World Domination: What do I do when my child doesn’t want to do school? Using questions to set daily goals.

Fourth grader, Jacob still loved to trade his Pokemon cards with his friends and he also really liked building with Lego. He wanted to attend a weekly local robotics class, which his Mom and Dad were considering, but they hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. What Jacob didn’t like was sitting down at the dining room table to do the curriculum books his mom had purchased for him. He fussed and complained but eventually ended up rushing through it as quickly as possible so he could get back to those activities that he really wanted to be doing.
 
Jacob’s mom was exhausted from cajoling, bribing and threatening to get Jacob to do school. We talked it over and Jacob’s mom was willing to try something new. She put up a Ponderings Board whiteboard on the kitchen wall and started having Jacob write down his questions and curiosities as ideas popped into his mind during the week. He wondered about the future of robotics and what machines might be doing in the future. He wanted to understand what kinds of jobs people had to get in order to work with robots and he wondered if people ever used Lego to build models of bigger things, like he saw his Dad doing with the model airplanes he built at home. Jacob wanted to know more about artificial intelligence and wondered if robots could take over the world someday.
 

Lead with Questions
When parents are interested in following their child’s interests and curiosities, I often recommend starting with the Ponderings Board to help identify what those curiosities might be. For a few days, family members jot down any type of question they might have about the world or about something they might be interested in knowing more about. Maybe your child is interested in what makes a good board game or maybe wonders why dew settles on blades of grass in the morning. Maybe someone in the family wonders how to compose an interesting photograph or how to balance out spices when cooking. These curiosities can be questions about anything and once you have quite a few written on the whiteboard or a large piece of butcher paper tacked onto the wall, you can start to take a look at them and see where your child might want to know more. If you can find ideas that intersect or are similar in some way, all the better to magnify the interest. In the past, I’ve often ended the conversation about those budding curiosities there, encouraging families to go explore and see what comes of it, but I think there’s value in diving in deeper into exactly how the process might unfold, how we might develop a curiosity into a passion.
 

What's important to your child's brain
To understand this, let’s learn a little bit about how the brain filters incoming information on a biological level. Because our brains aren’t able to process all of the information coming in through our senses, we have to have a way to notice only what’s most important and to make the rest invisible. Biology is all about survival and to survive humans have always needed resources. Things like food, water, shelter, clothing, tools, etc. In the early human days…it was way harder to get resources and keep them. We might squirrel away the things we needed to live and hide them from those that wanted to take them away or we might fight others off to keep a hold of them. Both of these options are rooted in a fear of losing the scarce resources we have, including our life and the lives of others, of course.
 
But…there was another option. We could find or create more resources through our own creativity, innovation, or collaboration with others. That choice revolved around our ability to think in new ways, make a plan, see a path forward and follow a goal to completion.
 
These two biological inclinations are alive and well in each of us and because of that biology our brains continuously filter for fear and for goals in order to ensure our survival. Avoiding things that scare us and obtaining things that we want pretty much make up our reality and our brains have a way of leaning towards the negative naturally because that’s the bigger threat to survival. The way this works in real life is that if our brains aren’t filtering and going after our goals, they are often filtering for fear to keep us safe and alive. This basic biological system of filtering by fear or goals is one reason why goals are so important in our daily lives.
 

Use goals to spark attention
Our goals spring from our curiosities, so curiosity, fueled by questions, is a great way into our goals. Your child can use goals to pursue interests, which also focuses attention and provides motivation throughout the day. So, let’s circle back. Now, that your child has selected a curiosity (or two or three that intersect into a single exploration) what do you do?
 
There are most likely many more detailed questions inside of your child’s curiosity. Let’s take the photography example from above. Your child might start by writing down or discussing additional questions with someone else in your house. Make a note of those questions. Examples might include:
·      What is a photograph?
·      Who invented photography?
·      How is it different today than a long time ago?
·      What does the word composition mean?
·      Are there rules to how a picture should look?
·      What do our eyes find visually appealing?
·      Does light have something to do with it?
·      Does it matter what type of photograph I’m taking, such as landscape or portrait?
·      Does a good photo have something to do with pixels?
·      What are pixels?
 
