About a few years into my teaching career, I was given the opportunity to move into the honors and accelerated English classes. It was an awesome experience, and I learned quite a bit about good and bad teaching through my experience with those very motivated and ambitious students. After a number of years however, I knew it was time for a change, and I transitioned into the role of a reading specialist and began to work with students who really struggled both with reading and with school. It was a dramatic shift. In my honors classes, students would want to argue over a point they missed on their essays, papers, and tests. In my reading intervention classes, students weren’t interested about how or why they lost a point here or there, they were more interested in why they had to do the assignment or activity in the first place. I learned real quickly that before I could do anything to help them develop their academic literacies, I had to get them to invest in the class, to take risks, be vulnerable, and to have faith that the effort they were expending would be worth the payoff down the road.
In honors classes, I had students who were driven by intrinsic motivation because they were naturally interested or eager to learn, and I had students who were driven by extrinsic motivation because they would work really hard for that good grade. These were my point pinchers, the ones who typically lived in mortal fear of dropping lower than an A. I still had intrinsically and extrinsically driven students in my intervention classes, but within the context of our classroom those drivers would look different from the ones of the honors students. For example, while a student from my honors class might be extrinsically motivated by the points given to an activity, my intervention students might be less interested in those. However, they would be extrinsically interested in extra credit or a piece of candy, a party etc. Intrinsic motivations were also present, but in different forms-- the feelings associated with positive feedback, the proud acknowledgements of families / parents / guardians / important role models and many others. One of my struggles is that I get trapped into thinking that the drivers of those intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are the same everyone, when they might not be.
Our understanding of motivation is evolving as educational researchers and reading researchers continue to examine how it operates and the factors that can both inhibit and promote its growth. As indicated above, there is no grand theory of motivation and how it operates for students. We know, for example, that intrinsic motivation promotes more long term growth and helps individuals overcome larger setbacks and obstacles. We also know that extrinsic motivation has its place, especially for tasks and activities that the individual does not perceive as important. However, these extrinsic motivations work better for short term goals and superficial choices but not as well for transformative change.
For me, motivation has become the cornerstone of my philosophy of teaching. At heart, I sincerely believe that if I cannot get the student to make the investment in learning, then no amount of expertise I might have on the technique of reading will be of use. Teaching attack strategies or word patterns or diphthongs will be really difficult if the student does not see the relevance of drilling those skills. Building motivation.
Begin with the why. Chances are that you probably do this anyway. It seems like there will always be students who raise their hands and ask, “Why are we doing this?” The answer should be concise and clear, an ultimate elevator pitch where the stakes are tied to whether a student will be joining you for the next three to five weeks or not. In some cases, I will answer this question but the student simply doesn’t accept it-- I frequently run into this with Romeo and Juliet because it really is quite an investment for them. For some students, they are going to reject everything at face value. The trick is to ignore them in the short term with the hopes that they will join you on the journey for other reasons (ie. more points, a better grade, social engagement with fellow students etc). The point is to always start with your why and build from there.
Teaching students to learn. An emphasis on motivation means that you will have to do more work on the front end then on the back end. Your work on the front end will involve getting the students to make the investment in the book / paper / activity. And it’s a little less work on the back end where teachers can sometimes get a little too obsessed with the details of the project or test. This is not to say that our lessons should skip over those details. Instead, it means that I make those details available to students and encourage them to discover and apply them, to seek me out when they need help versus baby stepping them through every phase of the process. It is one of the ways we hope to hand over the responsibility of learning to the student.
The power of a question. An easy method of motivating students is with a well thought out question that can peak interest. The key to a good question is one that does not have an easy answer (or even a correct answer). One that perhaps challenges a notion or belief they might have. Sometimes I use philosophical questions, “How do you know you are alive?” Sometimes they are in reference to a given unit or topic, “What role has rap played in advancing social justice?” “Is it okay for some people to use words that others should not?” “What makes for a good ending to a book or movie?”
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