Here are some strategies Ive found useful:

1. Use visual behavior tracking charts. Thats right, reward charts arent just for preschoolers anymore. I
have a large grid that I use as a basic chart (see photo at the top of this post) to help motivate students to
participate, and I modify it for every student on my caseload. Some students earn one square per session, others
earn 3 or 5 squares per session, depending on how much reinforcement they need on a given day for a given
task. Once they reach a star, they earn a prize/special activity. Of course, a chart alone wont do the trick unless
the student wants the reward hes working toward, which leads me to my next point.
2. Allow students to earn a work free speech session. What does the unmotivated student want most? To
be left alone! I have two students who will work diligently for weeks or even months just for a chance to take
most of a speech session off from speech work and just play on a computer or iPad during speech. (What
they dont realize is that many of their goals are addressed by the computer games!)
3. Challenge students to beat their own record for a certain task. Lets face it; drill work is awful. Its
hard to motivate even enthusiastic students to complete drills cheerfully. However, if we make the drill task
timed and the student tries to beat his last score, drill work can actually become fun! For example, Ill set my
timer for a minute and see how many perfect r words from a set of 70 flashcards the student can produce, and
then Ill let them try again (several times) to see if they can beat their best record. (I got this speed challenge
idea from the Superspeed Whole Brain Teaching game, and just modify it based on my students goals.)
Students actually beg to stay after their regular speech time to try to keep beating their records.
4. Allow the student to be the expert by teaching a skill to younger students. If a fourth grade student is a
poor reader but can read simple picture books, he could perhaps read a book to a kindergarten class every once
in a while, preparing for the reading by doing word study and learning tasks with vocabulary from the book he
will be sharing. This is a much more naturally motivating experience than reading for boring old Mrs. Ragan
who already knows what the book says.
5. Make tasks more hands-on. One of my third grade students recently said to me, I like working with you,
because we do stuff, and make stuff, and build stuff. This was a student who for the first two weeks of speech
refused to do any work at all with me when I was using traditional table-work activities (even when I bribed her
with silly bands, her favorite!). Good thing I wised up!
6. Make tasks more physical. Some of my most difficult to motivate students have been won over by a few
sessions of playing physical games such as Simon Says, Mother May I, Hot/Cold, Lego Creator,
Charades, or Pictionary. These games can be modified to address social skills (joint attention, turn taking,
flexibility, taking others perspective), articulation (generalizing targets to sentences and conversation),
receptive/expressive language (giving and receiving directions, vocabulary building, answering questions),
reading (following written directions, recognizing sight words, reading CVC words, etc.), writing
(summarizing, using transitional phrases, using descriptive vocabulary, etc.), and more. I think that much of the
success of this strategy comes from pairing myself with fun activities, because, after a while of doing physical
speech activities, many students dont need as much reinforcement for cooperating and engaging with methey
actually begin to be reinforced just by engaging with me! And then, boy, we can make some progress.
7. Catch the student cooperating. Then praise, praise, praise! (Be sure your praise is specific about what you
liked ex: Great job using although in a sentence!) I find that praising students in front of their peers, or
especially praising them quietly by whispering to a teacher just loudly enough that they overhear me, can
really shift a students demeanor out of an unmotivated funk. (I mean, if I overheard a colleague whisper to my
boss how great I was, it would knock me out of a funk, too!)

8. Treat a few students to a special lunch party with you as a reward/motivator. Our time is limited as
school SLPs. But we typically do have a lunch break, and every now and then, it can be fun to spend it
celebrating with students. For my fifth graders, special lunches have been a highly motivating reward. Ive had
students who have worked for two months (earning tokens toward their lunch party by following teacher
instructions, being on task, participating in class and speech, and writing during independent writing times) to
earn a special lunch with me (with pizza delivered, or McDonalds brought in, or something fun like that). You
might even be able to request PTA funds to help cover costs.
9. Be lighthearted and make mistakes yourself during therapy sessions. If students know that you are fun
to be around, lighthearted, even silly sometimes, they are often less worried about their performance on learning
tasks in your presence. And when you, the brilliant adult, make mistakes sometimes, the stress involved in
trying a new task is lessened in your presence.
10. If at first you dont succeed, try, try again. Some students are going to have an extinction burst before
they begin cooperating. You may put a motivation plan in place, and find that they are even more defiant and
uncooperative than ever, that they wont work even for ahuge reward. But persist. Give it two weeks. Then, if
its still not working, you can chat with the students learning team and try to modify your plan.
So, the next time youre in a battle of wills with an unmotivated student, and your only hope of rescue seems to
be in the possibility that they might be moving out of state, take a minute to think outside the box, and see if
you and the rest of the childs learning team can come up with some ingenious ways to motivate the student.
Then, come back and leave a comment to let me know how it went!