The beginning of the school year is an exciting, engaging time focused on building relationships, creating classroom communities, and ensuring a sense of belonging and inspiration for students. Teachers explicitly implement Responsive Classroom, Love and Logic, PBIS, and other culture-building systems in the first six weeks of school to motivate and engage students.
The curriculum is generally a review of the previous year to ensure a shared starting point for new learning. For students, the focus on getting comfortable is, well… comfortable!
Student Decline in Late Fall
School years follow a pattern, and in the 10-month cycle, months two to three have the potential to bring out frustration and disengagement from students across various backgrounds. Why is this so common?
In addition to the natural elements like decreasing sunlight and memories of leisurely summer days being too far in the rear view, students are facing a curriculum that is more rigorous and an end point that is very, very far away. It is natural that not only do we see dips in student engagement, but in their self-efficacy as well.
Students may start to vocalize feelings about “not liking school” or “school being boring.” These two phrases are code for us as educators to know that something is hard, uncomfortable, or just nonpreferred for our learners.
While not everything at school or in life can be preferred, there are ways to strategically adjust our efforts to promote these learners from feeling unsuccessful and falling into a negative cycle that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Proactive Strategy: Family Engagement
Come late October and November, notable amounts of students report feeling “bored” to parents and caregivers, with complaints about having to go to school. This can alert parents to thinking there is a problem in the classroom, with the teacher, or with their child.
Using your school-wide communication systems to remind parents and caregivers that this is in fact a natural part of the student cycle is critical to establishing trust and strong partnerships with families. Helping families normalize this behavior will not only strengthen your partnership but even more importantly will help the child over the hump of this slump.
Positive communication early is another highly effective effort to strengthen family trust and engagement. Sending home positive emails, posting pictures of the learning activities happening in the classroom, and using other school-to-home communication to share the narrative of what is going well can both calm parents and equip them to support and combat their child’s negative self-talk at home.
Proactive Strategy: Goal Setting & Small Wins
Success breeds success! It’s human nature to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment. Create small, tangible opportunities that can be publicly celebrated for students who are vocalizing these frustrations. On the small scale, it can be earning a dance break or 10 minutes of extra time outside for completing all of their work in the morning.
On the larger scale, be sure your class has a positive behavior reward system that encourages all students to contribute to the rewards, like a Pom-Pom jar or other class wide reinforcement visual, which will in turn give students something positive to look forward to when it’s time for the big class reward.
Having a class routine for setting small, manageable goals like “WIN goals” (within one week) can help students start to feel more capable and more successful at school. Communicating small wins home to families can also make students feel encouraged to see school as a place where they receive positive attention and believe they are seen as successful, combating those negative self-efficacy feelings.
Reflective Strategy: Review Curriculum and Instruction
Behavior is a form of communication. Suppose a child is disengaging, showing frustration, or anything more significant. In that case, it is a sign that something is hard or uncomfortable for them, and often it is the curriculum.
Be sure you have good assessment data to review that can inform if you are delivering instruction that is appropriately rigorous or scaffolded to make sure all students feel challenged at their appropriate level. Consider “leveling down” or “leveling up” to see if behaviors dissipate and students begin to feel more enthusiastic again about themselves as learners.
Also, be sure your curriculum has been reviewed recently for relevancy and cultural responsiveness. Who would want to attend a learning experience every day that felt entirely unrelatable to them? Ensure that math problems use topics that interest them by brushing up on your Roblox knowledge and using it in a math problem if that’s what the kids like!
Engage students in preference assessments to learn about topics they are interested in and be sure those are infused into curriculum content where feasible to promote engagement as well.
The slump is real for students and teachers alike. The honeymoon is over, grade level work is more challenging, and we all may feel like the light at the end of the school year tunnel is dim. However, if we can proactively address this time of year by being mindful of this cyclical and predictable part of the year, we can propel students to feelings of self-efficacy and produce great outcomes for learners.
Including clinicians in your building if a student is making self-harm statements or increasing in their withdrawal to school activities is an important action step to take but be sure your school leadership team is aware if you are taking this next step for a child.
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