7 Tips for Motivating Students During Distance Learning

Hi everyone, this is Jeremy Shea from the Khan Academy. Thanks for taking time out of the first week of back to school, or the third week depending on where you are. Wherever you're coming from, we're super excited to have you with us this afternoon or this evening, and we're extremely lucky to have our Chief Learning Officer, Kristin, joining us to share with you some really powerful strategies for motivating your students, especially during this challenging moment.

Now, because Kristin is all about motivation and what the research shows to be best practices, she wants to make this session highly interactive as well. So please join us in the chat room at tlk.io/con, and I'll put that in the chat in a second. You can chat directly with Kristin, with me, and with your fellow educators across the country. Kristin will be asking some questions, and she'll take some questions for you at the end of the session as well.

So that being said, thank you again for joining tonight. I'm going to pass it over to Kristin to share with you seven awesome tips.

"Great, thanks Jeremy! And I will echo Jeremy's thanks to you for taking some time out of your busy schedule to chat with us today. I hope that you find the things that I have to share helpful. As Jeremy said, please do also chat with each other because I know we all learn from each other, and I'd love to hear your ideas as well in the chat.

So I'm going to start off by asking all of you to think about the last thing you decided to learn, like a new thing, a new skill, something new you decided to try to pick up. Think about why you decided to try to learn that. And if you don't mind sharing, you can head over to that chat and just tell us what it was and maybe, in a couple of words, why you decided to take on that new learning challenge.

And while you're doing that, I'll tell the little story of what I've recently decided to learn. So I decided to try to learn origami because I feel like I have terrible spatial skills. Like, I can follow the instructions—like fold here, fold here—but I don't really understand how it all comes together in the end to make a bird or a frog. So thinking about that, I said, 'Alright, here's the thing that I want to learn.'

So let's see, we've got some life drawing online, some balloon animals, tablets on how to use the tablet to draw on your computer—that sounds like a good applicable skill, yoga—that's a good one, siphoning water out of the pool. Oh, so cool! Looks like we have some good things that people are learning.

Part of the reason I wanted to tell the story of what I'm learning is also because, as we think about what motivates you to learn, we're going to come back to these ideas. But I also had an interesting reaction from my mom when I told her what I was going to learn. She said, 'Oh, I would never try to learn origami; I would be terrible at that.' And it turns out that that reaction of wanting to try something that you think you might be good at and not wanting to try things that you don't think you're going to be good at is one of the founding principles of motivation.

Over lots and lots of motivation research, we can kind of boil down motivation into some pretty simple equations. Basically, motivation is whether you expect you can be successful at something and how much you value the task. In education research jargon, they call this expectancy value theory, but really it just says we like to do things when we think we're going to be successful at them and there's some value to doing them.

As I go through the tips that we're going to talk about, they each kind of come back to this. So as you're thinking about your classrooms, as you're thinking about different ways to motivate students, you can think just about these two simple things: how can I help students expect that they will be able to do this—that if they try this, they can be successful at it? And how do you increase the value of the task for them? Those are the real pieces that we can kind of come back to for each of these things that I'm going to talk about.

So the first one and the first idea is to set goals together and monitor progress. Because you know what? It turns out nothing makes you feel like you'll be successful in the future like having been successful in the past, and a good way to really mark whether you're successful is by meeting a goal.

So there's a success piece in here, but one of the reasons that goals can be so powerful is because there's also a value piece, and that comes in the setting goals together. If the student has some input into what the goal is, that actually increases the value of the task; it increases their buy-in to the task as well. So it brings success and value—that's pretty powerful in that motivation equation piece of things.

Thinking about setting goals is important. It's important to think about how big those goals are. It turns out even for adults, long-term goals are pretty difficult to maintain all of that work towards them. We want to set short-term goals, and they can build towards a long-term goal, but even for our high schoolers, we want a specific goal probably not to be longer than a week in terms of what they're going to do, and we don't want to have too many of them. We want to really boil down to the key things that we want to focus on—what are those, together?

