7 Tips for Motivating Elementary School Kids During Distance Learning

Hi everyone! Thank you for joining today on our webinar on seven tips for motivating elementary school kids during distance learning. Now the tips we'll be sharing today are tailored to this moment, but they're really applicable more broadly as needed. I'm Dan Tu, and I'll be kicking us off today as well as moderating the Q and A segment.

But before we get started, we want to say a special thank you to several organizations who have really helped us with philanthropic support, enabling us to bring you programming like today's session. So we want to say a special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis.

So I'd like to introduce you all to Kristen Deservo, who'll be walking through the seven tips and sharing her expert advice with you all while we answer your live questions. Kristin is our Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy and an expert in learning science. So if you have any questions on today's topic, feel free to enter them into the chat. We have a team collecting them for the Q and A portion, and all of this is going to be recorded and posted. Since you've registered, this will automatically be emailed to you, so don't worry if you miss anything or need to go back.

So with that, Kristin, take it away.

Great! Thanks, and thanks all of you for joining today. I'm gonna spend about 15 minutes or so going through some of the ideas and the research behind the tips, and then we'll open it up for questions, which I'm sure you all have lots of in this time.

So to start off with, as Dan said, I'm the Chief Learning Officer, and one of my roles is to bring research about learning motivation to our understanding of how to help students learn. So all of that that you'll see here is based on what we understand about motivation from research about how to keep kids motivated.

One of the first things to understand is that we can really boil down a lot of the research on motivation to a pretty simple formula. We like to do things when: first, we think we're going to be successful at them, and second, when we think there's some value to doing that activity.

Which probably makes sense for you just as much as it does for your kids. Who wants to do something when you think, "Oh, I'm probably going to fail at this"? You're not likely to do it. And second, you think you want to do things that are important to you.

So as we think about how to motivate our kids, we can think about, "How can I help them feel like they're likely to be successful?" and "How can I help them see some of the value in this activity?" This kind of simple formula drives a lot of the tips that I'm going to be talking about.

One of the biggest ways to help kids feel like they can be successful at doing something is to help them experience some success. One really good way to do that is to set goals because goals, by definition, help us see that we're making progress.

As you think about this with elementary-age kids, you want to set really short-term goals. So if you're talking kindergartners or first graders, it could be something as simple as, "Hey, this afternoon we're going to read this book together," or "We're going to write three sentences." What are those things that you want to work on? Just very short-term.

Then at the end, you can say, "Yes! Look, we said we were going to try to write three sentences; we wrote four sentences." There's an experience of success. As kids get a little older, you can stretch it out. You can think about, in the morning, setting goals for the day; you can think about maybe setting a longer, maybe a week goal that then you break down into daily goals.

The other piece when you're setting goals is to help kids think about how they're going to know if they're on track. So then one of the important pieces here in both goal setting and monitoring and making sure they're on track is to bring the kids into it.

Instead of you saying, "Our goal is this," have a conversation and say, "So we want to set a goal about writing sentences. How many sentences do you think you can write today?" So think about helping them set realistic goals, and that's then going to help them be able to also not just see success, but also they're going to value the activity more because they owned some of the goal-setting that went along with it.

So you get actually the double plus there of thinking about both success and value of the activity. So very strong, and that's why I encourage a lot of goal setting and thinking about how to do that. But then, when you meet them, definitely celebrate that success.

So this can be everything from high fives to thinking about small different things that kids like to do that they might find successful. We do everything online, from a little online confetti to all kinds of things that just recognize that there's an achievement there. Also, this can be a good time to reflect, "Hey, what was it that helped you be successful in meeting that goal?"

And, "Hey, was there a time when you were trying to do this that it was hard? And how did you get over that? How did you get through the place where you were stuck?" That kind of reflection helps them then think about, "Hey, next time they get stuck, what might be some strategies that they could do and work on?"

