the umbrella of self-monitoring, which is part of a student’s executive function skills. Self-monitoring is the ability to know what you are struggling with, identify tools to help, and communicate about those strategies. Asking for help may be the best and even most obvious way for students to get what they need. So, why do so many students struggle with these skills?  

The challenge is that asking for help puts one in a very vulnerable position (Good & Shaw). In fact, according to Kayla Good and Alex Shaw in Why Kids Are Afraid to Ask for Help, “as early as age seven, children begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others”.  This is a fear that most of us are familiar with and it is important to remember that our students often experience this same stress. In fact, they can even learn it from those around them. Every time we hesitate to ask for help ourselves, it reinforces the idea that asking for help is a bad thing. According to Vanessa Bohns in The Real Reason Why Students Don’t Ask Teachers for Help, “it’s more effective to address the underlying anxiety of asking for help than to focus on the practical benefits of doing so.” Our students already know that getting help will move things in the right direction. So, what we really need to address is the fear of getting help in the first place. 

Here are some ideas to support student success on this front:

  1. Model: Don’t shy away from asking for help yourself. Ask for directions when you are lost driving. Contact a help center when you are stuck navigating a particular website. Our students need us to model asking for help, both face-to-face and also electronically. Anytime that you ask someone else for something, big or small, verbalize this to your student. Explain why and how you are asking for help. Be specific. Model language you use to explain the problem and articulate what you need. If our students see us self-advocating in this way, it will help them build the skills and competence to do so as well.  
  2. Look it up together: Have you ever slyly looked up something on your phone because your child asked you a question you didn’t have the answer to? I know I have! To encourage students to ask for help, it’s essential that they don’t feel embarrassed or shamed. When you don’t know an answer, own it. Adopt a growth mindset attitude by explaining that you don’t know the answer YET but that you do know a way to learn that information. Then look it up or ask someone together. This will help students build the executive functioning skill of self-monitoring by helping them realize when they need to ask for help and feel comfortable doing so.
  3. Celebrate differences: Everyone has different knowledge and skill sets, children and adults. It’s important that we recognize this and help our students see their strengths, as well as the expertise of others. Point out when someone demonstrates a strength and emphasize that they are the best person to go to for help with that specific area. Knowing who to ask for help is an essential part of the executive functioning skill of self- monitoring. 
  4. Save contact info: Once you determine who to ask for help, the next step might be to find the appropriate contact info to reach that person. Simplify this process by helping your child save key email addresses, such as their teachers, coaches or tutors, for easy reference. You can also help your child by bookmarking important websites to help them shortcut their way towards helpful information. Finally, help them save a phone number and/or email address for a “responsible classmate” from each one of their classes to have on hand.
  5. Employ scaffolds: Many of our students will need explicit support to be able to learn how to ask for help. It’s important that we provide them opportunities to practice face-to-face conversations with roleplays, give them examples of professional and effective emails, and support them in coming up with their own language by providing sentence starters when needed. 
  6. Don’t allow the teasing: Finally, remember that it is never okay for one person to make another one feel badly for needing help. If your student is experiencing teasing like this  it is essential to address it directly or with the school following the school protocol. It is also important to reinforce that asking for help is a good thing and that teasing about this is unacceptable. 

If we can teach our students that needing help is normal and common and we can provide them with the tools to be able to ask for help, this will go a long way in fighting the stigma and getting our students the help that they need. 

Why Kids Are Afraid to Ask for Help

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-kids-are-afraid-to-ask-for-help/#:~:text=It’s%20an%20act%20that%20can,it%2C%20for%20the%20same%20reason.

The Real Reason Why Students Don’t Ask Teachers for Help

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-the-real-reason-why-students-dont-ask-teachers-for-help/2021/10