• Disengaged: Not engaged or involved, especially in an activity or task.
• Metacognition: The awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.
• Initiative: The ability to take charge and make decisions independently.
• Perseverance: Persistence in doing something despite difficulties or obstacles.
• Apathy: Lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.
• Self-advocacy: The ability to express one’s own needs and advocate for oneself.
• Generative AI: Artificial intelligence capable of creating new content or solutions.
• Dichotomy: A division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.
• Scaffolding: Providing support and guidance to help someone learn or achieve a goal.
• Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.
• Morally neutral: Lacking any inherent moral quality or judgment.
• Baggage: Emotional issues or negative experiences that affect a person’s present behavior or attitudes.
• Cajoling: Persuading someone to do something through sustained coaxing or flattery.
• Nagging: Persistently annoying or finding fault with someone in an irritating way.
• Sage on the stage: Traditional teaching approach where the teacher is the primary source of knowledge and instruction.
• Guide on the side: A teaching approach where the teacher facilitates learning rather than being the primary source of information.
• Hypocritical: Behaving in a way that contradicts one’s stated beliefs or feelings.
• Zone of Proximal Development: A concept in educational psychology referring to the range of tasks that a learner can perform with the help of a more knowledgeable person.
• Vygotsky’s research: Refers to the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist, known for his theories on cognitive development, particularly the Zone of Proximal Development.

welcome to episode 293 of Angela Watson’s truth for Teachers. I’m your host, Angela Watson, and I’m here to speak encouragement into the hearts of educators and get you informed and energized for the week ahead. Today I’m talking about what to do when students don’t want to think for themselves or put in effort. You can visit truthforteachers.com for an easy to read, easy to share version of this podcast episode. If your students are disengaged in learning and unmotivated in class, join me for a free online training. There’s one for middle school teachers and one for high school teachers. In each online training, I’ll share specific principles for students to manage time and attention and develop metacognition, initiative, perseverance, and more, along with strategies that you can use to introduce these concepts to students in a way that actually sticks. Learn more@findingflowsolutions.com a replay link is sent to everyone who registers for the free online training so you can benefit even if you miss the live event. It’s findingflowsolutions.com. Today I’m talking about those students who don’t want to think for themselves and put in effort. And I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referencing, like when you give open ended creative assignments or you’re trying to do project based learning with your class, these are the kids who say, can’t you just tell me what you want me to do? Can’t you just give me the answer? This seems to be a growing problem from what teachers have been telling me and from what I have observed myself as I travel around the country to different schools conducting workshops, teachers are definitely observing a lack of self advocacy among students. If kids don’t know what to do, rather than asking questions or seeking out more information, they may just sit there and do nothing if something’s challenging. A lot of them don’t seem to be interested in improving their skills or learning for the sake of learning. They just give up, and it seems like they don’t want to put effort in. So maybe you’ve seen those behaviors with your students as well. Or just notice this general sense of apathy and lack of ambition or goals. And in response to this, many teachers feel like they have to work harder than their students are working. They have to keep going the extra mile to make lessons personalized and engaging and put all these additional supports and interventions in place to help students be successful. All while many of their students are doing the absolute bare minimum I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years exploring this phenomenon and why it’s becoming more and more common. And in fact, you’ll hear some great guests this season on the podcast, including Dr. Jean Twange, talking about the mental state of young people and some of the root causes of the behaviors we’re commonly seen. The more that I learn about student disengagement, the more I am convinced that the solution is not to put the onus on teachers to make their lessons more engaging and personalized. I do think that this is a helpful approach, and I also think that generative AI can be a good tool for individualized support to make instruction more relevant for kids and easier on the teacher. But even with AI, the true problems are still there, right? An amazing lesson isn’t going to get through to a kid who is not willing to engage in any mental effort. I believe the way to address student disengagement and apathy is by addressing it directly with students, opening up honest conversations about it, and experimenting together with a wide variety of approaches so kids can pick and choose what works for them. Because here’s the piece that I think is often missed in these conversations. The adverse reactions to hard work are common among adults, too. Let’s face it, there are many days in which you only get up and go to work because you have to. You can’t afford to lose your job and your paycheck. Well, students aren’t getting paid, so they don’t have that motivation. What if we acknowledge that life involves doing things that you don’t feel like doing and you don’t have to just suck it up? There are strategies you can use to make those tasks feel easier and more enjoyable. You can find ways to make a task more interesting for yourself. If you think it’s boring, you can create things for yourself to look forward to. You can adjust the way you use your time so that you have more energy and you feel like you’re actually getting to enjoy the things that mean something to you? Because right now, I think a lot of preteens and teens especially have a dichotomy in their heads. They think it’s either work hard and hate your boring life or do as little as you possibly can to skate by and just soak up as many experiences and pleasure and do whatever you feel like in that moment. I think there’s