March Madness: Getting Students through the Big Dance
- kamdonbailey
- Mar 24
- 4 min read
The story in education is that March is one of the hardest months to survive. It is one of the only months without a formal Holiday and the end of the year is finally in sight, but too far off to feel encouraging. Everything inside of you just wants to survive until you can make it to Spring Break the first week of April. It is during this time (and perhaps others) that you may start to feel pressure to motivate your students and find yourself in a headspace of wondering, “What is wrong with these kids?” While my last few posts have focused on “important issues” in education. Today, I want to keep it lighter and offer some words of encouragement.
What’s Wrong With Kids These Days?
I can admit that I have asked this question a lot. Sometimes I ask it multiple times in a period, and the tone can shift from curiosity to contempt. As Dr. Jim Harris explains in his TEDx presentation, the tone is more a reflection of the question than of the person asking it. The solution is to “Start with a better Question” (2025). We don’t become educators to be critical of students. We become educators because we want to support and help students grow. So, a better question we can ask when we are frustrated or confused by a student’s behavior is “what does this student need?” Harris explains it as coming “hip to hip” with the student instead of approaching the situation from a position of superiority (Harris, 2025).
Without a doubt, it is harder to be a young person today, socially and academically, than at any other time in history. Students are processing the regular adolescent transitions we all went through, but with the added pressures of social media and, depending on where you work, a very tense political climate that could be impacting their day-to-day lives. Knowing this, we need to lead with compassion and not criticism. The struggle is to balance acceptance and growth. We can accept the unique circumstances and abilities of each of our students, while also holding them accountable to grow. If we shield them from the “essential experiences of failure, struggle, consequence, and success [needed] in order to develop the skills to be a formidable adult,” then we will weaken them (Harris, 2025). On the other hand, if we constantly push them, they will eventually break. Which brings me to my second area of focus: motivation.
How Can I Motivate My Students?
In spite of what we may think, sometimes what a student needs is not intervention, but space. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be the motivation we think our students are lacking. How can I make my lesson more engaging, more relevant, more structured, better scaffolded, the list goes on. These are all great questions and aspirations. However, this egocentric view of learning and motivation puts all of the responsibility on our shoulders. What Dr. Betsy Blackard suggests is that students don’t always need external motivation; sometimes they just need the opportunity to step back before taking a “Running Leap” (2025). When we see a student struggle or avoid an assignment or task, we have an immediate urge to intervene and encourage them to overcome their fears or persevere. It is very hard to develop self-motivation when you feel like you are always being pushed. Instead, we need to help students recognize how their behaviors are actually a way for them to process information and reframe the learning experience.
Learning is a two-way street. There is the person imparting knowledge and the person receiving it. Both people have a responsibility so that the transaction can take place. When we teach our kids to ride a bike, and they fall off, we don’t immediately put the training wheels back on. We pick them up, dust them off, and walk alongside them. The same should be true in education. When we see a student struggle or get discouraged, we don’t always need to jump in and try to remediate. If the last five years in education have taught us anything, it is that lowering the bar does not encourage growth or increase motivation. Leave the bar high, but give your students the chance to take a step back and get a running start. Elsworth (2009) found that, for students with lower competence and lower likelihood of achieving mastery goals, intrinsic motivation was especially important due to a lack of self-regulation in academic settings. This is explicitly evident in Dr. Blackard's analogy of the little girl “Popping.”
A Final Word to the Wise
Educators spend much of their time thinking about others, and often this leads us to neglect our own needs. I saw this play out during COVID. Districts, for good reason, were hyper-focused on the mental health of students, but at the same time, teachers were overextended and processing the same trauma, and very little was being offered to support them. It is totally acceptable for you to take a day off to spend time with your family or enjoy a moment of de-stressing. You are not required to take your work home with you every day. Grading papers can wait. Burnout is real, and the only way to protect against it is to learn to press pause and take a breath.
It’s Spring. The birds are chirping. The flowers are blooming. Go enjoy it!
Elsworth, D. H. (2009). Motivation in Education. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=833bd7fe-269b-3cc0-90ba-41214a72b0b1
Ted. (2025, November 11). What kids know about motivation (and we don’t)| Betsy Blackard [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/fdDJub69Hnk?si=V5NXjqUSRG0iuSdl
Ted. (2025, September 27). What’s wrong with kids these days? Start with a better question| Jim Harris [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/5EPxwJwUPs4?si=XurUow_Y9NjhiYED
Comments