Students And Work Refusal

What do you do with kids who refuse to do any work? This has been a serious issue with Montana all year long. Anise too, to some extent, depending on her mood, but definitely Montana. He will flat out refuse to do work, and nothing can change his mind.

The kids are on an incentive program where they earn a token for each piece of work they do. They can trade their tokens for preferred break time choices before lunch and at the end of the day. They can also save up tokens to trade for a special activity on Fridays. 

The work isn't even terribly demanding. I try to make it fun and authentic, and gear it towards their interests. For instance, Montana and Persius hate writing, so much that just getting them to pick up a pencil can be torturous. So I helped them start their own blogs. They loved their blogs and wrote like crazy for a while... until I started trying to teach them to go back and edit their work for punctuation, capitalization, grammar, etc. Then it became work. Persius still writes in his blog and will even edit it, but Montana just spends his blogging time trying to find pictures to add to his blog, or sneakily visiting other websites. 

Sometimes I can sort of trick Montana into doing some work. Today I had a magazine article about a video game. I started reading part of it out loud in a casual, "Hey, this is interesting" type of way, and Montana came over and sat down. He listened to me read, and answered comprehension questions and everything. At the end, I pointed out that the article had a writing prompt suggesting we write about a video game we'd like to create. When I agreed to do the physical writing part as long as Montana did the thinking, he dove right into it. Afterwards I made sure to tell him he did great work, and gave him his token. 

But more frequently, he won't work. If you press him, he'll destroy the work you're trying to give him, and then move on to rip the rest of the room apart. 

I prefer to not press Montana, instead reminding him that he will earn tokens for his break time if he does some work, and that it is his choice. Then I go do something else. He will literally sit on a bean bag chair all day long, doing nothing, while loudly complaining about how bored he is. 

There are two ways of thinking about this. I tend to lean towards wanting to bring the learning to where he's at. In other words, "If Montana refuses to do this work, I need to keep trying to find something that will engage him so he can learn." However, my supervisor, the school psychologist who happens to share the room with me and tends to be somewhat of a micromanager, leans towards, "He needs to comply. Take everything away until he can comply."

I wish I knew what to do, I just read an article saying to focus your attention and efforts on the kids who are enthusiastic, and make joining in seem like the best choice. But I only have 3 kids most of the time, and with Anise away at Residential I'm down to 2! Ruddy loves to do his work and earn tokens, and even asks to do extra work during his breaks in order to earn more tokens. Unfortunately Montana could care less what Ruddy is doing, and would probably rather do the opposite.

So, any advice? What would you do for a kid like Montana?