So definitely, tip two is to celebrate those successes. Then thinking about those roadblocks, think about how you can help your children have strategies for when they're going to get into that place where they don't know what to do.

And that's going to happen when you're learning because learning is hard, and when you're actually engaged in learning—in that you're your learning edge—right when you're learning new things, we know that often you need a little bit of help to get over that.

But what you want to do is help your kids to have a plan for what to do so they don't get frustrated in that moment. And before they get frustrated, you want to make the plan.

So this can be everything from asking you for help. If you're also working from home at the same time as your kids are in school, you might want to think about, "Okay, how do you signal to your kids when it's okay to come to you and ask for help and when they should wait?" What does that look like? Are there ways they can ask their friends for help? How do they reach out to their teacher in this kind of place?

What are they? So come up with a list of things that you might be able to work through to help your kids think about, "Hey, if I'm stuck, what are things I can do to get unstuck?" So you get, before they get to the place of frustration, they have strategies to use.

After that, think about emphasizing that effort leads to success. There's been a lot of writing recently about growth mindset and this idea that if you work hard, your brain is like a muscle, and the more you work at it, the more it's ready to learn new things.

There's actually physiology in your brain—the cells in your brain are called neurons, and when we learn new things, it makes new connections to new neurons. And that in itself then helps you remember the things that you've learned and makes you a stronger, better learner.

All of that is a better message, and research shows kids who understand and get some of that understanding of how their brain works actually do persist more than students who just say, "Hey, keep trying" or "Hey, keep going."

Actually, on Khan Academy, we have a growth mindset course where we have a couple of videos that explain some of this in language for kids to understand. That can be good to just, again, start thinking of those messages that your brain is like other muscles and it needs to keep practicing and keep learning new things, and that'll actually make you better and a better learner.

So that's the fourth tip—thinking about effort leading to success. The fifth one is to engage their curiosity. Lots of kids are curious about different things that happen in the world. It could be when they're riding their bikes and they're thinking, "How does pushing on this pedal actually make the wheels turn?" Any of those kinds of questions—it's okay if you don't know the answer! Think about how you can find out answers to those things together.

When we think about kids that are curious about the world, those are the kids that keep learning and keep trying to find new things. So you want to encourage those kinds of questions. You can also model asking those kinds of questions. So as you're doing things around the house or as you're doing things outside, ask questions about how the world works and think about, "Hey, did you ever wonder?"

And how can you find the answers to those? All of those help build up that internal motivation to find answers and understand the world.

The sixth tip I have is to establish relevance, so it relates to what I was just saying about linking things to the world. But the other way to do this is think about what your kids are learning and help them link that to things that are of interest to them.

You know your kids' interests better really than even their teachers do, so if you can think about how do I help them see how this relates to a hobby that they're interested in. How does this relate to something they want to be when they grow up? How does this relate to something we talked about yesterday?

All of those things help students establish the value of what they're learning. So when we go back to that equation, that second piece of "Why should I learn this?" "What is this going to help me do?" "How does this relate to things I'm interested in?" If you can help make those connections, kids will value the activity more and be more likely to want to engage in it.

Finally, the seventh tip—I hear lots of concerns, and we get lots of questions about should I use rewards. I don't want to be bribing my student to work. And I would say rewards are absolutely a part of what we do and how we reward ourselves.

Even those of us who are successful and are good students have tricks to keep ourselves motivated. I often say and do when I'm writing, I will say, "If I write one page here, I'll reward myself with a piece of chocolate."

You know, all of that is fine. But you want to think about how to do this wisely. So the danger of rewards is sometimes that if a kid is already interested in doing something—like it's already bringing them happiness and joy—and you start rewarding it with external things like candy and those kinds of things, they start to lose actually some of their internal motivation and start thinking, "Oh, I'm just doing this for the reward." So that's what we want to avoid.

