distracted?

Students can lose focus for a million reasons while working on a sustained task.

A progress bar can help to maintain focus and motivation.

Draw a horizontal bar on a post-it or paper. Shade in some portion of it from left to right to show how much progress they’ve already made—like they’d see when installing a new app.

Set a goal for how much more they can get done, and check back in with them. Shade in how much more they’ve done… and come back again to check!

Overwhelmed?

Sometimes students feel like schoolwork will take forever!

Alleviate their worries by drawing a bar and shading in how much they’ve already done—and celebrate that! (You can even fudge it a little… it’s a representation).

Then set a reasonable goal to work towards before a break or finishing for the day.

Way to go!

This example from Carol Lewis at One World Middle School in The Bronx, New York, shows success! a student had finishing their project.

Multi-part Project Bars

Chris Curmi at MBHS, Brooklyn, New York, used progress bars with broken down sub-tasks to help high school students on track and motivated through a long-term project.

Bar with Celebration 🎉

Hannah Jenkins, at PS 206 in East Harlem, New York, used a progress bar with celebratory stickers to keep students motivated on their writing!

Before…

and After

To help sense their progress while filling out the three parts of a Venn diagram, Janine Treglia from PS 4 in Staten Island, New York, used a bar broken into three parts: different, different, same—and her student shaded in each piece as he went!