Amy Bastarache

So, this is the end of the research required for my class…but it doesn’t mean that I’ve learned everything I need to know about motivating students and motivating myself. These are topics I will continue learning about and discovering as I move into my career. I’m sure that actually having a class of students and interacting with their various personalities and challenges will teach me more about motivating them than I could ever learn from researching. However, the research I have done has been incredibly helpful to me.

One of the requirements for this project was to use various technology resources in our investigations. We needed three, and they were intended to be resources that we don’t use on a daily basis (i.e. more than just a website). I was pretty skeptical of this requirement at the beginning because I questioned whether I would be able to research the way I wanted to if I was worrying about meeting a technology requirement. However, as I got into the process, I realized that I could find very relevant information in these resources, and that they were far more helpful than most websites. The first source I used was a podcast on academic enablers, which are five factors that influence student success and performance in the classroom. I realized that if a student was deficient in any of these enablers, it could manifest as an apparent lack of motivation, so “treating” a student as though they were unmotivated could mean overlooking the real problem. It is very good to be aware of these enablers so I can differentiate an unmotivated student from one who is simply bored (for example). The second source I used came from as RSS feed into my bloglines account. It was an article from the New York Times about the deficiency in student grades and skill levels (the grades were not reflective of students’ basic skill levels). I concluded from that that grades are a major motivator in most students and teachers. My third source was a video from the website learner.org, which showed teachers and students in real classrooms and talked about ways to motivate students and promote success. Some themes I saw in the classrooms were a cohesive community where students could ask questions and make mistakes without being ridiculed, students making discoveries for themselves instead of listening to the teacher tell them about it, students working in groups, and teachers giving students relevant, real-world questions to answer. I realized that teachers can do so much to motivate students simply by the environment they foster in their classroom and the types of tasks they design for students. All three of these resources were very eye-opening, and I know that the information I found will come in handy to me as a teacher. For a more in-depth look at what I learned and how I might apply this knowledge, please visit my final project posting on our group website.

We were also required to collaborate three different times with our classmates. For these, I first collaborated with Ashleigh; she was investigating TPRS, a method that my mentor teacher uses, and she sent me some questions about the method, which I answered to the best of my ability. The second time, I posted on the FL Teaching Methods 2 group’s website, because their research went along really well with mine. For my third collaboration, I took Bridget’s surveys to my placement class to help her collect data for her project.

Needless to say, although I was pretty skeptical about this project at first, it has proved well worth my time and energy. I have discovered a lot about motivating my students, and I feel like I am better equipped to begin teaching because of it. Motivation is a very broad topic, and I did answer some of my bigger questions, but because of time limits, I could not research my topic as in-depth as I would have liked. So I will most likely continue seeking out resources to help me learn more about motivation of students and teachers as I begin my career. This project has also helped to make me more aware of the variety of resources that exist on this topic, and how helpful and insightful they can be. My overall feeling about this project is that was worth my time and will be very beneficial to me as a beginning teacher.

This week I watched a video from Learner.org (we’ve used some of these videos in class). It came from a series called “The Learning Classroom: Theory into Practice,” and I watched session 12, “Expectations for Success: Motivation and Learning.” I found the video to be incredibly helpful and insightful into how teachers can motivate students, regardless of subject area, simply by the way that they design tasks and the environment that they create in their classroom. The video is about half an hour long and it shows teachers of various levels and subjects who have designed tasks that are student centered. It covers all the core subjects, and although none of the clips dealt with foreign language classrooms specifically, the concepts that they were modeling can certainly be applied to FL curriculum. The classrooms shown were a 5th-6th grade social studies class, a 10th grade science class, an engineering class (not sure of the grade level, but I think it was middle school), a 12th grade English class, a 4th grade math and science class, and a high school history class (not sure what grade exactly).  

At the start of the video, three key factors to motivating students are laid out. They are:

1. Expectancies of student success-what the student thinks of themself and their learning. Do they have the necessary skills to succeed and can they expect to succeed?

2. Design tasks that are genuinely engaging, that students will want to complete.

3. Teachers should assist students and provide support and guidance as they make discoveries in their learning process.

If teachers expect success, then students will too. Motivation can vary from subject to subject, and it is not something that students either have or don’t have. Therefore, teachers can do a lot to motivate students simply with the tasks they design, how they scaffold and support students, and the community and environment that they create in their classroom. All the teachers in the video were great examples of these principles, and their students seemed to be very engaged in the tasks at hand.

