Photo credit: forbes.com
First, I want to express some gratitude for my students this week who showed immense commitment and focus to their goals to improve their well-being and quality of learning. Watching these clients drop their limiting beliefs about their challenges and bravely pick up the responsibility for finding the solutions really kept me going this week. Below are some resources and strategies I think you’ll also find useful.
Two of my clients who were struggling with motivation to do certain types of school had a breakthrough this week with the Fake It Till You Make It strategy. This is a concise article about when you should use this and when you should not, but basically the strategy for students struggling with procrastination is that you pretend as if you were someone who loves doing the thing you are avoiding. One of my students really got into the character of someone who found the book he just couldn’t get into totally fascinating and reported this week that he not only hit his page number goals that he had missed for weeks, but also remembered a lot more of what he read. Another student decided to be a math professor who was demonstrating how to do the homework for a class and has stopped putting it off until the last minute.
OK, I was shocked by the popularity of these “study with me” YouTube videos, and a little jealous that I didn’t think to make these myself. I found out about it in this really good article from the New York Times by the great Lisa Damour and one of my students uses it and loves it. It may be super helpful for students as we near the season of semester-end projects, papers and final exams. If nothing else, it’s a much better way to teach the Pomodoro study method for students who would rather learn by doing than by listening to an explanation. That, and the cats during the 5 minute breaks are pretty adorable.
Finally, since we’re on the subject of academic motivation, this thread by Latif Nassar is such a great model for inquiry-based, interdisciplinary learning – a great method for helping students out on the engagement front. It hooked me from the start with this: “If you, like me, are tired of horse-race-style reporting, and need to zoom out, I wanna tell you a story. It’s about an ancient force influencing the election.” Enjoy it for yourself or share with students as an example of academic inquiry.
If anything in this post was useful to you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to pass it along to any others who you think could use these ideas.