Then a couple pieces: one is we want to think about how are we going to see if we're on track? So how are we going to monitor our progress, whether that's each day or a couple times during the day? How are we going to know if we're on track to meet our goal?

The third thing to think about with goals is to give people a plan when they get stuck. The first time you get stuck and you're not able to think about, you know, 'I seem like I'm off track on my goal,' how do you get yourself back on track? Actually talking about a plan for what to do when you're stuck, particularly when we're talking about distance learning and the students potentially on their own trying to work through some problems—what should they do when they get stuck?

So, setting goals together and monitoring progress—that's a good piece. So when you think about that thing you just learned, think about what your goal might be. I know my goal in the origami is to be able to make one of those frogs that you can hit the back of and it jumps. We'll see if I get there, but that's what I'm currently working on for this week's goal.

So, setting goals, monitoring progress, and somewhat related to that is then celebrating success. So this idea of "Hey, you did it! That's great!" Getting that feeling of accomplishment is really important, but the other thing that this helps us do is reflect. It can give us a moment to stop and say, "That was awesome! Great!"

Also, are there things that—what did you do? Tell me where did you start and where are you now? Get them to see their own growth—that's really motivating to see. "Yeah, I did actually improve on that. I did get better." Then you can also ask questions like, "What helped you get there? What was good?" You can reflect on what didn't go so well—"What would be even better if next time you did this thing?" So, building in a little bit of time to reflect pays dividends down the road in terms of helping students feel like they have the tools to grow and progress on their own and build up their own sense of ownership over what they have.

But again, it comes back to feeling successful and feeling like they can be successful at what they’re doing. So that’s the second piece.

The third piece is thinking about working collaboratively. People in general, even those of us who are introverts, still like to have a feeling of belongingness. So if we can work together on something, we can work and each contribute something. Feeling like I'm contributing to a piece of this can actually raise the value of a task because we're working together on it.

I know in a lot of motivation language, it's tempting to think about things like leaderboards—like we can create a leaderboard and kids will be motivated to get to the top of the leaderboard. It turns out research tells us that those competitive kinds of situations aren't great for the kids who are often at the lower end of the achievement spectrum. So, coming in, you know, in the bottom half over and over and over again— that does a lot more to kind of crush students' spirits than it does to actually motivate them to do better.

So, as you're thinking about how to set up group activities, think about how you can do that to encourage peer interaction and everyone having a contribution to make towards a class goal, as opposed to thinking about individual competition between different members of the class. And again, this raises the value of the task because you're thinking, "I can move and I can collectively get to those spaces."

Alright, fourth tip: emphasize effort leads to success. So this is a big piece again about thinking whether you can be successful or not. There’s a lot of talk about growth mindset—it has kind of become a buzzword—but it's based on some sound research that says that a lot of students don't believe that if they work harder, they can be successful.

Having them think about how that happens isn't just about telling them they can be successful by working hard—good effort is not going to work by itself. What they have found is actually teaching students a little bit about how your brain works and how practice can actually change how your brain functions can, along with those kinds of messages, help students believe that hard work does lead to success.

If you're looking for a little bit of that information, I’m going to give a little plug here because there's actually on Khan Academy, a course called growth mindset. There are videos on there for elementary school students and high school students. I'm going to play a little snippet of a video that gets at this idea of how does your brain actually grow as you're learning new things.

So this is just a quick minute of that video: "When you struggle, your neurons are struggling too. And that's important because when neurons struggle, they lean on each other, they make connections, and they start to form this densely connected network inside your brain, allowing little jolts of electricity to pass down them more and more efficiently. That's thinking faster. That's your brain getting smarter. That's your brain muscle getting swole, kid! So the next time you say to yourself, 'I can’t do this, I’m just too dense,' remember that brain density is your friend. In fact, the denser you are, the more connections between Nelly and her neuron pals that you've got inside your brain, the stronger and more powerful your thinking parts become. The more you work through your frustrations with the right learning strategies, the more your neurons get more used to working together, the closer you are to being that much smarter."

