Reform – Page 2 – Copy / Paste

May 22, 2012July 31, 2012

How to Motivate Students: Researched-Based Strategies

The student feels in control by seeing a direct link between his or her actions and an outcome and retains autonomy by having some choice about whether or how to undertake the task.

A new Center on Education Policy report, Student Motivation—An Overlooked Piece of School Reform, pulls together findings about student motivation from decades of major research conducted by scholars, organizations, and practitioners. The six accompanying background papers examine a range of themes and approaches, from the motivational power of video games and social media to the promise and pitfalls of paying students for good grades.

Researchers generally agree on four major dimensions that contribute to student motivation (below). At least one of these dimensions must be satisfied for a student to be motivated. The more dimensions that are met, and the more strongly they are met, the greater the motivation will be.

Four Dimensions of Motivation

Competence — The student believes he or she has the ability to complete the task.
Control / Autonomy — The student feels in control by seeing a direct link between his or her actions and an outcome and retains autonomy by having some choice about whether or how to undertake the task.
Interest / Value — The student has some interest in the task or sees the value of completing
Relatedness — Completing the task brings the student social rewards, such as a sense of belonging to a classroom or other desired social group or approval from a person of social importance to the student.

As the report authors note: The interplay of these dimensions—along with other dynamics such as school climate and home environment—is quite complex and varies not only among different students but also within the same student in different situations. Still, this basic framework can be helpful in designing or analyzing the impact of various strategies to increase students’ motivation.

The report singles out a number of approaches that can motivate unenthusiastic students including inquiry-based learning, service learning, extracurricular programs (like chess leagues) and creative use of technology.

I think increase motivations begins with giving students more responsibility for critical decisions about what and how they learn. I detailed these in my post The Four Negotiables of Student Centered Learning and they are summarized in this table. Teachers need to consider the extent to which they are asking students to manage the four central elements of any lesson – content, process, product and assessment. Any or all can be decided by the teacher, by the students, or some of both. All will assist in building Common Core skills in deeper thinking and analysis.

Students also need guided practice in reflection. Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It’s not something that’s fostered in school – typically someone else tells you how you’re doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning – patterns, connections and progress. One place to start is with the reflective prompts I developed in my Taxonomy of Reflection.

The CEP’s summary report and accompanying papers highlight actions that teachers, school leaders, parents, and communities can take to foster student motivation. The following are just a few of the many ideas included in the report:

Programs that reward academic accomplishments are most effective when they reward students for mastering certain skills or increasing their understanding rather than rewarding them for reaching a performance target or outperforming others.
Tests are more motivating when students have an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge through low-stakes tests, performance tasks, or frequent assessments that gradually increase in difficulty before they take a high-stakes test.
Professional development can help teachers encourage student motivation by sharing ideas for increasing student autonomy, emphasizing mastery over performance, and creating classroom environments where students can take risks without fear of failure
Parents can foster their children’s motivation by emphasizing effort over ability and praising children when they’ve mastered new skills or knowledge instead of praising their innate intelligence.

Many aspects of motivation are not fully understood, the report and background papers caution, and most programs or studies that have shown some positive results have been small or geographically concentrated. “Because much about motivation is not known, this series of papers should be viewed as a springboard for discussion by policymakers, educators, and parents rather than a conclusive research review,” said Nancy Kober, CEP consultant and coauthor of the summary report. “This series can also give an important context to media stories about student achievement, school improvement, or other key education reform issues.”

February 8, 2012August 5, 2013

Schools Making A Difference: Films and Discussions

The Portland City Club is continuing its educational series Schools Making A Difference: Portraits of Excellence, Engagement and Equity – films, panel discussions and participant dialogues.

Though economic realities pose significant challenges for our education system, when schools and communities work together with a clear vision and heroic effort, they can achieve stunning results. Exemplary schools provide high expectations and opportunities for all students to succeed. They also provide real world learning experiences that prepare students for college, careers and citizenship in the 21st century. They do this through an engaging curriculum that recognizes the diverse talents and needs of their student populations. Join fellow citizens, educators, and students for any of four evenings of films, panels, and participant dialogues that offer portraits of such schools in our region and around the world.

The series continues Feb 8 at Mission Theater with a screening of Robert Compton’s “Two Million Minutes” followed by panel discussion. March 5th: “The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System” by Robert Compton. (Hollywood Theater) The final forum is March 14 How Important Are the Arts and Civic Education for Our Students’ Current and Future Lives? featuring the film “Paper Clips” by Elliot Berlin & Joe Fab. (Hollywood Theater)

I attended the first session which featured the film Lessons from the Real World. Bob Gliner, filmmaker, as well as local educators offered an engaging follow up discussion with the audience. The film highlights project-based learning in greater Portland region schools. It’s a fascinating look at K-12 schools that weave community and societal problem solving through their curriculum.

Oregonians will have another chance to see the film which is screening on OPB Plus Sunday night, Feb. 12 at 7 PM throughout most of Oregon. More on “Lessons From the Real World”

Many people feel our public schools are failing, or at best, muddling through. What to do about this critical issue has almost exclusively focused on the efforts of No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top legislation to improve test scores in core subjects like math and reading.

