If you have chanced upon this blog article but you haven’t had the opportunity to read Parts 1 & 2 by the same name, then we strongly suggest that you begin there. If, however, you have understood the syndrome of ‘work refusal’, know what it can look like, what can cause it and what to avoid if faced with that situation, then read on!

This final article serves as the silver lining – it covers strategies, tips and techniques that we have tried, read about and heard from others as good practices. Note, that the suggested strategies should NOT be considered as a magic wand. They are meant to be support ideas, so treat them as interventions techniques that you can try in helping kids refusing to work, to and get them back on track! Bear in mind that they might take time to work or some may not work for a particular learner. There is no one-size-fits-all formula; it is all about finding what works best for you and your concerned learner.

Here’s what you CAN DO:

• … give them ‘wait’ time. When a student refuses to work at first, often times all they need is a little wait time. It’s okay to let them have their head down or keep their arms crossed, briefly. Give some time and wait to see if they come around within 5 minutes or so.
• … turn a blind eye to small misbehaviour. If a student crumples up the paper, breaks the pencil, or scribbles all over the paper, avoid the immediate desire to tell the student off or that they shouldn’t do that or give any further instructions. When things like this happen, the student is basically seeking attention with negative behaviour. One trick that will help in this instance is just giving space, letting them know they are there but not focusing on the behaviour.



• … continue teaching. Just because a student doesn’t have the pen/pencil in hand and is not taking notes or writing, doesn’t mean they’re not listening and learning. A good idea would be to continue teaching, talking, and even involving that student if they want to participate in the discussion.
• The ultimate goal is to educate the student, NOT force them to work. Our duty in the classroom is to offer opportunities for learning so we should just keep at it – with our plan.
• … focus on building ties and bonds. For many kids, relationship is everything. We could try putting the work aside for a bit and spending time with the ‘work-refusal’ student during lunch break, or talk with them after class, and really just get to know them. Tell them about you as a person, by sharing your challenging moments at their age. Once a bond is built between a teacher a child, many students have a much easier time working for that teacher, because they know the teacher cares. This isn’t a quick process, but it’s super important and worth the time and effort for their long-term success.



• … help them to understand the goal and how to proceed. Sometimes students refuse work due to social and emotional challenges, but other times it might be because they think the work is just too hard for them. Analyse the situation and see if the student needs guided, personalised assistance with reading, comprehension, writing, or math.

  Sometimes learners might even need step-by-step direction for executional functioning. You can help them get started and work through challenges. Where necessary, consider discussing the student with the Special Educator or School Counsellor to get some ideas and strategies.

• … apportion the larger tasks into smaller work packets. Another cool way to get students to work is to allow the student to choose the problems they will finish for a start OR which 1 question out of the 3 essay questions, they were ready to show us the next morning. Some of our colleagues did argue that this made life too easy for the students and it seemed unfair, when viewing the totality of the class deadline.



• … communicate with the student privately. When meeting with a student who is struggling to complete work, the most important thing is to just listen! Talk to the student, ask them what’s going on, and problem-solve about how you could help him/her. It is important that this personal meeting no be considered as a punitive measure.

  One could try with, “I noticed your morning work isn’t finished, where can I help you?” Try to avoid interrupting the child’s sharing with your own thoughts / point of view / assumption about what’s happening – just let the student first talk. In our experience, we were amazed with some of the responses we got – “… because of a seating arrangement next to a noisy classmate; … haven’t been getting any sleep at night due to a crying younger sibling; … failed to make it into the school sports team.” By being open-minded and by listening we were able to problem-solve with many students.

• … try logical consequences (prepare for them in advance). Logical consequences are outcomes from behaviour that make sense. For example, if a student is refusing to finish their morning work, a logical consequence would be using some break time later in the day to finish at least 3-4 questions or sending it home as homework to be done later.



• … prepare the student in advance with the consequences. Consequences shouldn’t be a surprise to the student. The students with work completion challenges must know ahead of time about consequences in a positive way, sans anger. We preferred to create this awareness with the whole class, by saying something like, “Everyone needs to finish their work so we can finish watching the rest of the Gandhi movie.”
• … try neutralising the moment. The difficult ‘won’t-work’ argumentative moment, can quickly become a power struggle when a student outwardly tells the teacher they are not doing the work. It is critical to know how to de-escalate a situation. Our time-tested strategy has been, “Let’s talk about this later.” It gave us the perfect way out of a heated situation with a student in class, while letting other students around know we were not ignoring the ill-behaviour; we had just planned on dealing with it later.
• … offer choices. For some students struggling with work completion, we explored offering limited choices for assignments – to a maximum of 2 choices to avoid making it confusing or overwhelming. This made the student feel s/he has control and choice. Here is an example, “Would you rather write the complete answer in pure text or would you like to draw a scene from the text and write a few sentences about it?” Isn’t the ultimate goal to get the student back to completing all the work? Without a doubt! When a student was outright refusing to do work, completing just one item over none was counted by us as a eureka success moment. We all have to start somewhere!