One trend that really stood out to me in all the clips was that students were working in groups to discover a key concept or principle. The teacher was not lecturing in any of them, save giving directions or facilitating a class discussion; in all the classrooms, students were interacting with each other and their instructor.  For example, in the 10th grade science class, students were given the task of figuring out how they could get a membrane out of a cell (or something like that, it doesn’t matter exactly what the task was). Students were working in groups to make this discovery, and they were using eggs to represent the cells. The teacher did not tell them the answer, she had them figure it out for themselves. She was circulating the room as students worked, asking and answering questions to guide students to the correct line of thinking. By working in groups, individual students were not singled out; it was up to the group to come up with the procedure together. Students knew that it was alright to make mistakes (some of their eggs broke, etc.); they simply recognized them as limitations that they needed to work around. All of the teachers said that students need to be able to investigate and figure things out for themselves because they will remember not only the conclusion that they came to but also the process they used to get there, which they may be able to apply in other situations. They said that students don’t remember things if they just tell them what to do and why, but it sticks with them if they can go through the process on their own.

In the engineering class, the students were working in groups on a project that was designed to assess whether or not they had learned the material or not. They were contructing bridges, and the teacher basically said that he would know if the students learned the material or not because they would build a good bridge. The problem they were giving was a real-life, relevant situation that they could feasibly encounter in an engineering job. They were also given real world limitations to work around, such as the inflation of the cost of materials due to the war. Once again, the group work ecouraged students to collaborate with one another and compete against other groups, and it fostered community in the classroom as well.

Finally, the 4th grade math and science class was given tools and an objective, but they were not told how to reach the goal; they had to figure that out on their own. The students, working in pairs, came up with different ideas on how to reach the objective, and then the class discussed which ones were best. The teacher described this as “the meat of teaching;” students were able to disagree with each other and offer constructive criticism. She said that it is so important to create a classroom environment where students feel comfortable disagreeing with one another and using their critical thinking skills to defend their own opinions as well as to challenge the opinions of others. This offers students the opportunity to teach each other, which is a natural part of the process of learning, and helps everyone to better remember the concepts.

So, the three things that stood out to me in this video, based on what I observed in the different classrooms, were the importance of allowing students to work in groups to make discoveries. All of the teachers used this technique, and the students seemed to be genuinely engaged in the tasks at hand. The teachers did not spoonfeed anything to their students, but they scaffolded students’ thinking and supported them as they went through the process of discovering how to best perform the task. Obviously, students like to work together, and if the task is something that is relevant and engaging, then they will be motivated to work on it. Something like building a bridge in engineering class, or perhaps simulating a trip to the target culture in a foreign langauge class, is a relevant task that presents challenges that students may actually face someday. So the second key point that I noticed was the relevancy of the task and its ability to genuinely engage students. The third concept was that of a strong classroom community, which most of the teachers seemed to have fostered in their classrooms. Students need to know that it’s ok to make mistakes and face challenges in their learning; the only way to really learn is to be challenged and figure out how to move past it. So students need to be comfortable collaborating with one another and sharing their thoughts, opinions, and insights, and they also need to be comfortable giving and accepting feedback, both positive and negative. It is also important, when designing tasks, to include a variety of activities that will challenge students with different skills. We as foreign language teachers are well aware of the importance of this, but it applies to all subject areas. 

Overall, this video was very helpful to me in understanding how to motivate students. I think it’s tempting for teachers to think that if students aren’t motivated it’s their own fault, some defect in them that keeps them from enjoying learning. Not true– as teachers there is so much we can do to motivate our students, simply by the tasks we design and the community we create within the classroom. Maybe this is easier said than done, I don’t know, but it certainly seems do-able in any subject area. We do have a curriculum to follow, but we can be creative about how we do it, and that will make such a huge difference in the motivation of our students.

That’s all for now!!

 I’m collaborating with Bridget this week; I’m distributing her survey to my placement class. It’s about motivation and what types of activities and subject matter motivate Spanish students. So it will be very interesting to me to know the results too!

 ¡Hasta luego!