But rewards can be really good for things that students just don't want to do at all but need a little bit of a kickstart to get going, and then maybe experience some of the success, experience meeting a goal in it to get from thinking about how we can use those extrinsic rewards to getting to more of those intrinsic, "Oh, actually I am good at this, I can learn math."

Those extrinsic rewards are really good at that, and they don't have to be things. They can be picking what's for dinner, they can be picking what TV show you watch, spending another 15 minutes of screen time, taking a walk with you, having some of your time individually—all of those things are good rewards.

It's also good to ask your kids what's rewarding to them. What would they like to be rewards for things that meeting goals and making progress? That way, again, you're making sure you've got something that's meaningful to them and helping them learn how to think about rewarding themselves when they need to get a little extra kick to get something done—to be able to think about how to use rewards wisely for themselves.

So that said, that gives us our seven tips: thinking about setting goals and monitoring progress, celebrating success, helping your kids manage those roadblocks, emphasizing that effort leads to success, encouraging curiosity, establishing relevance, and using rewards wisely.

So with that, I'm going to open it up because I'm sure there are specific questions that you have about your situations and how to deal with some of the specifics that you're facing. So I would be glad to hear some of those.

Dan: Yeah, so before we get to that, just a couple of things that we'd all ask you to do. First, there's in the handout section of the webinar you can download a printable version of these seven tips that's available in the download section. Again, if you registered and you're actually watching this live now, once this video, this webinar is over, you'll get an email with a recording of this webinar as well as a link to the downloadable.

So again, if you want to go back and both watch any of the tips in particular or read about them, that'll be available to you. And then secondly, go ahead and start putting in any of the questions you have. Even specific examples would be great, and we'll try to get through as many of them as possible.

So with that, Kristin, the first question we have is from Rebecca, and I think you mentioned this in terms of tip. I believe it's tip number six—how can you help kids feel like what they're learning in school and what they do is really relevant to their lives?

Kristin: So the biggest thing here is to think about understanding what is interesting to your kids. So what are things that they're interested in? Is the first piece and then relating things to them.

The most common place we hear this is in math. And so there are some things that are pretty easy to relate to math. For example, cooking. Cooking, it turns out, involves a lot of math—specifically a lot of fractions. If you're doing a double batch, how do you think about doubling a fraction? What does that look like?

Thinking about how those things that they're doing apply to their daily life—so cooking is always a good example for a lot of math issues. There are also things that you can think about. What do they want to be when they grow up? Maybe they don't know. That's okay too.

You can think about what kinds of careers are these skills they're learning good for. So, "Hey, these are the kinds of things. I know we don't know what you want to be when you grow up. You haven't decided what you want to be wrong, but it's a good idea to kind of experience a bunch of different things and find out about a bunch of different possibilities."

So, "Hey, this thing that we're learning now, it turns out, this is something that accountants use a lot." Or, "This is something that someone who's doing a lot of oceanography learns a lot about these topics that you're learning about in science today."

Thinking about those career paths that link to the different things that they're learning is another way to bring some of this to life. And I would also not hesitate to reach out to your kids' teachers for help in thinking about, "Hey, can you give us a preview of what's coming, and what do you think are good ways to help them relate that to things they see in their lives?"

But there's lots of things in our everyday lives. I gave the bicycle example. Well, it turns out that's all about simple machines and pulleys and chains and all of that. So all of those kinds of examples of how the world works—we can find things that kids are learning that relate to them, but it takes some work, I will admit.

Dan: That's great, Kristin. I would say like one thing as well is use all of your senses as a parent. There are things that the child might not tell you that they want to do, so you know your child best. If you know that they love doing this activity, just be observant of that and try to relate that back to that again, back to the subject.

Kristin: Cool! So Kristin, we have a question from Jay. Tinder, apologies if I mispronounced the name. Any tips for helping motivate elementary kids transitioning to middle school in a distance learning environment?

So really that transition period, meeting new friends, those types of things. So any advice you have there?

