Students are becoming more disenfranchised
This is why
Most students are demotivated,
And the problem is only becoming worse.
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In my role as CEO and Co-Founder of ILS (
https://www.independentlearningstrategies.co.uk/
) I speak to families every day.
And I have done so for the last 5 years.
Again and again, I hear of how students are demotivated when it comes to revision.
Deep down they often want to do well,
And they do care,
But they just can’t seem to consistently revise.
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Students are demotivated AND disenfranchised
Motivation comes from two things.
1) Believing that you will receive proportional or greater reward for the effort that you put in.
This goes for anything in life.
If you are doing the dishwasher,
Or doing a task at work,
And you don’t believe the result will justify the effort,
Your motivation to do it will be very low.
And this is why we can’t expect students to be magically motivated to revise,
When no one has taught them how,
Beyond the existence of past papers and flash cards.
2) Being ‘instructed’ / held to account by someone you respect and want to impress.
Motivation comes from believing that the task that you have to do is worthwhile.
When you muster up the courage to do anything in life,
You make a judgement in your mind as to whether the effort is going to be worth the reward.
And if you do not have a lot of experience in doing the task before,
Your judgement will be influenced by who or ‘what’ is telling you to do it.
Therefore, if you trust and look up to the person that is telling you to revise,
Motivation will increase.
And I am sorry to say parents,
In the specific field of revision,
Almost all of your teenagers don’t want to hear your opinion.
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Being disenfranchised is different
I was thinking about why students struggle to revise consistently,
And I realised that the problem starts before motivation even comes into it.
The problem,
For a lot of students,
Is the way exams and revision are approached in the education system.
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Teenagers are not stupid.
Through social media,
Teenagers are far more informed than their equivalents were 30 or 50 years ago.
This means that ideas about the brokenness of the education system,
And how it is stuck in the early 20th century,
Are commonly understood.
Most students are aware that the education system tests a very particular type of knowledge,
In a very rigid format,
That is often not very applicable to the skills you need later on in life.
Teenagers know that their effectiveness of memorising trigonometry and McBeth quotes has no bearing on their creativity and their problem-solving ability.
And yet we are still training our teenagers to fit in to a mold designed for factory labor.
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Furthermore,
Often revision advice feels a bit ‘smarmy.’
Now I realise that at ILS we could be considered by some as part of the problem.
But I would like to think that there is a key difference,
(You can be the judge).
For me,
Revision advice is far less about flash cards, mind maps, and past papers.
Students aren’t stupid,
They already know how they work and if they wanted to learn more, they could easily watch many videos on their Tik Tok feed.
It is about the framing.
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Instead of teaching students about flash cards and spaced repetition for the sake of it.
Students want to learn how to beat their exams,
Plain and simple.
It is about gamifying the process so that they can spend time of specific elements,
That will generate greater returns for their efforts.
Which comes back to the first aspect of motivation I mentioned earlier.
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My intention is truly not to try and sell ourselves in this newsletter.
It is to explain why I believe students are both demotivated and increasingly disenfranchised,
And how these attitudes can be overcome.
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I hope you all have a great week ahead,
Best wishes,
Joel