"The fundamental difficulty is that the work in which the schools seek to engage the child is not significant to him. It does not satisfy the needs which the individual child experiences. It does not gratify any hunger or yearning he has felt. It does not answer any questions which his experiences have raised in his mind. It does not contribute to the solution of any problems which he has encountered in actual life." Does the sentiment of this quote about students' motivation sound familiar? It comes from chapter one of The Motivation of Schoolwork, by H.B. Wilson and G.M. Wilson. This book was published in 1916.
Jump ahead nearly 100 years, to 2014, and an article written by Emma Brown in The Washington Post entitled "U.S. Students Stall In Math, Reading." This article about United States students' scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress highlights the stagnation of twelfth-graders' scores recently, and actual decline in reading scores since the early 1990's. In the article, readers see this analysis: "Some analysts contend that the 12th-grade scores are evidence only of an unsurprising truth: that high school seniors are not motivated to try their hardest on tests in which they have no real stake. 'We all remember exactly how engaged your 17-year-old high school senior is,' said Frederick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute."
Teachers have grappled with how, optimally, to motivate students for at least 100 years. The fact that it's hard to motivate children is old news to parents. Anyone familiar with Bill Watterson's work in Calvin and Hobbes or Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman's contemporary comic strip, Zits, will recognize these authors' spot-on depictions of parents trying to motivate their children to help with chores, eat healthy food, join in family activities, and be better students. But, take 10 Calvins or Jeremys, put them together in a room with 10 more students, and have the goal of teaching all 20 some aspect of an academic subject, such as symbolism, the causes of the Great Depression, multiplying fractions, or cell division. Maybe now it's understandable why the engagement of students has been a topic of study, discussion, and debate for so long.
On a theoretical level, why is motivating students so challenging? Take a look at Learning Theory Fundamentals. This web site examines the learning theories of just six psychologists and theorists: David Ausubel, Albert Bandura, Jerome Bruner, Robert Gagne, B.F. Skinner, and Lev Vygotsky. Yet each one has his own theory about where students derive their desire to learn. For Ausubel, motivation comes out of learning. Bandura thinks students' self-efficacy is at the root of their motivation. Bruner believed intrinsic rewards encouraged students to achieve. In Gagne's view, students are motivated by feeling more capable. And Skinner held that external rewards are what motivates students. Finally, Vygotsky's research led him to conclude that students are driven by appropriately challenging and engaging tasks. What's the problem? These and other researchers are all right, about some students.
No two students are exactly alike. While some students want to do well because they take pride in their work, others can't get to this point because they've developed negative beliefs about their own capacities to learn. Some students love to get stars, bookmarks, and homework passes for doing well. But others will only try if the work they complete shows they can earn "A's."
So, how do I light the fire to learn in my students? Learn, practice for excellence, and experiment. On a practical level, Jon Saphier, Mary Ann Haley-Speca, and Robert Gower identify, in The Skillful Teacher, three areas of teaching which address motivation: expectations, personal relationship building, and classroom climate. In the book, they present multiple actions teachers can take, in each area, to improve students' motivation. I could spend the rest of my career learning to use these research-supported actions, and I still wouldn't perfect all of their ideas. But a few I've worked on developing are sticking with students, actively listening to students, and instilling positive beliefs about risk taking.
I also have to take what I learn from theorists and my coworkers and devise my own approaches to test on students. Recently, all of my students took standardized math, reading, and language use tests, as they had done in the fall, and some took again in the winter. A coworker who teaches math aimed to motivate her students to do well on the math portion of the test. She handed them the math scores they earned when they most recently took the test. She then talked to them about how, if the students did well enough this spring, they might move to a more advanced level of math class next year. A good plan, I thought, employing both Vygotsky and Skinner's theories of motivation.
By chance, I was privy to two students' thoughts about my coworker's motivational tactics. The first I overheard talking to some friends. And from what she said, I gathered she felt concerned about doing well enough to be promoted to the higher level math class. What she said and her tone conveyed that she felt threatened by the challenge. The second student told me about this challenge and confidently stated that she believed she would be up to it and was capable of advancing to the more challenging level of math. My analysis of these two incidents--the first student operates under Bandura's theory of motivation while the second is motivated according to Gagne and Skinner's theories.
Since I wanted to encourage my students to try their best on the reading and language use tests, but didn't want a repeat thought process for the first student I describe above, I decided to tweak my coworker's approach. I gave my students their last scores on the tests. And then I appealed to their sense of wanting to show how they've become more capable by challenging them to do their best, so I had a true sense of how much they had grown in their learning.
I also used two metaphors. First, I explained how in individual sports, such as cross country running, there can be only one winner. But what everyone else can do is improve on their previous best time. This, I hoped, would touch upon the students' self-efficacy by making the goal less daunting, try to better than last winter or fall. My second comparison was about Michael Jordan not making the varsity basketball team as a sophomore in high school. I relayed to students what the coach said Jordan needed to work on in his game, and how, within a few years he was a star college, and eventually pro, player. And I also highlighted how Jordan's success must have come from hard work and desire to improve in those aspects of basketball. The point I eventually made was, even if students didn't score the highest in seventh grade, they still had a lot of growing to do, and could still end up strong readers and writers if they kept working at it. Here, I tried to instill an intrinsic reward.
For me, focusing on techniques that encourage my students is a critical part of what I do each day in my classes. Challenges continue to present themselves, and discovering and utilizing the solutions to these problems takes effort. But I see a strong payoff in continuing to better myself at tackling the complexities of motivating students.
Thank you,
Brendan
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