How to Help Students Avoid Procrastinating

Long-term projects and assignments present a unique challenge for many students, requiring several layers of executive function skills, like planning and time management, to be able to manage steps over an extended period of time. Much to our frustration, students may procrastinate or avoid working on an assignment when it seems overwhelming. This can lead to late, missing, or incomplete work, or it can push students into a stressful all-nighter, as they complete an assignment designed to take weeks in the span of just a few hours. 

An effective way to address the challenges of overwhelm and procrastination—and a way that requires only a tweak to your teaching instead of another task on your plate—is to teach students to “scan and plan.” Scan and plans happen during the introduction of an assignment, usually one that takes more than a few steps. Teachers organically fold in the scan and plan approach as a layer to the assignment’s announcement to the class.

The Scan and Plan Approach

With the scan and plan approach, teachers walk students through an assignment or prompt with a distinct purpose: to scan and plan. As students review the assignment information, they’re actively asking themselves to identify three things: Where do my points come from, what will I have created when I’m done, and when is this due? If the assignment isn’t for points, students seek to identify main components of the assignment, such as the sections of a written essay or the elements covered in a presentation. This lens positions students to consider the most relevant aspects of their upcoming project.

Scan and plan also creates a boost of focus: Their brains are “reading to find out” when they scan for the important information. Because the scan and plan approach is done as a class initially, students can’t avoid considering the project’s scope and potential demands. Paradoxically, it’s in recognizing the demands of an assignment that many students experience clarity and relief. What seemed overwhelming (and thus something to avoid) becomes clear and less intimidating. Often, students report that their first impression of the assignment was much worse than the reality!

Connecting Scan and Plan to the Bigger Picture

After students scan to identify the three big answers (points, final product, and due date), teachers can engage them in creating a plan for themselves. You may want to help students break the big assignment into smaller pieces, possibly using the prompt or assignment sheet as inspiration for a checklist—annotating the directions with numbers—so that each part of the assignment is considered. Another way to effectively break a longer assignment into parts is to visualize the process of completing the assignment. Each scene in the visualization can become a step.

For example, if students are writing a research paper, they may envision themselves creating a research question, looking for articles, reading the articles, annotating their reading, etc. Each action they visualize may become a smaller step to consider in their plan. If steps are sequential, teachers can model calendaring the steps in order, or backward from the due date to the current date—a strategy aptly named backward planning. 

Once the steps are identified, consider modeling the prioritization of the biggest parts of the assignment. For example, you may model for students how to schedule the writing before the illustration, since it’s harder, may take more time, and is worth more points. Or, if steps need to be completed in order but are of different levels of difficulty, you can model how to create more scheduled time for the longer or more challenging steps.

Finally, teachers can guide students to assign themselves mini-deadlines and check posts for the important steps along the way to the deadline and put these mini-deadlines in their calendars. Many students like to add a little reward for hitting their personal project step deadlines, a habit-forming strategy that can boost the likelihood of completing a step or task.

Monitoring Progress, Adjusting the Plan

In the days and weeks after scanning an assignment and making a plan, reality will likely throw some curveballs. What students thought might take a short while could take longer, or students may end up with other work pulling their attention away. A common example of this is when students planned to work on the project in the evening without realizing that they actually had another activity, like sports practice or an extracurricular at the same time. Adding a check-in to the daily class schedule can help; teachers can guide students through self-reflection on their progress, to identify and address impediments.

When students notice their challenges, they can update their approaches and their personal project calendars. Another common impediment is planning to do more than is reasonably possible each day. Students may create long to-do lists without pairing time estimations with each task, leading to over-stretching themselves.

Checking in on the class’s progress on an assignment helps students continue to reflect on these challenges, offering them the chance to layer in strategies, like adding time estimates, to avoid repeating pitfalls. Scan and plan teaches students to manage multistep projects by identifying what they will be creating, how much it’s worth to their grade, and when it’s due. This method empowers students to use strategies that support their independence and can be an effective way to help students decrease procrastination while practicing important executive functions.