Yesterday I was reading some of the articles that came through my Bloglines account (similar to Google Reader, uses RSS feeds), and there were two that really interested me; I found them to be quite relevant to my inquiry into the different motivations of students and teachers. The first article came from the New York Times education section, and the second one came from the CNN education page. Both deal with the same topic, which is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam results, which were released on Thursday, February 22. The results of the test showed that in 2005, the reading skills of seniors across the United States were “significantly worse” than those of high school seniors in 1992 (the exam also tests students’ abilities in math, but the 2005 test had been modified from previous versions, so the results could not be compared with those from 1992). Considered alone, this fact is disheartening, and clearly shows that US schools have some improving to do. However, the phenomenon examined in these articles is not only the discouraging evidence of the test, but the conflicting statistic that shows current US seniors taking more difficult classes and earning better grades than they did in the ’90s. These results are obviously in conflict; how could high schoolers possibly be earning better grades than they did in the ’90s if their basic reading skills are weaker? Two possibilities presented in the NYT article are grade inflation and the tendency to increasingly factor things such as class participation and extra credit into students’ grades. I certainly agree that these are possible causes for the conflict between students’ grades and abilities, but I also see motivation as a possible reason that teachers would try to raise students’ grades.

There has been a surge, especially in the last decade or so, of this ideology (if you can even call it that) of preserving students’ self esteem by not telling them they are wrong (“2+2 can equal 5 if you want it to”). Students are rewarded for meeting lower standards because teachers (or parents, administrators, coaches, etc.), don’t want to hurt their self esteem. Students cannot be punished because it may hurt their self esteem, etc. I know this is especially relevant in younger grades because students’ psyches are more fragile then; high schoolers can typically handle being punished when they do something wrong. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a little; but there has definitely been a move away from “wrong” answers and towards a belief of “what may be true for one person is not necessarily true for everybody,” not just in schools but in society as well. Anyway, back to the point, I see that this belief system could certainly cause teachers to want to inflate students’ grades or give them little boosters along the way; what teacher wants to hurt their students’ self esteem? Teachers may perceive that if students earn lower grades, they will lose motivation, or maybe without these boosters, some students would not pass. Grades are probably one of the top motivators for student success; I am speculating, but I see that there is a huge emphasis on grades at all levels of our school systems. If students don’t earn a certain grade, they don’t pass; parents put intense amounts of pressure on their college-bound students to “make the grade” because that is what will get them scholarships in college, etc. So it’s no wonder that our grading system is inflated and not reflective of students’ true abilities. What good are our schools doing students if they inflate their grades to make them feel better or more motivated? It doesn’t change the fact that they don’t know the material, and it certainly doesn’t do them any favors at higher level institutions.

I’m not sure what would have to happen to lessen the influence of grades on students and their role as a major motivator for student performance. If the only goal is a good grade, that encourages students to cram and memorize information that they will not retain once the assessment is over, and naturally they will not be able to reproduce this information on standardized tests. I’m curious about what has changed in our school systems since the early ’90s; fewer students were college-bound then, but were grades as important back then as they are now? My guess is that if not as many students attended college, that grades were probably not as important 15 years ago. Perhaps in the rush to prepare students for college level work, the acquiring of basic skills is being overlooked. Teachers compensate for this lack of skills by weighing grades and offering opportunities for extra credit and similar things. In this way, they emphasize that the grade is more important than the skills necessary to earn it. Students, in turn, are motivated by their grades, even though they do not necessarily reflect their true abilities.

Basically, what I got out of these articles is that grades are a huge motivator for student performance, and when students lack the skills necessary to earn the grades that will motivate them to continue learning, schools compensate by inflating their grades so they feel better about life. This doesn’t really do anybody any favors, but at least the students stay motivated.  This may also help teachers stay motivated, because they can look at higher grades and feel that they are doing their job well. That is not to say that teachers don’t do their jobs if they give their students little grade boosters; they are just as much victims of the system as their students are. Regardless, as these articles showed, grades are a major, if not the major, motivator for student performance, and schools, teachers,  parents and students perpetuate this by continuing to emphasize the importance of grades.

I read something interesting in a Reader’s Digest magazine today (I don’t remember which edition it was, but Katie Couric was on the cover). It was an article on burn-out, and it had a list of the professions where burn out occurs most often. Teaching was #1. Not so encouraging to a future teacher, but I wasn’t entirely surprised by it. I wonder how many burned out teachers are out there, still going to work everyday and going through the motions, but having no energy to be motivated in the classroom. And I wonder how this affects the quality of their work and the motivation of their students. It can’t be positive. Teachers pretty much go non-stop all day long, planning, teaching, having meetings, dealing with issues that come up, etc., not to mention that a lot of them have families and kids of their own to think about. Teaching can be exhausting if you don’t take care of your personal time. So, what I got from that little blurb was that some teachers are probably not very motivated, either experiencing burn out or trying to avoid it.