a very rich middle grounds there that we can explore alongside students. What would it look like to work hard and actually get enjoyment and satisfaction from that work? Which things are worth the effort these are questions that a lot of people, much less young people, have never really considered for themselves. And that’s at the heart of what I’m doing with my curriculum line, finding flow solutions. I want you to have tools that help students push themselves through difficult tasks rather than relying on you to do it. Teaching kids to understand themselves is even more powerful than the teacher working to understand them, because there’s no way you’re going to get to know all of your students, particularly if you teach multiple classes at the secondary level. It’s very difficult for the teacher and disempowering in some ways for the kids to have to rely on an adult to tell them what is special about them or what they’ve done well, or to be constantly giving them feedback about what they’re doing. And I think with younger kids particularly, you can find they get very addicted to that kind of feedback. Everything becomes, look at me, look at me, look what I can do. And the counterbalance to that is to help them notice things about themselves and to understand what works best for them and what helps them thrive. So let’s talk about what that looks like. I would love to see all students have a basic understanding of metacognition, that is, thinking about your thinking neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change and grow, and strategies for taking initiative when they don’t feel like it, persevering through difficult tasks. And those kinds of topics are really my focus in finding flow for elementary and middle school. And that foundation provides the scaffolding for high schoolers to then learn specific strategies for managing their time, energy, and focused attention. What ties it all together for me is talking about productivity, that is doing tasks that matter in the most effective, efficient, and enjoyable way possible. That’s the way I think about productivity. Talking about that with students through the lens of a giant experiment, let’s see what works for different tasks, different personalities, different moods. Let’s have open and honest conversations about the challenges around it. You can model this by sharing your own challenges with productivity. So maybe you can say, I was really tired this morning. I really did not want to come in and teach today. But here’s what I did to get myself motivated. This is why I’m here today. This is what I did mentally. This is my physical actions that I took. These are the habits and routines I have in place that help me follow through. Or maybe you say something like, I really did not feel like grading those papers last night, but I knew I needed to get that feedback to you today. So here’s this little trick I use and then share something. Maybe you say I use the Pomodora method where I work for 20 minutes and then I take a break for five. And maybe that’s something that you could try tonight when you have homework. Give it a try. Work for 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, take a five minute break. Let me know tomorrow how that worked, because it really helped me when I was trying to get the energy together and try to really focus on grading your papers. Last night, I found that really motivated me because I knew I only had to do it for 20 minutes. And then once I had experienced success with those 20 minutes and taken a break, I was actually ready to go back in and do another 20 minutes session, see if that happens for you and let me know. So in this way, you’re presenting these topics to your students in a very casual way, just very matter of fact, because trying to get motivated and get work done is just part of the human experience. This is not you being immature, it’s not you being lazy, which is sometimes how I think we frame it for kids, right? Like, you just need to buckle down, get it down and grow up. Can’t get away with this In the real world. But in the real world, we do all still struggle with getting our work done, and kids benefit from knowing that. I certainly didn’t understand it as a student. I thought once I was out of high school and I didn’t have adults bossing me around all the time and making me do things that I didn’t want to do, that life would be great. I didn’t realize that I would then be responsible for making myself do things that I didn’t want to do. And in many ways, that’s harder. I was depending on my parents and teachers telling me what to do and when and how. And I didn’t know that figuring out how to fill that role myself would have such a steep learning curve. So kids need to experiment with strategies with this adult oversight while they’re young so that they have strategies for initiative and perseverance later on when they are doing these things for themselves. The struggle to concentrate and focus our attention is actually lifelong. It’s not something that is going to end when they get out of school. So these are really life skills, right? And I don’t see this problem getting better in society in general just because of technology and the way the world is changing. So what if we approach this as something that we are learning alongside our students, we are experimenting with alongside them, and there’s no judgment about it. This is a morally neutral thing, not being able to focus, not being able to complete tasks. It’s not a fault. We don’t need to load it down with all of this baggage and guilt and shame and cajoling and nagging. It’s a thing we all experience. We all have times where we’re just not motivated because we’re human. So what can we actually do? What things actually work? We can help kids build a toolbox of strategies that they can go to so that they have different options to choose from. Because the thing that I’ve learned in my own experiments with productivity is there’s not one thing that works for me all the time. Sometimes if I’m trying to motivate myself to get something done, I need to just tackle it first thing. Other times, if I try to dive into it too early in the morning, I’m not fully awake and I just don’t do a good job. Maybe I need to go for a walk first or have breakfast first or just kind of ease into my day. So thinking of these as different strategies for myself and I can pick and choose. I know some days it works well for me to get things done immediately. Sometimes I need a slower start to my morning, which one is going to work for me today? And that way I don’t get frustrated when I’m like, well, how come I