Alright, I'm going to switch back to our presentation here.

So, what you saw there is that idea of helping students understand that it is the case that as you practice, as you learn more, your brain is actually changing. That’s what then is going to help you answer all of those questions and be able to solve those problems.

So it's a big piece that we can think about, again, not just praising effort, but helping students understand how it really does lead to them understanding and being able to do more things. So that’s a tip for number four.

Let me go to number five: relationships. So I talked a little bit about kind of peer relationships, but the other thing that's really important is, of course, your relationships with students. And I’m sure I’m not telling any of you anything new, but in this distance learning world, that can be really difficult to form.

So think about how at the beginning of this school year you usually start building relationships with your students. If you're in the chat room and want to type a couple of things that you've tried this year—if you are in distance learning—how you're trying to build relationships this year within a distance environment with your students.

So a couple of things we can do is, one is definitely think about how you are coming to know your students as people. Like, what are their interests? What are the things that they think about? What are the things they worry about? What are the things that make them happy? All of those pieces are important as we start to understand who our students are.

As students build relationships with you, they actually will be more willing to do the things you're asking because you're asking and they value their relationship with you. That relationship building pays off both in terms of just having good relationships with your students and also in terms of motivation.

I see the idea that Julia posted about being your genuine self, and that is part of relationship building—sharing a little bit of yourself too. Being your quirky self, or sharing a little bit that's different—all of that is important to make it a two-way street in the relationship of what you're doing.

So, I want to emphasize that that is so important. Think about if there are ways when you're doing a synchronous call that you don't just jump right into the content, but you have some time where you're getting to know your students and they're getting to know each other to help build those together.

Lots of things, like I see morning check-ins and all of those good ideas for helping to build those up. So that is number five: build relationships.

Number six: establish relevance. I know this is like one of the top ten most hated questions: 'When am I ever going to use this?' But it turns out that the value of the task is really related to how relevant it is to a student.

It doesn't mean that, yes, you're going to use this specific Pythagorean theorem in your future life, but think broadly about what students’ goals are. Think about how the things you're learning relate to maybe outside interests, maybe it's career goals, or maybe it's just related to something else they want to learn how to do.

Any way that you can make the things that they're learning relevant to the real world and applicable in the real world increases that value of the task to students. So it's really important to think about how they can connect what they're learning to their lives.

So that's an important piece. Do some thinking about it and be explicit about it when you're starting a lesson, or you're thinking about here's the objectives and here's how I make those objectives seem like they're going to be relevant to what my students care about. So that is number six.

And number seven: let's talk about rewards. Rewards are tricky to get right, but they can work. I know as an adult I reward myself when I do things. When I have to do a long writing task, I break it up and give myself a little piece of chocolate after I finish a little bit.

Lots of folks do it with all kinds of exercise apps, doing things where they reward themselves. People who do personal finance rewards after you save a certain amount of money—all those things work for a reason. We do like getting them.

The key is there's a couple of things in terms of the research about how to use rewards wisely. The first is you want to be careful because students that are already doing something because it's really interesting to them, if you start rewarding them too much for it, they start to think, 'Oh, I'm just doing this for the reward' instead of doing it because it's interesting to them.

So we don't want to kill that intrinsic internal motivation by giving external rewards. But there are good ways to use rewards that actually don't do that.

The first is, if you have students that you know aren't that interested, internal rewards can be a good way to get someone started; external rewards can be a good way to get someone started on something so that then they can experience that feeling of success.

The other things that are helpful with rewards is to sometimes make them surprising. Like, here's a little piece of joy for doing the thing that you just did. If they're not on a fixed schedule, it's more likely that they'll be effective—something that's surprising and different for them.

And the third piece is, don't make them big. They can be little things. Also, think about praise as the reward. Think about small little things that someone likes to do, and it goes back to this relationships piece about thinking about if you know your students, know what they care about, and you can think about a little bit more about what will be rewarding to them and what kinds of things are rewards.

