Turn On the Turned-Off Student

by Ruth Herman Wells

Filled with dozens of motivation-makers, this book is full of surprising lessons to turnaround the apathy, disinterest and lack of effort that many youngsters show for school. Each of the 20 lessons is perfect for the classroom, counseling office or group counseling session. Many lessons include engaging handouts that ease students into developing new attitudes and behavior even after years of school failure. Especially designed to work with special ed, alternative ed and drop-out students, these methods are also geared for any child or youth who believes school is unimportant. Lessons "Maximum-Strength Motivation Makers," "Put Aside Problems During School," and "Even Rock Starts Gonna Need School." This book also has unusual and potent strategies for students who plan to avoid school by dealing drugs, going on welfare or becoming a sports star. Designed to work when more conventional interventions fail, this book provides every defiant, misbehaved, oppositional, difficult and hard-to-manage student with the specific behaviors, skills, and attitudes they need in order to succeed. Because the interventions are designed to turn the light on over the students' head rather than to overtly alter opinions and attitudes, these lessons often succeed conventional approaches fail. These interventions offer new tools to use with the student that has exhausted "all" other options and can provide new hope for youth who seem destined to fail in school. Most schools do not have a formal curriculum to train kids to be students. Consequently, some students truly struggle to understand why school is important, especially if they hear at home that school in not valuable. By providing students with the motivation to succeed in school, many "sure failures" can be transformed into surprising successes by incorporating the lessons in this book into a planned program of instruction. Without the training provided in this book, many schools may feel they are working with untrained, unprepared, unmotivated students, and they may be sadly right. The new, attitude-adjusting interventions in this book may give the most likely failures the chance to become unexpected successes-- a chance many children and youth sorely need. Handouts "Rate How Well You Can Learn When You Miss Class," "Find the Reasons to Stay Home from School," "Are You Ready for Life in the Adult Lane?," "Sooner or Later, Will They Really Never Need School," and "Find Out Now What You'll Know Later."

Paperback

Published January 1, 1992