4 Ways to Guide Disengaged Students to Try Again

What do you do when a student has given up on school? Maybe they’ve decided school’s just not for them, or they’ve failed so many times that they believe it’s not even worth trying. Maybe they have responsibilities at home or a job that leaves them with little energy, or they just don’t see school as relevant to their goals. The reality is, we may not know the cause of a student’s disengagement, but our goal remains the same: help the student see school as worth their time and effort again.

It was tempting for me to try to do this by introducing more fun and exciting activities—upping the energy with a Gimkit or Blooket game, incorporating movement and brain breaks, or trying to create interesting projects. These helped, but they gave only a short-term boost—the student would disengage again when they were over.

I was a hamster on a wheel, and it was taking more and more time to create these activities that had shorter and shorter impacts.

What finally ended up succeeding for me was to really work to understand the brain and how motivation functions on a deep, sustained level. What I found is that, while the root causes of disengagement aren’t always within our control, the following approaches—in addition to fundamentals like supportive relationships and classroom routines—are effective, research-backed methods of helping disengaged students to reengage in their learning.

1. The Power of Small Wins

The most powerful question I’ve learned to ask about a student struggling to engage is, “When was their last win?” Some students have experienced so much failure that it just feels inevitable, so why even try?

The key to combat this is to provide alternative evidence to disrupt this narrative. While it’s tempting to simply tell a student, “You can do it!” phrases like that are devoid of meaning. What a student needs is actual evidence of success to help them believe that success is possible in the future. This is the well-researched power of self-efficacy.

I had a student who struggled in English 11, an intervention class. He had experienced a lot of failure in English classes previously. While we were studying the concept theme in literary texts, I created a simple Google Form activity that students could attempt as many times as they wanted until they got every question correct. This student took more attempts than most other students, but he finally got it. When I asked him why he had persevered for so long, he told me, “I never get to get 100 percent in school.” Many students simply need a win like this to help them decide to reengage, and in this student’s case, that reengagement carried him through the rest of the term.

The key is to provide opportunities for students to experience small but meaningful wins, so they begin to rebuild their belief in their own ability. You can meet one-on-one to discuss something a student did well (often called dialogic feedback, which can positively impact learning and engagement), or assign scaffolded reflection activities so that students see their growth over time, or, my personal favorite, highlight a strong aspect of a student’s work during peer review and ask their classmates to explain what made it successful. In general, well-designed peer review can have positive impacts on learning and engagement, and I found that the intentionality in having students identify strengths of their peers was especially beneficial in impacting the engagement and motivation of disengaged students.

2. Make Success Just Within Reach

For many runners in a race, the midway point feels daunting, maybe even hopeless, but as soon as the finish line is in sight, there’s a major boost in motivation to push through. This is the core of goal-gradient theory, which states that the closer we are to a goal, the stronger we feel the motivation to pursue it.

In the classroom, the goal-gradient theory can be a powerful, positive element of learning. While goal-setting is important, one of the issues for a student who is struggling is that an academic goal might feel so far away that it has very little motivational value. The key is to develop tiered goals—through learning progressions or other similar approaches—that break a lofty goal down into smaller, more manageable steps.

For example, if the overall goal for my ninth-grade English class is to analyze how character development impacts the theme of a text, I can break that goal down into steps defining protagonist, identifying static versus dynamic characters, and explaining an author’s methods of characterization to help all students achieve micro-goals that will lead them to success with the overall goal.

This can even be as simple as taking a worksheet of practice problems and cutting it into sections so that students finish a section, they bring it to you, and then they receive the next section. This not only utilizes the goal-gradient theory but also gives you space to provide immediate feedback to students.

3. Help Students Picture Themselves as Successful

My introduction to visualization (sometimes called imagery) came when a psychologist worked with a basketball team I was on in high school to help us picture ourselves winning the state title. The power of imagery in helping people achieve their goals has been documented quite thoroughly, and I can attest that as goofy as it may seem, even too-cool-for-school high school students will generally try it when you explain the rationale.

When I decided to test this out with my students, I approached it quite simply by asking them to pretend that they got their test back with 100 percent correct—while I don’t love using grades as a benchmark for success, it was something students understood. I asked them how they would feel, what movements they might make, what they would say, etc. The goal was to get them to picture it as clearly as possible.

Many students who are disengaged have a hard time imagining themselves succeeding. This activity guides them to really picture what success would feel like, and I had a number of students who had not been willing to try very hard on assessments give much more effort after doing this exercise.

4. Help Students See Content Relevance

Plenty of studies show an increase in students’ engagement, effort, and persistence when they see their learning as relevant. The onus of demonstrating relevance is often put on teachers’ shoulders, but students can do this for themselves: Research has found that it can be effective to have students write about how content is relevant to their lives, and activities in which teachers guide students to identify the relevance and value of the activity for themselves can also increase motivation and engagement.

This is an activity I love to do at the beginning of a unit. After introducing the content we’ll be covering, I provide time for students to write about how the content might connect to their lives. We often follow that with a classroom discussion based on the same prompt.

This approach also works as a one-on-one conversation with a specific student who is struggling to engage. I try to help the student identify how the content might be relevant to their life, utilizing what I know about them and their interests.

When you do these activities, it can be incredibly helpful to explain to students how they can use the strategies on their own to build their motivation capability, which is an individual’s ability to understand and regulate their own motivation. Instead of simply breaking a goal into chunks, for example, explain why you’re doing it and how students can do the same thing in other aspects of their lives. Helping students build their motivation capability—which involves activities that help students to independently identify value in goals, monitor and adjust their self-talk, and clarify connections between the current activity and their future—can have positive impacts within and outside the classroom.

Student engagement is impacted by many factors—many, or maybe even most, of which are outside of a teacher’s control. However, by focusing on what we can control and supporting students in seeing themselves as successful in the classroom, we can have a positive impact on the experience that each student has in our classroom.