But again, not big things. Little pieces do it sometimes unexpectedly and think about how we can build those together so that we start with some of these external rewards to build momentum towards more internal intrinsic feelings of reinforcement for doing what we want them to do.

So all of that said and done, here are the seven things we just talked about: setting goals and monitoring progress, celebrating success, working collaboratively, emphasizing effort leads to success, building relationships, establishing relevance, and using rewards wisely.

So with that, let's open it up for questions and thoughts. Jeremy's got the chat, and he's going to feed me in questions or comments or thoughts that might be interesting to talk about.

"Yeah, thank you so much, Kristin! You definitely sparked a great conversation in the chat room. If you want to join that, those links are in the chat. Come over to tlk.io/con. You can ask questions right there—you can ask questions and go to the webinar control panel—but you've got a rockstar researcher and a motivation expert at your disposal right here, so any questions, big or small, Kristin is happy to take them on."

"Okay, so we're going to start with a question from Sage. Sage says, 'Kristin, we've got some kids who are very hesitant to be on camera, which our administration is actually requiring this year. Any good tips to help encourage them in this very frightening environment?'"

"So a couple things. First, try to get little bit to the root cause there. What is it that they—what is making them hesitant? What is it that they're not sure of? In some cases, I've heard about, you know, that the issue is being nervous about showing their background. If they live someplace they're not real excited to show where they live and what that looks like.

Think about, you know, are there ways to either set up a towel against the wall, or use virtual backgrounds, depending on what your software allows? I think a piece of it is, is it that they don’t like how they look? Is that they don’t like the background? Depending on what the root cause is is probably going to depend on how you want to address what the issue is and how to encourage them for doing it.

It's probably not great to do a lot of commenting on people's videos and backgrounds unless they’re doing something explicitly fun to bring attention to it because that probably starts to create a comparison issue. You know, 'Oh, they have this really fun thing in the background and I don't have that'—those kinds of things.

So, with lots of things, if you can do anything to get at the root of what's kind of going on there, that might be helpful to figure out how to then think of a solution."

"Yeah, it definitely seems like spot-on advice, Kristin, because it seems like a lot of districts are trying to find ways to keep sessions interactive, but also respect students' privacy and all that. And Sage says that's super relevant in their district, so that's awesome.

Another question came in, and it said, 'Any suggestions?' This is from Julia: 'For what to do in the moment. So here you are, your third hour of Zoom, the student is starting to hit a wall. How do you bring that extra oomph of motivation right when you need it?'"

"Yeah, so I will suggest a little pre-planning. Some of the things I know for those of us that are on Zoom lots during the day—I’m on Zoom calls all the time—it helps just to stand up! Stand up and shake and get the wiggles out.

There’s a lot of—you know, just staring at that screen is difficult. So I would definitely suggest that. You know, let's all take a break. Let's everybody stand up; you can even lead a couple of those stretches, do some arm circles, do some toe touches, you know, get things going, and just take a quick break.

Honestly, as we're talking about screens, the recommendations from the eye doctors are that for every 20 minutes you're staring at a screen, you take a 20-second break and look at something 20 feet away. So it's the 20-20-20 rule, so that can be helpful too, just giving your brain a chance to check out.

The third thing that I will recommend is: we actually—again, Khan Academy—and Jeremy, maybe you can find the link to these and put them in the chat—we actually have a little piece of a section of cards that we call Refresh. The Refresh cards are just simple little questions that you can have students do. Thanks, Jeremy's putting those in the chat.

They just ask students questions like, 'If 2020 were a food, what would it be?' or, you know, 'Draw a picture of yourself in some crazy environment.' So all kinds of different things that can be just, again, a good break for the brain—doing something else, doing something a little bit different."

"Cool. We had actually asked that same question, 'What would 2020 look like in food form?' in one of our webinars a few weeks back. I would say teachers were very creative. Some people said it looked like haggis; it looked like spoiled potato salad, so definitely a good way to get teachers and students alike feeling motivated.

