A featured post by Jordan Rochelson, Executive Functioning Coach
Many times parents will watch their children do an assignment and feel as though they are not putting in the required amount of effort. The work seems sloppy, there are steps that the child misses, or the pages themselves are found crumpled at the bottom of a backpack.
This is particularly common among students that are in middle school or in the early years of high school, and there are reasons for it (none of which, by the way, involve the word “lazy”).
Much of this comes from students not being used to the combination of increased workload and increased independence. But there is a deeper, more complex root for this problem: they have no idea why they are doing all this work in the first place.
Why should I proofread my work?
Why should I meet with a tutor/coach?
Why do I have to go to school?*
*They say this one all the time, and we somewhat laugh it off. But they really don’t know!
In elementary school, students work hard because they still have a strong desire to please and impress their parents; in the later years of high school, students have a deeper understanding of the upcoming responsibility of college, so they are more likely to ramp up the effort and care.
But what is left in those in between years is something like a motivation valley. They don’t care quite as much about pleasing the adults in the room, and they also don’t have much of an understanding of what it means to go to college or work hard at a job. They don’t really have a strong motivation. Enter crumpled pages at the bottom of the backpack.
And it makes sense that a parent would get anxious when they see this happening. After all, parents are not wrong when they tell their children, “when you get a job you’ll have to work hard and be organized.” But to an adolescent, those words are fairly meaningless.
Nurturing Autonomous Learners
If we want our students to be working hard, we need to be developing their internal motivation. Getting a child to do the work, to develop the skills that will matter later in their life boils down to them setting their own goals and them feeling independent.
At the start of any work that I do with a student, I set off by asking them what they care about and what they want to achieve. I am careful not to frame it in terms of “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That is too far off. Instead, the conversation sounds a bit more like this:
What do you want to accomplish this year?
I want good grades?
Okay, why?
Because my parents said…
Nope, let’s start over. What do you want to accomplish this year?
***thinking…thinking…thinking…***
Well, there is this fantasy story I have been writing and…
And we’re off to the races. The student will tell me that, if they could, they would spend hours working on their story or designing a comic on their iPad. This is evidence that they are clearly capable of sitting down to devote time and focus to something that requires effort.
They don’t lack the ability to work hard, and they are certainly not lazy.
Now, does this mean that the child should not be prioritizing their academics and should spend all day writing a fantasy story? Drawing on their iPad? Coding something in Scratch? No.
But allowing your child to choose and pursue their own interests has supplementary benefits as outlined by the National Institute of Health:
…students who were autonomously motivated had higher academic achievement, self-esteem, perceived competence, personal control, and creativity[13] and showed a more adaptive learning attitude, and academic success. (Hui, Tsang, 2012)
There are countless studies that emphasize the value of internal motivation. But we have also seen it with our own eyes. The way an adolescent gets excited about things they understand and can grasp or how excited they get when we show interest in their interests.
Setting It Up: Clear Expectations and Student Input
Kids in the motivation valley are eager for a reason to care about their work, and they are also desperate for the trust that parents can place in them. They crave independence, and there are structured ways that we can provide it to them. We don’t completely let the student dictate how work periods will go, but we must let them have input. This way they will feel connected to the work, because they helped to set it up.
- Allow the student to have input into how work sessions will go and let them decide the reward (make sure it relates to their interests/passions).
- Tie their interests to the work they need to do.
- Set clear expectations (have it written on a shared document, print it up, tape it to the desk).
- No exceptions. Even if they had a hard and busy week, they still need to meet certain requirements before we get to do the fun stuff.
One Way To Do It: Reward After Habit-Building
Let’s go back to that student that loves to do creative writing. Every time we logged on, he would ask me to read something he had written since our last session or ask me for a new writing challenge. Now I love working on creative writing with students, but in order for us to get to that place in the session, the student had to meet certain expectations first:
I definitely want to read what you wrote. But first, did you update your planner like we talked about?
Yup!
He shows me the planner, but I notice that he only wrote due dates. He did not block out time to do the work.
You’re halfway there. So glad you remembered that expectation. But you still need to…
I didn’t plan out the work blocks.
Nope!
He furiously starts to write in his planner when he is going to work on certain assignments in order to meet the due dates.
Boom! He holds it up proudly.
Nice! Okay, now we have a few more things to do, and then it’s writing time. Remember, if you get these things done ahead of time, we will have more time to focus on the things you love to do.
This is just one of many ways we can incorporate the student’s interests into their work sessions. Call it “eating your vegetables” if you’d like, but it works. Demonstrating that you care about their interests and having it tied into the work they are doing for school will help to build the habits they need to work diligently and independently.
Jordan is the Executive Functioning Coach at Admit NY. Interested in enrolling your child into his bespoke program? Sign up for a consultation here.