Kristin: So there's a number of things that go on when kids transition to middle school. So you mentioned, Dan, meeting new friends. There's also kids taking on and required to take on a little bit more ownership and a little bit more self-responsibility.

If—and when we talk about distance learning, one of the things we know about distance learning is that kids who are best at it are kids who are what we call self-regulated learners. So those are kids that are actually capable of setting goals, capable of monitoring their own progress—kids that can create, you know, organize schedules for themselves.

Those are all skills that you can help your child with. So think about helping them set up, "What is their schedule for the day?" Because the other piece that often happens in middle school is you start switching teachers, whereas in elementary school you just had one; now, you have multiple teachers.

So help your child think about how do they set out a schedule of what the day looks like so they make sure to know what the expectations are. Help them think about—and let them be part of the process! Let them, you know, you can maybe give them a skeleton and let them fill it out. And next time, they create what the schedule looks like.

So kind of gradually pulling back from the things that you're doing and letting them have some ownership and some agency. It turns out that a lot of kids are really motivated by that if they know that you've kind of got them there as a safety net and that you're there to kind of catch them if things get too rough.

So I would say give them a little bit more agency; they're going to then find more ownership and value in the activities because they're driving them and choosing them.

And help them see that and take on a little bit more of that ownership. Dan, you mentioned the pieces about making new friends, and often middle schools are bringing together a bunch of elementary schools, and now that we're at distance, it's so difficult to create some of those peer connections.

As peers start to become more and more important for kids at this age level, the more you can help facilitate things in this distance environment. We're really limited, but facilitating calls or hangouts, ways for kids to informally connect with each other, and being able to do some activities together online that maybe they wouldn't be able to do in person these days—to help keep some of those peer relationships going and to try to build them in these new places.

But understand, the other piece you may just do is to empathize with your kids and say, "I know this is tough right now, and this is going to be difficult as we're moving forward. I know you miss your friends." Let them, you know, just give them a chance to share with you and to express some of what they're feeling too as they're kind of making some of these transitions.

Dan: Yeah, I think that's a great point, Kristin. Great points! I think when you transition to middle school, not only do you have more teachers that you have to control your schedules more, you know which classrooms you're going to when, so you're learning a lot of like agency and being responsible.

You're meeting, like you said, tons of new kids from different schools and different experiences at the same time, so I do think there's a lot of challenges for those kids.

Kristin: Absolutely! And if you can pinpoint which things your kid is good at and highlight those, and find out where some of the weaknesses are and help support those, that's a good way for you to help support them and tailor it to what their needs are.

So we have a question from Dora. I think we hear this question a lot is, "How do you manage roadblocks?" So when your child has self-doubt or developing low self-esteem, especially in this distance learning environment—how do you manage those and help the child overcome those moments?

Kristin: Yeah, so kids who are not feeling like they're learners or they're feeling like math is not for me, I'm not good at these things, I don't know how to do this—those are things where kids can really benefit from things like the growth mindset piece that I was talking about.

This idea that none of us is fixed in our ability to do things; we can always get better, and getting better takes work. But it's actually pretty rewarding when you start to see, "Hey, I used to be able to do this, and now I can do this."

"Here's a new thing that I can do now that I couldn't do before." So one, give them the messages about thinking about we can always improve. Our brains improve; our brains change as we try new things. That's really important.

But also thinking about helping them experience some success—so those small goals and thinking about how to get them to exceed a little bit of progress that they're making. And even a little bit of progress is good!

Yesterday, you couldn't do the two-digit minus two-digit problems, and today you did three of them. That's great! Like, legitimately, that's progress. That's very good. So helping them see, again, that they can have a little bit of success, and that really does build on itself and help kids start to see themselves as learners.

That's really the key that then will kick things off.

Dan: Great! So Kristin, we have a lot of questions, and it goes back to the very first tip, which is setting goals. So we have a couple of questions around goals. First, from Tsuki: she loves the idea of setting goals, but they're already being set by the school.