• … identify what makes the student tick. Another way was to go the extra mile of finding out topics the student enjoyed reading about, mulling over, working with and learning about. It could be any topic: cricket, go-karting, drawing, animals, garba time or dance, or even a certain television show. The topics and ideas were endless. Driven by our creative mind-set, we used bits of those realisations in our instruction to hook the learner and help him/her to feel more interested and start working.
• … think about patterns in work habits. Patterns are everywhere and they can make the seemingly invisible much more visible! We worked around finding out – Is the work refusal only happening during math? Or maybe during group work? Maybe it’s only in the pre-lunch hours or in the post-lunch session? By thinking about these patterns and really delving into the evidences, we were able to build an informed judgement about what was really going on and to handle it.
• … try to use a ‘push-start’ button for task initiation. Skills for task initiation are very much like a car starting up. When kids lack these skills to get started, it can be extremely frustrating for them, for us and for parents at home. Oftentimes, kids don’t actually know HOW to start a challenging task or assignment. One must be alert and aware that if such skills are lacking, we must push the start button by teaching them how to!



• … try giving a choice of different writing tools. This may sound crazy, but some kids get inspired when given options for what to write with. Tools such as gel pens or coloured pencils instead of just a plain old pencil / pen worked like magic. Sometimes, the freshness of a new eraser can help kids get over that road block of starting. It sure worked for us; you could give it a try.
• … provide some leeway. Giving leeway or accommodations doesn’t necessarily mean we are making an assignment easier; it just gave more options for how the student approached the task. So, you could try these:
  • Allow a student struggling with reading to listen to audio books.
  • If a student isn’t writing, allow them access to a laptop and type or complement their textual answers with visual art.
  • Give out a calculator to a student who gets fatigued with math problems (provided the math skill isn’t calculations themselves).
  • Give a word bank, provide multiple choices, let the student use manipulatives, and so on.
• … stretch accommodation into taking turns. Where necessary, another strategy in line with accommodation that one can try (when one really wishes to hand-hold and help), is to take turns writing and completing problems with the hesitant student. For example, one of us completed the first problem and wrote it in the student’s notebook. It helped us to think aloud while solving the problem, and this was the work-habit we wanted to see in the student. Then, we got the student to complete the second problem. Next, we tried completing only a few lines of the third problem and so on. This emerged as a more collaborative approach that eased some of the kids into working and finishing their assignments with independence.
• … give bite-sized breaks. Most kids need a break sometime. Consider adding a preferred activity right after an assignment you want your student to complete. Plan some meaningful brain break – say with a trick quiz question, or catching up on some world sports & games event (especially cricket, football and tennis).



• try an incentive plan, if needed. Yes, yes, we know incentive plans aren’t considered to be a good idea; and most educators refuse to use it as a strategy. We agree that they shouldn’t be used as a first strategy, but there is a time when they can help a struggling student work towards their goals.

  We even tried using a fun ‘work contract’ that detailed logically, what the student was responsible for and what incentives the student would get by completing the work. Such a work contract set the tone that we meant business, that we would stick by our word AND that we expected that the student made an effort to do the same. The trick is to find the sure-shot push button around the child’s interest area, remembering that each individual student is motivated by different things. You could also draw up a reward inventory with the student, so that s/he is motivated to earn the reward.

• … bring in the family. Sometimes we needed help from the parents. When we had to call in the family for the first time, we always believed in sharing something positive first. With that said, we then progressed into the areas of concerns about the ward and our observations on their challenges with work completion. One needs to be extremely mindful while communicating this with parents. Rather than saying, “Your child is refusing to work,” we preferred to tone it down with something like, “XX seems to be struggling with getting started even on assignments that are at his level.”

  Invite parents to walk the journey of their child’s learning as Partners in Education, and enquire if anything else is going on in the home or outside of home with the child. Often, parents are more than willing to talk about the concerns with their child and on many occasions, this fixes the concern. The rule is – both school and parents must speak the same language and have the same ‘logical consequences’ approach.



• … become a reflective practitioner. At times, we needed to step back and reflect, introspect on what WE could be doing that might be triggering the student to refuse to work. For example, are we using a harsh tone? Did we embarrass the student by calling them out for something right before? Sometimes, there isn’t anything apparent, but it’s always worth considering!

And finally, unwind, energise and rewire yourself. Self-care for teachers is definitely not stressed enough in the world of education. Working with ‘work–refusal’ students can be emotionally and physically draining. It is important to take time to focus on one’s well-being. After all, there is much truth in the famous quote “You can’t pour more from an empty cup!”

We hope this blog has offered some good ideas for you all to try in the classroom and at home, to convert resistance to work into a lifelong skill of becoming a self-driven, independent student in charge of their own learning. God Bless our Little Ones! ***