Procrastination

For this week’s topic, I’d like to reflect a bit on a practice that is the bane of teachers and educators everywhere: the practice of procrastination.

I will be the first to admit that I am, reluctantly, a serial procrastinator. I don’t think I was always this way: I seem to remember that in upper elementary and middle school, I tended to finish assignments early, and I never really understood how other people could wait to do everything at the last minute. Even the thought of that would give me anxiety. And when I was in my first year of university, my friends – who were older than me – would always tell me how impressed they were that I managed to finish essays a few days before the deadline.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost this ability to avoid procrastination. I don’t know exactly when or exactly why this happened, but I now have a very hard time rousing myself to begin any kind of assignment or lesson planning, with the result that I often find myself scrambling to meet deadlines. I think in part it has to do with a lack of a motivating goal; when I was younger, I had a very clear purpose for doing my schoolwork well: I wanted to be admitted to a good university and learn as much as I could to become a great teacher. This is what the folks at Procrastination.com would call “intrinsic motivation”: my desire to enter into a respected university provided me with “meaning and vision” and allowed me to focus on the tasks I needed to accomplish to make my goals into a reality.

Now, however, having met many of the goals that I had previously set for myself, I’m finding it hard to find the same sense of drive that saw me through my earlier formative years. This internal confession has inspired me to take a deeper look into procrastination, and some of the aspects I learned were unexpected and interesting. For example, according to Kendra Cherry in her article “What Is Procrastination?” one of the key factors that can lead a lot of people to procrastinate is the mistaken belief that we actually “have to feel inspired or motivated to work on a task at a particular moment”. In this sense, we tend to use a lack of motivation or inspiration as an excuse to delay doing something (say, for example, writing a blog post on procrastination) in the hope that these feelings will eventually manifest themselves (in my case, they usually don’t). In a sense, this factor highlights a limit to the idea of intrinsic motivation: it’s nearly impossible to feel an intrinsic motivation to complete every single task that we are faced with, and some things just have to be done whether we are interested in them or not.

As any teacher or student knows, procrastination has a clear, measurable impact on students. In the same article, Cherry cites a 2007 study that indicates that “80% to 95% of college students procrastinated on a regular basis”. Procrastination in students can also lead to lower grades on assignments and coursework, according to a 2015 study cited by Youki Terada in the Edutopia article “3 Reasons Students Procrastinate–and How to Help Them Stop". This same author goes on to point out that procrastination over the long term can have even more dire effects on mental health, such as “higher levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and fatigue”. Procrastination, therefore, is clearly something that we need to take seriously and learn to combat, but how do we start?

From my point of view, as both a procrastinator myself and a prospective teacher, one of the starting points is to try to avoid making swift negative assumptions about students who procrastinate. It’s easy, and perhaps also convenient, to jump to the conclusion that students who procrastinate are simply lazy; however, both Terada and experts at Oxford Learning caution us that this is most likely not an accurate perception. Procrastination in students usually stems from a fear of not doing well on an academic task or a lack of understanding about how to approach a project or assignment. Indeed, these two factors are logically related: if students don’t have a clear idea of how to do something, they might be less likely to start out of fear that they are doing it wrong (a type of failure).

The good news is that we as teachers can do things to address these two causes. To address the second cause, Terada recommends that teachers “have clear instructions and examples”. In other words, teachers should explain, in a straightforward way, what they want students to do and specify, as concretely as possible, what they will be looking for in students’ final work. This could involve saving some examples of past work by students, or actually creating a sample project yourself. Letting students see a potential finished product can make expectations less abstract and more tangible, thereby giving students a clearer springboard from which to dive into their work.

Another strategy, this time recommended by Oxford Learning, is to “break the project into smaller tasks”. Generally speaking, smaller tasks will tend to be more specific, and therefore it will be easier for students to conceptualize how they can begin working. This is a strategy that my freshman English teacher used with us when we wrote our big freshman “I-search” paper: an academic-style research paper about any topic that we found personally engaging. For many of us, this was the first time we were expected to produce a research paper longer than three or four pages, and therefore it was an intimidating task. It was made manageable by the fact that the entire process was broken down into specific, shorter tasks. This also had the added benefit that it allowed our teacher to provide us with feedback and suggestions throughout the process, so we had a more or less consistent sense of whether or not we were on the right track. Consistent feedback, in my opinion, can go along way toward assuaging a fear of failure in students, especially if we as teachers can word that feedback in a supportive, constructive way.

There are many other strategies that can be used to fight against procrastination, but the last one I’d like to propose is perhaps a bit idealistic. If one of the significant causes of procrastination is fear of failing an assignment, then maybe one thing teachers could do is make the assignment fairly difficult to actually fail as long as we can see that the students have been putting effort into their work. By this, I don’t mean that we should make the assignments easy or give away good grades just for effort. Rather, whenever possible, we should offer students the opportunity to revise their work after it’s been evaluated and then raise the grade on the assignment in accordance with corrections and improvements the students make to their work. This is, of course, more work for the teacher and might not always be feasible; after all, teachers have their own deadlines to hand in final grades. But allowing for revision and improvement where possible emphasizes the reality that learning is a process and that students do not have to produce perfect work on their very first try.

From my perspective, this practice connects back to the idea of a growth mindset precisely because it allows students some margin from error and the chance to improve and develop as they learn from any mistakes they make. Giving students the chance to raise their marks based on teacher feedback is sending them the message that we believe in their capacity to continue growing and learning, and that we are willing to invest the time and energy to help them achieve that positive outcome. It is, in a sense, like saying that we don’t believe in their capacity to fail.

References

Cherry, K. Reviewed by Susman, D. (2020, May 30). What is procrastination? Very Well Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-psychology-of-procrastination-2795944.

Terada, Y. (2020, February 11). 3 reasons students procrastinate – and how to help them stop. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/3-reasons-students-procrastinate-and-how-help-them-stop.

What is procrastination? (n.d.). Procrastination.com. https://procrastination.com/what-is-procrastination.

Why do students procrastinate? (2017, September 27). Oxford Learning. https://www.oxfordlearning.com/why-do-kids-procrastinate/.