Why aren't we talking about boredom in schools?

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🦄 In Case You Missed It

Part 1 of Our Series: Is the goal of school compliance? Or learning?

If you are anything like me, your educational experience consisted of many lectures, notes, homework, tests, and papers. Then, when I started teaching, I gave a lot of PowerPoint lectures, had my students take a lot of notes, and focused on rigorous tests and all kinds of papers. Seemed to be a cycle. One that I had a hard time breaking. Read the whole first article here.

The Backstory: This is a three-part series that explores the problems with compliance in our places of learning and how we can re-engage a generation that has never been more distracted and bored in school settings. This series is based off my new book, "Meaningful and Relevant: Engaging Learners In An Era of Distraction" and accompanying keynote and workshops. Second part is the article below!

🏆 Part 2: Why aren’t we talking about boredom in schools?

Read the article on Ajjuliani.com

When a student says, "I'm bored," it's easy to dismiss it as a lack of motivation or effort. But what if that statement is actually a crucial signal that something in our educational approach isn't working? Research says that students are bored for a third to half of their time in school. That is a lot, and way more than at home.

Raise your hand out there if you’ve ever been bored at school. Yep, that’s what I thought. We’ve all experienced it. It’s also not the worst thing to happen (which we will look at below), however, it does impact engagement and learning in many different ways.

As teachers and school leaders, it's time we recognize boredom not as a student problem but as a system problem, and an opportunity for meaningful change.

Let’s dig in.

Understanding School Boredom: It's Not What You Think

Contrary to popular belief, boredom isn't a lazy, low-motivation state. In fact, it's quite the opposite. When students are bored, they're signaling a desire to engage with the school and learning in meaningful ways. Boredom emerges when this fundamental human need isn't being met.

A 2025 longitudinal study tracking over 1,400 students found a troubling trend: the longer students stay in school, the less interested they become. This isn't a failure of students—it's a failure of design. We can’t blame the kids here. That solves nothing.

Our traditional (compliance-based) educational structures often work against the brain's natural learning processes rather than with them.

Boredom typically comes from two main sources:

1. A mismatch between challenge and ability: Material that's either too easy or too difficult creates what researchers call the "Goldilocks problem"—finding that sweet spot where challenge meets ability is difficult, especially in a classroom of 25 students with 25 different optimal skill levels.

2. A lack of perceived meaning or relevance: When students don't understand how learning connects to their lives or interests, engagement drops. This happens more frequently with basic (rote) tasks that leave little room for creativity or personal input.

The Hidden Costs of Ignoring Boredom

Persistent school boredom isn't just an inconvenience, it also has huge consequences for kids academic achievement, emotional well-being, and long-term success.

The annual Gallup poll of 500,000 students found that while nearly eight in ten elementary students were "engaged" with school (attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic), by high school, that number dropped to just four in ten. I’ve shared the Scott McLeod article on this many times, but the disengagement trajectory has only worsened following pandemic-related disruptions.

Research has linked school boredom to:

• Decreased academic achievement

• Increased classroom disruption and behavioral issues

• Higher rates of procrastination

• Diminished mental health, including increased stress, anxiety, and depression

• School avoidance and truancy

Perhaps most concerning is what researchers now call the "School Boredom Mindset" (SBM). This is a subset of high-risk students who develop strong negative attitudes about school itself. Students with the strongest SBM report substantially lower well-being than their peers across multiple indicators.

This connects to the lowest two areas of Schlecty’s Engagement Levels from our Part 1 article: Retreatism and Rebellion.

Reframing Our Approach: It's Not the Kids, It's the System

When addressing boredom, we need to shift our focus from "fixing" students to examining how our educational environments might be out of sync with students' needs and interests. As one researcher notes, "the effect of the situation swamps those individual differences" when it comes to boredom.

Our current system often:

• Prioritizes standardized content over personalized learning

• Emphasizes passive instruction over active engagement

• Values rigid curricula over student agency and choice

• Focuses on external motivation (grades, compliance) rather than intrinsic motivation

The problem isn't that students don't want to learn, it's that our system isn't designed to let them learn in ways that align with how their brains actually work.

Practical Solutions: Creating Meaning and Relevance

So what can we do? I shared in this video three strategies to help combat apathy and boredom through meaning and relevance. But, I want to offer some additional ideas below the video as well.

1. Involve Students in Solutions

What better way to engage students than to include them in developing solutions? Ask them directly what's working and what could work better through surveys and focus groups. This could include student-led conferences, classroom co-generation sessions, student advisory committees, and student membership on schoolwide teams.

2. Enhance the "Five C's" in Your Classroom

I’m laughing because there are so many “C's” in education, however, the research does suggest that boosting these five elements can significantly reduce boredom. We can change the words too if you’d like 😀 

• Control: Give students voice in how they demonstrate learning

• Choice: Offer multiple pathways to meet learning objectives

• Challenge: Provide appropriate scaffolding to keep tasks in the "Zone of Proximity”

• Complexity: Design open-ended activities that allow for creative problem-solving

• Caring: Foster relationships that help students feel connected and valued

3. Make Learning Meaningful

Help students understand the "why" behind what they're learning:

• Connect content to real-world applications and student interests

• Design project-based learning experiences that address authentic problems

• Invite community members to share how they use specific knowledge and skills

• Create opportunities for students to apply learning in service to others

4. Teach Students to Navigate Boredom

While we work to improve our systems, we can also help students develop strategies for when boredom inevitably occurs:

• Teach mindfulness practices that help students recognize and reframe boredom

• Encourage students to identify their own strategies for re-engagement

• Help students "gamify" less intrinsically interesting tasks

• Support students in finding personal meaning in required learning

5. Rethink Assessment and Feedback

Traditional grading systems often diminish intrinsic motivation:

• Implement more formative assessment with specific, growth-oriented feedback

• Create opportunities for students to assess their own learning

• Design authentic assessments that demonstrate real-world application

• Celebrate progress and effort, not just achievement

So, what’s next?

Addressing boredom isn't about making school "fun" or "entertaining", it's about creating learning environments that honor how the human brain naturally learns and thrives. When learning is meaningful, appropriately challenging, and connected to students' lives, engagement is likely to follow.

As we look to the future of learning, let's view student boredom not as an inevitable part of school but as valuable feedback that can guide our improvement efforts. By working with rather than against students' natural curiosity and drive for meaning, we can create schools where engagement is the norm, not the exception.

The question isn't whether we can afford to address boredom in our schools, it's whether we can afford not to.

Part 3 of this series, shares 100 ways we can re-engage students in an era of distraction and boredom!

🗓️ Upcoming Events

Reviews! The first few Amazon reviews are coming in for Meaningful and Relevant, and it is always scary for an author. I’m proud of the book and sharing it with the world, but it always comes with a wide variety of feedback (which is a good thing). Here is a recent review that had me smiling:

Thanks as always,

A.J. Juliani