Motivating Teens to Do School Work

Source: Photo courtesy of Judy Willis, M.D., M.Ed.

“What can I do to get my teenagers to put in the effort needed for success in school?

How can teens build their skills, persevere through setbacks, become independent learners, and learn from mistakes? These are the most frequent questions posed to me by parents when I present at conferences or schools.

Build your teen’s sustained motivation.

Sustaining your teen’s motivation, effort, and perseverance through setbacks is especially challenging during the teen years. Motivation can be busted by disinterest, boredom, an expectation of failure, or suffering frequent setbacks.

Teen brains are actively building the neural networks (executive functions) needed to sustain effort. During their high school years, you can influence these developing brain networks to expand their self-motivating capabilities.

From neuroscience research, we’ve learned that the brain expends greater effort when anticipating positive learning experiences or potential success. Strategies for these include helping teenagers recognize how subject topics are personally relevant and guiding them to appreciate the progress they make while working towards their goals. When teens are connected through personal relevance, recognizing their strengths, and seeing evidence of their ongoing progress, their ability to sustain motivation and work for success expands.

Source: Karolina Grabowska/Pexels

Why should they care?

Sustained effort can build when your teens find the learning personally relevant and interest-related, know they will do something interesting with that learning, and believe that their effort can result in success.

Relevance is a powerful tool to ignite and sustain both engagement and effort. If your teens know from the start that part of their learning of a topic will include doing something (in class or with you/friends) that interests them, relevance and motivation increase. As a unit progresses, sustain teens’ motivation by having them write about the usefulness of the material to their lives, future careers, or the careers of professionals they admire. Notably, increased understanding and long-term memory retention of the information arise as a side benefit of their applying learning to interests.

Examples:

• Math: studying conversions between the metric and standard measurements system. A relevant opportunity occurs by inviting them to select a recipe from a cookbook from England using metric measurements. Have them choose a desirable one they can make at home. To follow the recipe, they will want to know how to make the “translations” between metric to imperial to use your standard kitchen measurement devices.
• History: Promote description or discussion of how the school topic relates to their interests, family life, community, or current events.
• Reading/literature: Invite your teens to select goals for the unit or assignment that they consider possible and valuable. These will be used as they keep progress records that show them they are achieving challenges. Examples of goals to note and record: number of pages read a week, progression to the next level of the multiplication tables, fewer spelling or grammar errors on essays.

They need to know they are making progress.

When learners recognize they are progressing toward a goal, a pleasurable achievement response is experienced. This positive experience activates the brain’s desire to acquire further skills to evoke that positive pleasure response. Awareness of making progress is a powerful cue that activates the brain’s perseverance even after setbacks, failures, and extraordinary challenges.

Source: russellhemmings used with permission

Frequent recognition of their progress en route to their goals will help them sustain their effort. This progress awareness builds their abilities to recognize that their effort is correlated to their progress—their perseverance and motivated effort are boosted.

Employ systems for helping teens recognize positive goal progress.

Remind them of their previous goal progress—such as learning to ride a bike, use the keyboard, play an instrument, or build skills in a sport. Have them recall that even before they reached their goal, they were aware they were making progress and that sustained their effort despite setbacks or mistakes. Invite (and explain) how they could use those successes to boost motivation and positive expectations for new challenges as they achieve their goals.

Ask your teens how they will recognize progress on the personal goals they defined for the unit or assignment. Guide them to evaluate if their goals are reasonable and manageable and how they will assess their progress.

For example:

• If the goal is to read a 200-page book in a month, they can write down, on a calendar or chart, which ten pages they will read on each of 20 days during the month. They will recognize progress by marking off each segment of reading as they complete it.
• If the goal is memorizing 30 geometry theorems (or names of rivers, mountain ranges, causes of war, or formulas for math or physics), they can create a bar graph, like a thermometer. In this visual model, they then break down the task into segments. In the example of 30 items to memorize, they can have segments of five. They fill in sections of the bar every time they add five successful memorizations on the way to 30. As they reach each progressive mark (and color in the achieved segments), they give their brains the positive pleasure reward response to their evidence of progress.
• Encourage them to write sub-goals they will need to achieve on the way and to periodically assess and modify their plans or actions accordingly.
• Converse with them about how they can obtain help when blocked: e.g., using resources like classmates, a teacher, or a librarian.
• Self-corrected practice tests are opportunities for teens to judge their level of understanding and revise or reinforce their knowledge as needed.
• Effort-to-progress graphs: A variety of effort-to-progress graphs can be downloaded from the Internet. When these are filled in by your teens, and they record evidence of their incremental goal progress, they see the impact of their effort on their progress.

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The opportunities you provide to guide teens to build their motivation, effort, and perseverance can help build their capacity as independent learners. Enhancing their interest, curiosity, positive expectations, and awareness of goal-achieving progress will help sustain their motivated effort during the school years and future ongoing opportunities awaiting them.