Somewhere in the world right now, a genuinely excellent speech about potential is being delivered to a kid who has not voluntarily picked up a pencil since October. The speech has a callback. It has a personal anecdote. It lands nowhere at all, and the bell rings, and the worksheet goes into the backpack in the exact condition it arrived. The speech was not the problem. This week is about what the actual problem is, and about a three-rung tool for solving it that takes roughly eleven seconds to deploy.

🔉 What is an AI expert, and how does one become one? If you’ve ever asked those questinos, then this week’s sponsor is for you!

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

Note: if you already answered this last week, no need to repeat; keep on scrolling to the next section. ⬇️

This takes one tap and quietly changes everything that shows up here next. The advice that helps a primary classroom is not the advice that helps a Grade 12 one, and this newsletter would rather stop guessing. Pick your grade band below and let the next issue meet you where you actually teach!

And now back to making you an even better teacher. ⬇

Every engagement strategy handed out at a PD session shares one quiet assumption: that the student in question wants something. Make it relevant to their lives. Add a hook. Gamify it. Print the anchor chart in the fun font. These are real tools and they work beautifully, provided the kid is already about 60% bought in and simply needs a reason to close the gap.

Then there is the other kid. The one at zero, studying a specific ceiling tile with the focus of a scholar, who has run the numbers and correctly concluded that nothing sufficiently bad is going to happen if they simply do not move. No hook reaches that student, because a hook is an argument, and arguments require an opponent who has agreed to show up to the debate.

Here is the reframe: this was never an engagement problem. It is an activation energy problem in an engagement problem costume. The task is not to raise the student's motivation, which is expensive, slow, and largely outside anyone's control. The task is to shrink the size of the ask until it drops below their resistance threshold. Nobody is lowering standards. Someone is lowering the entry fee, which is a completely different line item.

The Shrink Ray is a descending ask with exactly three rungs. Start at rung one. Drop a rung only after a no. The order matters more than anything else here, because opening at rung three turns the floor into the new ceiling, permanently, for the rest of the semester.

Rung one: circle the number. Do not hand over a worksheet with the words "do this." Hand it over with three problems circled in pen and say, "Just these three. Not the rest, those are crossed out already." Specificity is the entire trick. "Do your work" describes an infinite quantity of work and is therefore impossible. "Do #3, #7, and #11" describes a finite quantity of work and is therefore survivable.

Rung two: drop to one, out loud. A no does not mean repeating the instruction at greater volume, which has never once worked in the history of the profession. It means shrinking again, audibly: "Fine. One. Number three. Tell me what the first step is and then I will stop talking." The task has now gone from a page to a sentence. Rung three: you talk, I write. The student dictates, the teacher holds the pencil. This feels like cheating and it is not, because for a huge number of students the refusal was never about the thinking. It was about producing visible evidence that can be judged. Remove that part and the thinking tends to wander in on its own, unsupervised.

Scripts help, mostly because they keep the adult calm at the exact moment the adult would prefer to escalate. A few that hold up under fire: "Not asking you to like this. Asking for four minutes." / "Pick the three that look least offensive to you." / "You can do it badly. Badly is allowed today." / "The next hour is happening either way, so it is really a question of how boring you want it to be." That last one has an unreasonable success rate, possibly because it is the first fully honest thing a lot of students have heard about a class period.

Then there is the ledger, which is the part most likely to get skipped and the part that matters most in about eight months. Keep a running tally of partial completion somewhere private. Not completion. Partial. A student who moved from 0% to 40% over a semester delivered a 40% gain, and that gain is completely invisible in a gradebook fluent in only two words, "missing" and "done."

The ledger is not documentation for an administrator, a parent, or a data wall. It is documentation for one specific reader: whoever is sitting at that desk in March, wondering whether any of this is working. That person is going to need receipts, and past-tense memory is a notoriously unreliable narrator when the building is cold and the sun sets at 4:45.

Run the arithmetic on all-or-nothing framing. If the only acceptable outcome is a completed assignment, then a student who does four problems instead of ten has handed over a failure. Absorb that failure personally, five times a day, 180 days a year, and the total is not a rounding error. It is a career. That math has never once worked out in a teacher's favour, and no amount of dedication has ever made it work.

Partial credit turns out to be one of those things that has to be extended in both directions. It is granted to students constantly and generously, and then withheld from the person granting it, who ends each day performing a full accounting of everything that did not happen. A day where three kids moved from zero to something is a good day. It is allowed to be filed as a good day.

Underneath all of it sits something quieter. The size of an ask broadcasts a read on the kid, and they receive that transmission instantly. A giant ask says, "Nobody here has looked closely enough to know what you can currently do." A tiny, specific, achievable ask says, "Your exact location is known, and someone came to meet you there." Students clock the difference immediately, which is why the Shrink Ray occasionally produces a strange side effect: the first honest conversation about school that a student has had with an adult in a very long time, conducted entirely through three circled numbers on a worksheet.

The smallest version of the ask is still the ask. Nothing was watered down, nothing was let go, and the standard is sitting exactly where it was this morning. The only thing that moved was the price of admission, and it moved because a standoff has precisely one exhausted participant and it is never the twelve-year-old.

So: one student, one worksheet, three circles, Monday. Report back on what happened, because the ledger works better when more than one person is keeping it.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

We would LOVE to hear from you!

Reply to this email, or send us a message on Instagram! We’re here to walk with you in these crazy times!

Part of what makes The PEN Weekly community so special is the fact that our readers are teachers from around the world! We’re not going to lie, we think that’s pretty darn cool!

We’ll see you again on Wednesday 🍎

Do you know someone who would appreciate reading the PEN? Share this newsletter with them! Our goal is to reach as many teachers as possible, and to build a community of teachers supporting teachers.