So there's, you know, how do you match what the goals that your schools are setting? Another question from Flavia Fabio is, "How do we know we're setting goals at the appropriate level?"

Is it, you know, whether it's too challenging, not challenging enough? And then the third is from Ev, who's asking for very specific examples for their grade school kid. They're having challenges with getting their child to help set their own goals.

Kristin: Got it! Yeah, lots of good stuff. So the first thing I would say that underlies all of those is think about talking to your child's teacher. Even in this distance world, keeping those lines of communication open.

If a teacher starts hearing, "All of the things that you're asking us to do every day is too much! The kids can't handle that much," they're gonna adjust what they're doing, or they're gonna start to find ways to help the students and provide more support—one or the other.

But if the teacher doesn't know that the kids are struggling to do this, and it can be difficult to know that when they are in a distance learning situation, then they don't know that the kids need extra help or that they need to think about how much they're putting on kids.

Because a lot of teachers may have tons of experience doing all of this in the regular classroom, but it's not clear how much kids can take on in these distance learning situations. So that's my first piece of advice is to think about how to talk to your teacher about the goals—if the goals are too much or if they're not meeting them or where they need to go.

And Dan, I have lost—there were a bunch of questions there, and I've lost my short-term memory a couple of the other points. Could you remind me of what those are?

Dan: Sure! So the other one is how do we know when it's like the right level of goal for the child in addition to the first one? And then I think the third one was how do you get your kids to kind of play in the goal-setting if your kids are reluctant to kind of engage with the goal-setting exercise?

Kristin: Great! Yeah, so the level of goals is another one to it's really good to talk to your student's teacher about what kinds of levels that they're at because it is going to be individual for kids.

But what it should be is something that you're looking for—you want kids to, if you're observing them do work, you want to think about there's something where they have to put in effort, and there's something that we talk about that's called productive struggle.

It means that kids are having to put in some cognitive effort, like thinking hard about this and reasoning through it—and it's not just coming easy to them. If it's coming really easy, it's probably too low a goal. If they're getting really frustrated, it's probably too high a goal.

So something kind of in between there is what you're looking to hit—where there's a little bit of struggle going on; maybe they're a little bit confused; maybe they're not sure how to do this; maybe they need a little bit of help.

That is all okay. Those are all signs that they're right about at the right place. They don't need to be doing it independently, but if they can just breeze through it independently, it's probably too easy.

So that's kind of what you're looking for in terms of where to set, what that is. But a good guide is looking at the things that your teachers—your child's teacher—is assigning and thinking about how you can help break that down.

The other piece to that first question was, you know, it seems to be too much that's being assigned. Again, think about breaking down into small pieces so you can see a little bit of progress. Even after an hour, what are we going to try to do in this hour?

I know it's a whole bunch of stuff! Let's just focus on the thing we can get done now, and then we can worry about the rest of it later. So all of that is good goal setting.

And then if you've got kids that are just like are not engaging and are not that good at setting goals, we can think about, again, the idea of rewards.

And thinking about how engaging them and maybe if you're initially setting a goal and then having them in the conversation about what they think maybe would be a good reward for getting into that and getting reaching that goal.

So all of that can kind of help bring them into the process and what that is. So maybe they're not interested in setting the goal the first time, but then you can think about what's the reward for that.

Or you can think about rewards for helping set goals, getting very kind of meta there, but that again rewards can be good for helping kids start doing something that they're not interested in doing.

Kristin: So think about, "Hey, let's set this goal, and then we can go and you know chase around in the backyard with a dog for 30 minutes, and then we can get back to work on meeting it!" Those kinds of things, you know, are all good ways to start to encourage that behavior.

Dan: That's great! And we have a question, we have a couple of questions around feedback and that portion of the tips. So Rebecca asks, "What type of feedback is most helpful for kids? Does it depend on the stage of where they're learning?"