These questions can go on and on, but wonderment gives your child a good place to start and questions are fabulous ways to stoke curiosity and build motivation. I just rattled off all of these questions off the top of my head, but even though photography is only a very casual interest of mine, I notice that I am having to refrain from stopping the discussion here and going to find the answers to my own curious questions about photography. Questions are compelling!
 
Let’s take a look at Jacob’s interest in Lego and robotics. There are some intersections between the two, including a possible interest in engineering and technology. Jacob’s particular pondering looks forward into the future of robotics, but it wouldn’t be a far stretch to tickle his interests by going backwards into the history of robotics and artificial intelligence, as well.
 
Including questions that tap into the history and terminology of a field of interest are great starting points because the history helps kids understand the story and we naturally learn through stories, whereas the terminology, the words used in the subject area, can hold hidden clues into the subject matter and conversing with an expert later becomes so much easier when speaking the same language.
 

Curiosities to Questions to Clear Goals
After finding a curiosity and perhaps a number of similar curiosities, children can expand their curiosities by jotting some more detailed questions down. Those questions can become daily clear goals that will guide your child’s activity . Your child might set a number of these small, daily goals around this area of interest in order to be able to answer the questions or to start to learn the basics of a subject area. List out those goals specifically, such as read chapter one of my basic photography book to understand when photography started and how it’s different today than from a long time ago. Or, in Jacob’s interest…learn the story of when the first robots were created.
 
What your child does with the information to remember it, is an individual choice, but typically working with the information in some way helps kids remember it. This does not simply mean closing your eyes and trying to repeat back what’s on a page in a book, but instead doing something meaningful with the information is usually much more enjoyable and effective. We’ll talk more about attention and memory in future discussions, but some children find that they remember information best by taking visual notes, meaning answering their questions through pictures and words. Other kids may like to stop and explain the learning to another person, and once there’s some competence, kids might combine learning to create a how-to guide, a song or a project, for example.
 
In my photography example, I might learn the answers to my questions and then put my newfound learning to good use by taking some pictures, maybe even creating a memory book for someone I care about or creating an online ad for an upcoming community project, for instance. For Jacob, that might mean building a Lego model or an actual robot or even writing a futuristic fantasy store involving AI and world domination.
 
In the early days of curiosity exploration, your child is creating a few daily goals (perhaps using pomodoros) to gain some basic competence in an area of interest. Goals may be accomplished through reading books or actively watching topic-specific videos, for example. Your child is building the basics. If your child is going to start with a few books on the topic, I encourage you to ease your way into a topic of interest. Start with a book that’s light and engaging, a book that may even deal with the topic indirectly. For Jacob, it might mean reading aloud a fantasy story about artificial intelligence or Jacob might dive deeply into a comic series that deals heavily with robotics. You want to build some knowledge, while keeping motivation high and not drowning in dense material that’s overwhelming. Flirt around the edges and then slowly, book by book, start to dive deeper and deeper into the content, gently adding complexity over an extended period of time. Imagine starting with your toes in the ocean water and slowly inching your way in. There’s no hurry to pursuing an interest and too much too soon can extinguish the fire in your child’s belly.
 

Small steps help your child's attention
The principle of kaizen…small steps forward… is a best friend to clear goals. Children need to know exactly what to do now and what to do next. This clarity helps them focus in, saves time in debate or confusion and allows kids to simply get it done minute by minute. You might think of this type of attention on clear goals like a flashlight and if kids know where to point the flashlight, they know what to do, minimizing all the internal distraction.
 
Clear goals can also help kids understand how follow through works. Many of us have great ideas that we start working on with gusto, only to find that a few days, weeks or months later, we’ve lost steam and our ideas sit unfinished.
 
Clear goals lower stress in your child’s body and make learning easier because kids don’t have to try to figure out what to do. They know exactly what to do, how to do it and when to do it. Remember, working memory…the lobby…has limited capacity, so clear goals help to get extraneous things out of your child’s mind. The fewer things in working memory, the easier it is for kids to pay attention without all the impulsivity taking their minds elsewhere.
 
To learn more about how to turn curiosity to passion to purpose using goals, head on over to Boldschoolers Blueprint where we dive in deep.
 
For now, sink into these ideas and start sniffing out some curiosities.
 
Please, reach out …I’d love to hear your reactions and experiences.
 
What curiosities is your child interested in chasing?