That’s about it for this time…this post is long enough! More later!

This week for collaboration, I posted on the Foreign Language Teaching Methods page (Kristyn and Bridget’s group). They aren’t my group, but I sort of feel like I have more in common with them than I do with my own group, so I posted on their page. 

So I’ve been realizing that my topic is extremely broad, and for that reason it is quite difficult to research. Google searches for “student motivation” don’t really return many current, relevant resources. I’m not sure that I want to narrow my topic necessarily (I’m not sure what I would most want to focus on) but I don’t know if it’s possible, with everything else going on in life, to put in the time necessary to thoroughly research all of my questions. So right now my plan is to do the best that I can with the time that I have, and although I may not get all my questions answered, I know I will learn from the research I do. As long as I’m finding out new things as I go, I’ll be doing alright.

That being said, I listened to a podcast today called “Academic Enablers Critical to Student Success,” by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER). The podcast was created on September 12, 2005, and the podcaster (not sure if that’s the right term) is Paul Baker. The link to the website where you can listen to or download the podcast can be found here. It is only five minutes long

This podcast does not deal specifically with motivation, but it introduces the idea that motivation is one of many factors that influence student performance and achievement. Baker introduces the concept of “academic enablers,” which he defines as “attitudes and behaviors that allow a student to participate in and ultimately benefit from academic instruction in the classroom.” The attitudes and behaviors that he identifies as academic enablers are prior achievement, interpersonal skills, motivation, study skills, and engagement. All of these factors, he argues, are critical to student success. He believes that these “enabling skills and attitudes should be taught explicitly to optimize student achievement,” yet at the same time he points out that as students advance from primary to secondary school, the emphasis on skill development decreases and the emphasis on content acquisition increases. Thus, study skills become more and more important as students advance in school, but they are not taught much after middle school. The trouble for many students, in my opinion, is that they are never adequately taught study skills in the younger grades, so that by the time they get to the secondary level and are expected to be able to apply these skills, they have still not acquired them. Thus, a student who doesn’t study or put forth (seemingly) much effort in class may appear to suffer from lack of motivation, but really the difficulty could be that they were never taught how to study or think critically. Baker points this out in the podcast; students who seem “unmotivated” may actually just lack the appropriate study or interpersonal skills to perform the task(s) at hand. To assume that these students are unmotivated would be a “misdiagnoses” in a sense, and to “treat” them for this condition may mean actually overlooking the true cause of the problem. Many teachers will create “assessment and/or intervention plans that overlook the true causes for student difficulty.” Obviously, this would not be as helpful as creating a plan that would address the academic enabler that is truly causing a student to appear unmotivated. Perhaps they need to be taught basic study skills, or have opportunities to interact with other students in a low pressure, non-threatening environment, or perhaps they need to experience success on a small scale before they will attempt larger tasks. Whatever the case, simply assuming students to be unmotivated may actually mean overlooking the real problem. The academic enablers that Baker identifies are undoubtedly all related, but “treating” a student for one when it is a different one giving them difficulty may not produce results as quickly as treating them for the root cause of their difficulties.

As a future teacher, this podcast was very relevant to me. I feel like many teachers would see signs such as not studying, not participating, not achieving one’s potential, etc., as a lack of motivation, which any of these could easily indicate, but Baker points out that in many cases, motivation is not the true problem. As a teacher I will now be aware that there are many factors other than interest in the material that influence student motivation. I will try to closely observe students that are struggling and talk with them, their parents, past teachers, counselors, etc., to determine as accurately as I can the cause of their difficulty. I realize that if I have 5 classes of 30 students this will be a lot to keep up with, but I am committed to help all of my students to the best of my ability, whether it means teaching them basic study skills or redesigning lessons to accommodate their needs.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that all of these academic enablers really do influence a student’s overall motivation; perhaps the motivation that Baker discusses refers to the students’ level of interest in the material. He does not go into this in the podcast, but the general idea that I get from it is that there are many factors that contribute to student motivation in the broad sense, and each student in my classes will have a different combination of them, which will obviously result in varying degrees of motivation and performance. The important thing to realize is that there are many factors, so it is especially important to determine which one, or ones, are causing students to struggle or lose motivation; in order to truly help students succeed, we must determine the root cause of their difficulties before creating an intervention plan. Intervention plans that do not target the specific areas that students struggle with will not be nearly as helpful to them as those that do. I am very glad I listened to this podcast; even though it is only five minutes long, it is full of relevant information regarding student achievement and motivation.

