How to Encourage Hard Work Without Telling Kids to Work Hard
Dear Kid Whisperer,
I teach high school and have a huge problem with students sleeping in class. These kids don’t care and have just completely checked out. What do I do? -Marvin, Tampa, Florida
Marvin,
I’m going to start by challenging an assumption that you made.
I have worked with tens of thousands of students from an incredibly diverse range of backgrounds and experiences, and I don’t think I have met one who did not care about their present and future success and happiness.
I have met, I believe, thousands of kids who would rather win a power struggle with an adult than improve their lives through actual struggle. For many, many kids, when they weigh these options, the reward for winning a power struggle with an adult greatly outweighs the benefit of working toward a goal in a classroom.
Many kids love two things a whole lot:
1) Winning power struggles with adults
2) Doing absolutely nothing
By sleeping in class, or more likely, by pretending to sleep, they can accomplish both at the same time.
A note here: if we know that there is a medical or home life issue that is making it impossible for a student to stay awake in class, we obviously treat this very differently. Often a student may just need to go to the nurse for medical attention and/or to sleep.
Otherwise, we use an effective procedure for encouraging hard work, and gently guide the student toward hard work and remaining conscious.
All independent work should be done through Real-World Workshop. It can only be described incompletely and poorly here; it takes me 45 minutes to teach this in live trainings, but once a standard is taught, the student has “Nows” and “Laters”. Nows must be done first. Once those have been done, the student can do Laters: activities that are also aligned to the common core standards that you teach, and may be even more enjoyable and engaging than your Nows. Just like in the real world, when you get done working, you can do things that are more fun than work. A Workshop Board in a high school classroom may look like this:
Nows
Math Textbook pg. 125 #3-27
Algebra Online Self-Assessment #47
Laters
Online Algebra Arcade Game
Algebra Competitive Game (Find a Partner!)
Go to study hall room 321 and help 7th graders with math classwork
At first, make it really easy for students to get to their Laters, and make your Laters amazingly exciting and fun. For a fifty-minute class period, you would want all of your students to be able to be done in 25 minutes or so with even moderate effort. You want every single one of your students to look up at the Workshop Board and think to themselves, “I really want to do that ‘Later’, and it won’t be too hard to get done with those ‘Nows’. Slowly add rigor over time. Scaffold appropriately and have individualized Nows when necessary.
I explain all of this to students (sleepers and non-sleepers alike) and then say the following. You may want to say this as well:
Kid Whisperer: I apologize if any teachers have ever tried to make you do work with lectures or badgering. That always annoyed me as a kid, so I’m going to do that. Feel free to do your Laters as soon as you’ve done your Nows.
Choose Laters that can be easily withheld if you are concerned with kids moving on to Laters before they are done with their Nows (tablets, websites, and games can start each period on lockdown and be unlocked by the teacher).
You have eliminated the need for a power struggle and set up your procedures to encourage hard work. All you have to do now is keep the sleepy kids awake in order to be bored while their friends are playing fun math games and generally having fun for the second half of the class. Tapping kids on the back, teaching excitedly from right next to sleepers, tapping their desks, or whispering “Are you OK?” can all help students to stay awake long enough to realize that pressing their faces against a wooden surface is significantly less fun than the Laters on the board that they could be doing if only they put forward some effort.