Why ‘Call to Action’ Assignments Can Overwhelm Kids (and What to Do Instead)
It was Tuesday morning, and I was wrestling with a jammed copy machine in the faculty workroom when Ms. Reyes came in holding a stack of papers. “Can I ask you something?” She set the stack down. “I gave my U.S. history classes this prompt: ‘Choose a problem in your community and describe your call to action.’ Half of them wrote, ‘I don’t know.’ Three kids wrote about gun violence. One girl asked if she could go to the nurse because she felt sick.”
I asked her what she meant by “call to action.” She shrugged. “I wanted them to think beyond the textbook. Like, what would you actually do? What would you say? I didn’t expect them to feel helpless.”
That phrase—”call to action”—has been floating around American classrooms a lot lately. It shows up in civics units, in project-based learning packets, and in graduation requirements for community service. It’s meant to inspire. But after that conversation, I started noticing it in my own house too.
A few weeks later, my son came home from seventh grade and dropped his backpack at the door. “We have to do a project,” he said. “We have to pick any problem and then actually do something about it. I picked global warming.” He pulled out a worksheet with three boxes: Define the issue. Brainstorm actions. Create a plan. “I don’t know what to put in the second box,” he said.
We sat at the kitchen table with the worksheet. I wanted to say “recycle more” or “use less plastic,” but he’d heard those a thousand times. They didn’t feel like action to him. They felt like the stuff he already wasn’t doing enough of.
So I asked, “What part of global warming do you actually see?”
He thought about it. “At lunch, there are those little milk cartons and plastic forks. Everything gets thrown away. It’s like, every day.”
That was a beginning. We looked up how many kids ate school lunch in his district. It was around 900 lunches a day. “So every day, this school produces a thousand pieces of plastic waste,” I said. “If you wanted to, you could talk to the principal about setting up a recycling station or using refillable trays.”
He didn’t get excited. But he stopped looking stuck. He wrote “plastic waste in the cafeteria” in the first box. He wrote “talk to principal” in the second box.
The next day, he actually did it. He asked the principal for five minutes and read a short speech he’d written on his phone. The principal listened. He said the district had been talking about a “green team” for a while, and maybe this was the push they needed. He didn’t promise anything right then.
What I learned from that small, unimpressive moment is something I’ve come back to again and again: kids don’t need to be told they can change the world. They need to be shown they can change the thing right in front of them.
In American schools, we often frame action as something heroic. We want kids to be “leaders,” to “speak out,” to “make a difference.” But that language has a shadow side. When a child is asked to take action on a problem as enormous as climate change or gun violence, their brain does the math. They don’t have money. They don’t have votes. They don’t have a driver’s license. The gap between the problem and their power is so wide that the only logical response is, “What’s the point?”
That’s not apathy. That’s overwhelm.
I’ve talked to enough teachers and parents to know this is common. An eighth grade teacher I know assigns a civic action project every spring. She says the kids who pick large global issues tend to procrastinate the most. The kids who pick narrowly—like the cracked sidewalk near the school entrance or the stray cat problem behind the gym—actually follow through. And once they finish, they’re more likely to believe their actions matter.
So now I try to shrink the assignment, no matter where it comes from.
First, ask about what they see, not what they care about. “Caring” is vague. Seeing is specific. When my son said “cafeteria plastic,” it was something he encountered every day. He didn’t have to read an article to understand it. He’d experienced it. The same works with younger kids: “What did you notice this week that bugged you?” not “What problem would you like to solve?”
Second, find the smallest possible unit of action. Instead of “write a letter to your congressperson,” try “write a question to the school board.” Instead of “organize a community clean-up,” try “pick up one block for fifteen minutes.” The action needs to be completed in less than a week, ideally less than a day. If it feels too big to finish, it’s too big to feel real.
Third, look for people already doing something. A lot of kids freeze because they think they have to invent a solution from scratch. But most problems already have someone working on them. The question becomes “How can you help them?” rather than “How can you fix this alone?” For my son, the principal already knew about the waste issue. That made his role smaller: not the creator, but a voice.
Fourth, let them make the call. It’s tempting to jump in with suggestions. But when I suggested “talk to the principal,” I made sure it was just one option. Then I waited. The choice was his. That matters because action is not really about the outcome. It’s about the feeling that your brain had an idea and the world responded—even if the response was just a five-minute conversation.
The phrase “call to action” still sits oddly with me. It sounds like a command. Like an email from a political candidate that ends with three exclamation points. But when I watch my son walk to school, he points out the trash cans near the cafeteria door and says, “I wonder if anyone actually uses those.” He hasn’t become an activist. The principal did send out a letter to parents about waste reduction, and the school got a few more recycle bins. I’m not sure my son connected that to his speech. Maybe it was a coincidence.
But something shifted. He stopped saying “there’s nothing I can do.” He now says “I don’t know what I can do, but maybe I could figure it out.” That’s a different sentence.
I still don’t know if the green team will ever form. Ms. Reyes changed her assignment to something more local. She asked students to observe a place they spent time in and describe one small problem. They noticed the free bus that no one seemed to use. They wrote about the water fountain that always makes a weird noise. It wasn’t world-changing. But it was a start.
Maybe that’s all a call to action needs to be: a start small enough that a kid can actually answer.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why ‘Call to Action’ Assignments Can Overwhelm Kids (and What to Do Instead)