So things like the frequency of the feedback, the timing, when to acknowledge, you know, basically effort versus results, things like that.

Kristin: Yep, yep! Oh, good, excellent questions! This is actually some place where there's a pretty good amount of research out there.

So when you're just learning a new thing, you want to give immediate feedback that is both about whether it's correct or not, but also why it's correct or not. So that's called what we call elaborated feedback because it's not just the correctness, but it's the why.

And so you want that to be specific to the task that they're doing. You don't want to give that general feedback like, "Oh, you're so smart." You want to keep it as, "You got that question right! Good job! That question—that answer is right because x, y, z."

Or, "You didn't get that one right that time. That answer is not correct because of x, y, z. Let's try again." Again, don't make it about characteristics of the child.

You want to think about trying to give feedback—so feedback on correctness and about why it's correct or not is good. And you can also then combine that with feedback about effort.

So something like, "Wow, if you're seeing that productive struggle that I was talking about—like they worked pretty hard to get to this answer—like, 'Wow, I saw you really thinking hard about that! That's great! Let's take a look at whether we got it right or wrong or whether we want to try again.'"

And then you can move into the correctness feedback. As kids are more advanced and they're getting into more advanced topics and are kind of more comfortable with things, it's actually good to have them have a chance to reflect on whether they think something's correct or not.

So we do things like saying, "How confident are you in that answer? How sure are you that that's right?" and get them to actually start building some of those skills where they're kind of mentally checking their own work, which is a good skill to have and think about.

Then give them the feedback—it can be a little bit more delayed. It doesn't need to be quite as immediate as kids are getting a little bit more advanced.

Dan: So perhaps we have time for one more question. Unfortunately, we have a lot more questions than we have time for. So we'll try to, you know, potentially address it in a future webinar, but Melissa asks, and it's a little bit related to feedback, which is when should you step back and allow a break if your child is just really reluctant or really frustrated?

How do you recognize that? And then when do you actually engage or when do you disengage?

Kristin: Yeah, excellent question! So first, I would say we want to prioritize our kids' emotional well-being in all of this.

We don't want to let kids get to the point where they're, you know, breaking down in tears about things, because that's going to take a lot to then walk back and get settled—and where that is.

So the more you can be proactive in scheduling in breaks and taking a step away even before they're showing signs of being upset, those are—that's actually good too.

So don't be hesitant to take breaks. Breaks are good for everybody! But if you kind of gotten through there but your child is still like really frustrated, absolutely take a break. See, go back to those strategies—okay, you know, let's take a break, do something else.

And then when it's time to go back, have a little bit of discussion about what's really frustrating them? What is where is that roadblock? Is that they don't know what to do next? They can't get this right? They can't understand it? You know, then you can start to problem-solve about okay.

If you understand what it is that's so frustrating, it's just too much that they're thinking about? Are they worried about all the other things going on in the world? Where are those things?

So the more you can have a conversation, take a break, get away from it, then have a conversation about how are they feeling, what are the things that are they're worried about, what are the things that are frustrating them, and see if you can problem-solve some of those together.

But absolutely, look for those body language signs that kids are getting really upset and frustrated and try to cut things off if you can before it gets too far down that road.

Dan: Well, I think that's great advice for adults as much as kids. I think that's good advice for us all to follow as well.

So, huge apologies! We have so many more questions. Like I said, perhaps we can tackle more in a future webinar. But with that, I'd like to thank Kristin for sharing her expert advice with our audience.

And we want to thank you, our audience, for taking time out of your busy schedule to be with us. We know you're incredibly busy during this time, and so we really appreciate you investing your time in this session.

If you missed anything or want to go back and review again, this is being recorded, and not only are we going to post it, but for those of you who have registered, this will automatically be emailed to you in addition to that, as well as the downloadable with the seven tips that Kristin mentioned before.

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