Reframe Unmotivated Behavior to Promote Effort

how anyone else is doing. Like all skills, people learn at different speeds and in different ways. Tell students, “There will be times when assignments and tests won’t be the same for everyone. My goal is for each of you to get a little bit better every day when you prepare, practice, and persevere. Your job is to make progress each day, and my job is to provide lessons, assignments, and tests that will help each of you improve.”

Ensure the End Is in Sight

During the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020 through June of that year, nearly 41 percent of adults surveyed by the CDC reported an adverse mental or behavioral condition (Czeisler et al., 2020). Among children ages five through eleven (24 percent) and twelve through seventeen (31 percent), there was an increase in trips to the emergency room through October 2020 (Leeb et al., 2020). Having lived through it, there were intervals when many of my friends and I lapsed into periods of depression and hopelessness not knowing when it would end. While it may be a stretch to compare, consider that many unmotivated students may have the same helpless feeling when presented with lessons in which they lack interest or understanding—and that seem to have no end in sight.

Success is far more likely with underachievers when assignments and projects have an identifiable and manageable end. Stay away from multistep assignments or too much on a page since this discourages effort by feeling endless and overwhelming. After explaining a concept that may require answering written questions or writing an essay that demonstrates understanding, be sure to get students started by working through the first few problems or sentences to ensure understanding.

Give Before You Get

Like it or not, good teaching includes good sales techniques. To inspire motivation among poorly motivated students, we must try to sell them on the idea that working at school and achieving is a good