The Ultimate Back-to-School Guide for Virtual School Students
by Beth Werrell
byElizabeth Preston
7 min to readIn an ideal world, children would be excited and motivated to learn, and they’d jump at the chance to go to school each day. However, that’s not reality for many children, and about five percent of American students refuse to go to school.
Luckily, there are strategies to motivate disengaged students and reluctant learners, and there are strategies concerning how to deal with unresponsive students. To understand what strategy is best suited to a student, parents should first try to understand why their children have become reluctant learners.
Here are a few of the common reasons why students may become reluctant learners and some strategies to motivate and engage students.
Bullying is, unfortunately, not uncommon, and it can often result in feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression as well as low academic achievement. It can also cause students to become disengaged, skip school, and even refuse to go to school. Some signs of bullying include failing grades, the student consistently feeling sick (or feigning sickness to avoid school), a change in friendships, difficulty sleeping, the student withdrawing from friends and/or family, and unexplained injuries. If bullying is causing your student to refuse to go to school, try these possible strategies:
Some boredom in school is natural. However, excessive boredom may result in a student becoming disengaged, unmotivated, and unresponsive. It may also cause them not to want to go to school at all. This boredom may stem from the student not being challenged by the curriculum or not feeling that the material is meaningful. Unmotivated students suffering from boredom in school often find the love in learning when parents:
Students learn at different speeds and in diverse ways. If students feel like they are not understanding material as quickly as they think they should, then they may feel academically overwhelmed and become unresponsive. Here are some ways you can help:
Emotional and mental health problems could cause a child to become an unresponsive student or even refuse to go to school. Indeed, mental health issues are not uncommon among students. In fact, a 2021 Center for Disease Control (CDC) study found that 42% of student participants “felt persistently sad or hopeless,” and 29% of student participants “experienced poor mental health.”
Reluctant learners and students who refuse to go to school may be experiencing social anxiety, separation anxiety, depression,. You can help motivate reluctant learners with these strategies:
These strategies to motivate disengaged students and reluctant learners can help you and your student to address the root of their lack of motivation and their disengagement with school and to find a path forward so that school can be a positive and rewarding experience.