Collaboration: This week I collaborated with Ashleigh; she is working on TPRS, which my mentor teacher uses. She emailed me some questions and I answered them to the best of my ability, in as much detail as I could. See her inquiry project page; I believe she is planning to post the interview.

I am now in my final semester of the teaching program, and one of our assignments is an Inquiry Project. Each of us have chosen a topic that we would like to learn more about throughout the semester. Bascially, we’re “inquiring” about something that is interesting and will help us somehow in our careers as teachers. My topic, which you can probably guess from the title of this entry, is motivation: what motivates teachers to teach and what motivates students to learn? These are the questions that I originally came up with when I proposed this topic:

What motivates different students to succeed in school?
What motivates teachers?
How do different motives affect the performance and effectiveness of students and teachers?
How do teachers go about motivating students? 
Is it possible to make sure all students are motivated?
What are some strategies for motivating students who don’t care?
Motivation is interesting to me because it’s what makes us effective in what we do. I’m not saying that someone who isn’t motivated can’t perform well, but I would claim that they can’t perform as well as they would if they were motivated to complete whatever the task is. Performance also depends, of course, on what you’re motivated by. If one teacher is motivated simply by their paycheck, chances are that they will not be as creative or engaging in their curriculum as the teacher that is driven by a desire to make their subject matter interesting and relevant to their students. Similarly, a student that is motivated by pressure from their parents will probably not perform as well, or at least not enjoy their performance as much as, the student that is intrinsically motivated to learn the material. Likewise, the student that is not motivated to succeed in school will probably not perform as well as the intrinsically motivated student. The way I see it, there are millions of different combinations of teacher and student motivations, which in turn create millions of possible classroom environments and dynamics. The possibilities are endless, and my purpose in this project is to research strategies for motivating students, statistics about student and teacher motivations, how to stay motivated as a teacher, and basically anything I can get my hands on about the topic. I know this research, although time consuming now, will probably save me a lot of stress and anxiety as a beginning teacher.

I’d like to start out with what I already know about motivation; I know there are other entries on my blog about it (under “Class Readings”). We did a lot of reading on motivation in my class last year, and I found the topic to be very relevant and interesting. One thing that really stood out to me was the importance of showing students the relevance of subject material by relating it to their lives and interests. I think this is absolutely fundamental; how can a teacher expect students to be motivated to learn something that they view as pointless or uninteresting? So the challenge there is making it interesting. One idea I have for tackling this problem in my classes is to find out from day one what interests my students. I will probably have them fill out some sort of card or paper with their schedules and emergency contacts, so part of that will also be a place for them to list their hobbies and interests, what they expect from the class, etc. That way I can incorporate those things into my curriculum and I know what types of scenarios would be relevant to my students.  Along with that also comes making material culturally relevant to students. On page 186 of her book Secondary Classroom Management, Carol Weinstein says “[w]hen students are not from the dominant culture, teachers must make a special effort to relate academic content to referents from the students’ own culture.” I think this is very important; what a difference it would make to a minority student to feel that their culture is valued and appreciated enough to be incorporated into the curriculum. I think it is so important for teachers to at least have a general understanding of their students’ various cultural backgrounds and values, so many conflicts and “behavioral problems” in schools simply boil down to cultural misunderstandings, at least some of which could be avoided if teachers were more knowledgable about the cultural backgrounds of their students. Another important concept with respect to motivation is the expectancy x value model, developed by Jere Brophy. We read about this quite a bit last year, and it is also mentioned in Weinstein’s book (175). Bascially teachers have two major responsibilites when it comes to motivating students, which are: 1. They must create tasks that students can perform with a reasonable amount of effort (expectancy-too easy and they lose interest, too hard and they get frustrated and quit) and 2. They must help students recognize the value in completing the task at hand (value). Teachers must also support students as they complete challenging tasks; teacher support is key to students success. Setting goals can also be helpful in motivating students, and teachers can help students set reasonable goals that can attain if they put forth the necessary effort.  One thing I remember from my readings in my other class was the idea of modifying lessons to make them more interesting to certain students. There are two sides to this coin, however; one is that it may result in making the task easier somehow, which is unfair to other students, but on the flip side, if it gets an otherwise unmotivated student motivated, then perhaps that’s the lesser of two evils. That’s something I may look into a little more.

I know that this entry has been very vague and general (and long!), but as I research and come up with more specific material, hopefully I can solidify my ideas a little more. Stay tuned…