can’t just get up every single day and start getting into work mode immediately? Because I’m human. I’m not going to feel the same every single day. And I don’t have to necessarily fight that. What I don’t want to do is just sort of coast along and do whatever I feel like, which is what I think a lot of people feel like is the opposite of that, right? Like we have to be very rigid and structured, or we could just kind of never really have a plan. So what I’m proposing here is having a toolbox of strategies, different things that work for you at different times that you can pick from so students can learn. Maybe this one approach works for a math assignment, and this other approach works better for me after lunch when I’m a little bit sleepy. And then maybe this other thing works at night when I need to finish up some homework and I’m just kind of tired and I really don’t feel like getting it done. We want them to have a variety of things that they can choose from. Teaching kids to notice what factors help them concentrate and what factors don’t help them concentrate is much better than the teacher trying to figure that out for each student and trying to provide those conditions. And that’s what I see happening in a lot of schools. The expectation is placed on teachers to figure out what every individual child needs and provide it. Not only is that impossible and unsustainable, but we really leave kids at a disservice because then they’re depending on adults to figure them out, to motivate them and to accommodate them. It’s not working, right. I think that’s pretty obvious to every teacher. This is not going to work, and it’s also not going to work to try to go back to this way of learning that we did decades ago, where we’re not personalizing or individualizing at all, where we’re expecting kids to just shut off their emotions at the door and just come in here and just focus and do what they’re told to do. That also doesn’t work. We need some kind of middle way. And one of the most impactful things that you can do with students is to hold regular informal discussions in which you present different strategies to students for concentration and motivation and give them opportunities to try those strategies and talk about it. It really is as simple as that. They can come back and say, this really works for me, or, I didn’t like that one at all. Please don’t suggest that one to me again. That is not for me. And then you don’t have to be the apathetic student whisperer, right? You don’t have to figure all this out on your own. Let the students experiment and let them tell you. And then you can also share your same things, your experimentations with them, and they can learn from your experiences. And you don’t have to master all of these strategies ahead of time. I think a lot of times adults are not teaching kids these kinds of productivity and mindset skills because we feel like we’re not really great at them ourselves. But this is an area in which we naturally get to be that guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage. I know that it’s hard sometimes to be in a position of learner because we feel more confident as teachers when we’re experts at the thing that we’re explaining to kids. But understanding how our brains work is something we’re all still learning. Neuroscientists are still learning new things all the time, and I hope to be learning about myself every single day of my life. I want to always be changing and growing and becoming a better version of me, and I want students to see that modeled for them. I want them to have that same kind of vision for their own lives. It can be really empowering for kids to see the teacher step into that role and say, I don’t have this all together either. I mess up with this all the time. I’m not quite sure where I want to be with it. I’m still trying different things out. We can model that for kids, rather than saying, this is the standard I expect. I expect you to always be on time. I expect you to always turn in everything on time. The reality is I’m late sometimes. Personally, I don’t meet every deadline. And the thing is, kids aren’t dumb. They know the adults in their lives don’t do everything that we tell kids to do, and it comes off as hypocritical. And that’s how we lose trust and respect, by trying to hold kids to a standard that we can’t even meet ourselves as adults. So instead we can teach them what to do when they’re going to be late and miss a deadline because it’s going to happen. How do they take responsibility for that? How do they handle the consequences? How do they reflect on what happened to ensure that they’re more timely in the future. These are the kinds of skills that kids need. And this is obviously much more difficult than just giving a zero for a late assignment and just telling them, oh, well, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, as is done in some schools, just giving kids endless chances over and over and over and over. So it’s almost impossible for them to fail. Either way, I think we’re doing kids a disservice. We need to acknowledge you will be late sometimes. You will miss deadlines sometimes. How do we handle that? How do we bounce back? Because this is a life skill. It’s not something specific just to school. In addition to this being more difficult than just giving that zero or just having like a redo policy in place with everything else that you’re trying to juggle as a teacher and with all of the other curriculum that you are expected to implement, having these kinds of conversations, having space in your mind and in your day to talk about these things and model them with kids can feel overwhelming. I know that. And that is exactly the point of finding flow in the curriculum. It’s all done for you. There’s no prep. So you literally just click through the 15 to 20 minutes slideshow that teaches the kids these ideas and it guides them through different activities to help them experiment. So all you have to do is just go through the lesson with them rather than having to prepare. How am I going to explain this? What am I going to say? How are kids going to practice this? It’s all done. There’s also a student journal that has activities that have students self reflect. So they do the 15 to 20 minutes whole class slideshow that has different activities and questions and games and things like that. And then they do some sort of like self reflection activity in the journal. So it really doesn’t take a whole lot of class time. And what I’ve done is created six units for high school and I’m finishing up the six units for middle school. More than half of them are out now. There’s a couple more that will be done by the of March. Elementary resources will start releasing this spring. Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about you. My process with making these resources really has been sort of backwards design. I thought about the end goal for students who are graduating high school Do they need to know? What do they need to be able to do? And I created those resources first and then I worked backward from there. What needs to happen in middle school to prepare them for those lessons? And when middle school is finished in March, I’ll be asking myself what needs to happen in upper elementary to prepare them for middle and high school curriculum, and then what needs to happen in early elementary to get them there. That’s why I started with high school and we did a beta tester group for that. First, I got a lot of feedback from different educators who’ve tried it out in schools all over the country, even some internationally with lots of different demographics, so that I can see what’s working and what’s not. And as I said, I’ve also been traveling around to schools and working with teachers on this and students and seeing the impact. It is amazing. It is so cool to see because I feel like this is something that is so needed and we need it in a really accessible way. So that’s what I’ve done. There are two free things that you can get if you’re interested in exploring, finding flow solutions and introducing this kind of classroom culture for your kids and talking about these things and really being honest about what’s going on and what our struggles are. The first thing that I’m offering is a free online training in February. There’s one for middle school teachers, one for high school teachers. Check the show notes for the dates and time as well as the link to register, or you can just go to findingflowsolutions.com. I’m going to be sending a replay link to everyone who registers. So if you miss it or maybe you’re not even hearing this podcast until after February, 2024 has already passed. No worries, the replay will be available and I’ll be doing more live trainings in the summer and fall of 2024. I thought about just making these on demand so you could watch them whenever, but there’s nothing like the energy of live interaction. And I just really love talking about these things with teachers and answering their questions about it and just seeing their reactions to the different slides. Like I actually go through some of the lessons that you’ll be teaching to students through the curriculum, and that engagement with teachers is just so energizing for me. So I really wanted to offer this live. If you can’t make it, that’s fine. Replay will also work. Those free trainings are designed to help you reimagine student engagement in your classroom to help you rethink what might be possible for your students. So I will walk you through the basic principles of the finding flow curriculum so you understand what kids learn, and you can start envisioning what kind of learning environment you want to create. The free training is about an hour, and I’ll spend about 30 minutes afterwards answering questions because I want you to feel confident about how the curriculum works and using it with your students. And even if you don’t purchase the curriculum, you will walk away with some really solid ideas for how to introduce these concepts to your students. So that’s one free thing you can get if you’re interested in exploring finding flow solutions. The second is to download a free unit and try it out with your kids. The first unit for middle school and for high school, both of them are called foundations of flow. It introduces students to the work of hungarian american researcher Mihai Cheeksent. Mihai Mihai discovered the state of flow. He’s the one who first coined that term, that state in which you’re so absorbed in a task that you just lose all sense of time. More recent research shows that aiming for a flow state for just a small portion of your workday or school day, like around 20% of the day, if you can achieve a flow state in just 20% of your day, that is motivating and enjoyable enough to help us push through the rest of the workday in which we’re doing more mundane or less enjoyable tasks. Being in a flow state is one of the peak human experiences, and the optimal way to experience a flow state is when you’re being challenged, when you’re attempting something that’s just beyond your comfort zone, but not so difficult that you’re struggling. And that’s also an ideal state for learning. Right? It ties to what we know about the zone of proximal development in Vogotsky’s research. So school really is an optimal place to experiment with flow states and help kids figure out what helps them find their flow. What things do we do in school that they find so engaging that they don’t want to stop when they’re supposed to be done? And it might just be one thing that they can think of. Particularly as kids get older in middle and high school, it can be more challenging for them to think of aspects of class that they really enjoy. But certainly everybody, I think, has had at least one experience in school where it was like, oh, man, do we have to stop now? So this is teaching kids to reflect back on that. What was I doing at that time? Was I working alone or with other people? What subject was it? Was I concentrating very hard? Was I writing? Was I drawing? Was I doing something with my hands? Was I standing? Was I sitting? When kids can figure it out for themselves, they can create more of those experiences and not have to rely on the teacher to personalize the lesson for them. They now have strategies for getting themselves hooked into the topic and pushing themselves through when things feel difficult or boring. So click the show notes for this episode or go to findingflowsolutions.com to get the free download. Foundations of flow this is the first middle or high school unit, your choice, and sign up for the free middle or high school training that I’m going to be doing in February. Your takeaway truth for the week ahead is a quote from Brian Tracy. He said, any goal can be achieved if you break it down into small enough parts. Teaching students how to focus and engage in learning can feel like an overwhelming and even impossible goal, but there are actually concrete steps and strategies that can get them there and they’re worth teaching. In fact, this can be the very thing that makes it possible for you to teach everything else. Have a great week. You can do this. And remember, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be worth it.