Okay, another quick question comes in here from Denise, and Denise says, 'One of the hardest things with distance learning is collaboration. You know, I used to break my students up into groups and have them work together, and that was awesome for building connections and also accelerating learning. How do we do that in this environment?'"

"This is going to depend on software and school policies because just glancing over at the chat, I see Denise saying her school doesn’t allow unsupervised Google Meet, so that makes things a lot more difficult.

I’ll give you the ideal answer, and then I'll do some other pieces. So lots of software, like Zoom, actually has breakout rooms and you can assign students to groups of three or four and have them get together, and you can actually drop in as the teacher to the different rooms at various times and see how they're doing and where those are. So that's kind of an ideal situation.

But, again, I know lots of you have issues with Zoom, there’s issues with district policies, and there’s issues with how to make that work. So that—if you’re thinking about where those are—if you don’t have access to that, here’s some other ideas.

One is, is there any software where they’re not looking at each other, and not, you know, not using video, but are collaborating on a document? Google Docs is an example of that, where, you know, they’re actually in the document writing and solving, you know, potentially writing together—everyone’s writing a section or putting a section together and working together on it. They can talk to each other in the potentially the chat, you know, piece of the Google Docs to coordinate back and forth of that work.

So there’s one thought of, you know, kind of how to get people working together on things. There’s the idea of having just a small group together with you, but that puts huge demands on your time to be able to do that. But it might be, depending again on your district policies, instead of doing two hours of the whole class, would it be worth breaking them into five groups and doing four sessions over that two hours? Again, district policies, I know!

So think about what are the solutions that you might be able to have to get around those kinds of things—being able to give all the students a problem again to work on together in some Google document or something like that, and then coming back as a whole and sharing the different solutions from the different groups—all kinds of different pieces to think about. But it’s going to depend a lot on what software you have and what kind of constraints you’re in with what your district can do.

If worse comes to worse, think about your whole group as you're trying to encourage at least collaboration among peers when you're all together in a whole group setting."

"Yeah, so hard to do right now, but it looks like Tammy and Dusty and Mary have had some great ideas: Nearpod, Padlet, Jamboard, Kami—so definitely explore those.

Larissa has a really interesting question, which is: 'Kristin, do you have any really practical how-to tools to help kids set goals and then monitor those on a weekly basis? I’ve always wanted to do this with my kids, but I’ve never found a practical way to do it, and it always seems so time-consuming, like so much follow-up is involved. How do I practically get this off the ground?'"

"Yes, so in thinking about goal-setting, one of the simple things to do is to—and you can find these all over the internet—but just to create a little template that says what do you want to accomplish in math this week? How will you do that? It helps them think about their plan. What will you do if you get stuck? And how will you know if you’re on track?

Just kind of giving them a simple, you know, four questions that they can answer gets at those important things about goal setting that they can work through. If you can have an individual conversation with one of them, that's great. Think about what you're doing: in that first setting, suggest some goals. Like, 'Hey, we want to think about a reading goal, and we want it to—you know, how much you’re going to read and what that looks like. So what do you think we should do?'

All of those pieces, I think could potentially be collaborative; you can provide a little bit of guidance for each of those questions. But a really simple template is the best thing that I've seen, and there's lots of examples kind of around the web of those kinds of just easy goal-setting templates."

"Great, so I think we’re at the bottom of the hour! I know it’s getting a little late on the East Coast, especially during those first few important weeks of school. But I want to thank you so much, Kristin, for sharing your expertise and wisdom tonight. Thank you!

Awesome, also to all the awesome educators out there across the country for joining and sharing your own expertise. This has been a super good demonstration of learning through collaboration.

So, wish you all tremendous success with the rest of the school year. And Kristin, as we end, any final words of wisdom? Any sort of things you want educators to be thinking about as they head into a tough school year?"

"I just want to first say thank you again to all of you, and that you are probably each other's best resource. So collaborate with each other and reach out to each other. We're here to help as we can."

"Wonderful! With that being said, here's wishing all a great evening, a great start to the school year, and tremendous success on the road ahead. Cheers, all!"