December 2003

Question: What do teachers do with students who do nothing during class? They sit and play with pencils, shoelaces or whatever.

Answer: Restructure the day. Plan in more physical movement. Break up short periods of concentrated learning with out of seat movements—even less than one minute will help. (See http://www.kaganonline.com/ for great ideas.)

Highly unmotivated students respond ten times better to incentives than any kind of criticism or punishment. Plan a fairly well structured incentive program. Let the student earn points or bonus bucks or tokens for concentrated work and assignment completion. Make the work times (earning times) short and frequent. Make all privileges part of the incentive program. Be creative with rewards. Computer time. Game time. Use your imagination.

Create more friendly competition in completing assignments. Tell the unmotivated student that you need their help. They need to work with you to learn and complete assignments so that your superiors will think you are a great teacher. Just say, “Help me out here.” Many unmotivated students will perform to help you—if they know you like them—when they won’t do much of anything for themselves.

One last word: Today’s students are used to high stimulus games and entertainment. Between television, video games and high-impact movies, these students fall into boredom and lethargy all too easily. Keep them moving and grooving. Use a hand signal—practice it over and over to get them to settle down.