Lessons From the Real World, contends, like many educators, that focusing on test scores to improve student achievement is looking in the wrong place.

Learning to read, do math and other subjects will come if students care about what they are learning, rather than drilling them with subject matter largely divorced from their real lives, and the community and societal problems which often impact those lives.

In Portland, Oregon, teachers at a wide range of schools are putting this idea into practice. While this is their story, it can help point the way to rethinking how schools everywhere can be successfully transformed.

November 25, 2011August 5, 2013

Black Friday: Will Teachers Be Shopping or Working at the Mall?

American Teacher Poster

Throughout my teaching career I had a second job. For the first decade, I spent my summers painting houses. My non-teaching friends joked that I had “summers off.” No, I just had a different job. As the superintendent gave the the opening day pep talk at the start of the school year, I was thinking about the dormers that I still needed to finish.

Ten years into my career, I couldn’t afford to own a home in the community I taught in. I frequently ran into former students. “Hey Mr. Pappas … great to see you … remember me? … are you still a teacher?” I would think – would you ask a doctor that question? … or don’t you consider teaching a real job?

What’s your kid’s teacher doing tonight – home working on lesson plans, or selling cell phones at the mall?

Eventually, I realized I could align my second job with my teaching career – so I turned to academic writing and adjunct teaching. By supplementing my income with summer and evening work, I figured out a way to stay in the classroom for 25 years.

So much for the personal backstory. This post is about American Teacher, a film that follows four teachers who struggle to make ends meet while trying to stay in the profession they love. With narration by Matt Damon, it tells their stories through a mixture of footage and interviews with students, families, and colleagues, as well as the teachers themselves. By following these teachers as they reach different milestones in their careers, it uncovers a deeper story of the teaching profession in America today.

“American Teacher” is waiting for a major theatrical release. I plan on attending the Portland Ore premiere of the film on Thursday Dec 8 at the Hollywood Theater. The film’s producer Ninive Calegari will be hosting the screening.
(I wonder if she’ll bring Matt??) For more information on national screenings of “American Teacher” or to arrange a screening in your area click here.

Statistics show that nearly half of all teachers leave within the first five years. Low salaries and high stress are among the top reasons teachers “burnout” and quit the profession. Sixty-two percent of our nation’s teachers have second jobs outside of the classroom. What’s your kid’s teacher doing tonight – home working on lesson plans, or selling cell phones at the mall?

In countries known for superior student performance (Singapore, South Korea and Finland) top college students are drawn into teaching by competitive salaries and high respect for their contribution to society. In contrast, US teachers are underpaid, relative to other skilled professionals, and they have to listen to politicians accuse them of being lazy and undeserving of collective bargaining rights.

Nearly half of the American teaching profession is eligible for retirement in the next ten years. Will that be seen as a opportunity to hire low-paid replacements? Or do our kids deserve something better?

PS. Need some inspiration? Read my recent post Why I Teach? A Voice from StoryCorps

November 20, 2011January 24, 2012

Studio H Classroom: Design. Build. Transform. Community

Studio H: Design. Build. Transform is a new exhibit that just opened at Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft. It offers visitors an opportunity to immerse themselves in the design process.

While touring the exhibit, I was struck by how the Studio H exhibit embodies the key elements of project-based learning. The PBL approach engages students with the chance to think like professionals while solving real-world problems. Studio H gives PBL added impact by inspiring and empowering student as change agents in their community.

High 5 Studio H

Student-designed solutions that empower people, communities, and economies.

In contrast to PBL, the traditional classroom conditions students to listen to teachers lecture – a one-way flow of information from teacher to passive recipient. And then, if there’s time, students might have a chance to “apply” what they’ve “learned” in a “canned” project (often over-managed with worksheets and a teacher-defined product). But that’s not how we experience life. We encounter challenges that become the catalyst for us to “figure things out.” Thus problem fosters research, analysis, solution, and reflection.

The MoCC’s Studio H exhibit re-imagines the gallery as a laboratory and teaching space. Visitors get to see how students were taught a non-linear design process in a more authentic learning environment that grows out of a dynamic interplay between research, ideation, development, prototyping and building.

Farmers’ Market Prototype @MoCC

Educators will find the exhibit to be an inspiration and template for using the PBL approach to motivate students with challenge, autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Studio H: Design. Build. Transform
Research: Gather relevant contextual precedent and sociological information.
Ideate: Generate large amounts of seemingly crazy ideas in quick succession.
Develop: Refine promising ideas using functional requirements real-world constraints.
Prototype: Build working versions and test their feasibility.
Build: Execute and test the prototype in real-world conditions for human interaction dreams.

Farmers’ Market – Complete

“A piece of me in every part of this building” ~ Erick
“I’m proud of the market and myself.” ~ Jamesha
“In 30 years, I’ll say I helped build it.” ~ Colin

The exhibition asks viewers to reflect on how that process can teach the next generation of designers to transform the world for themselves. Artifacts from the studio classroom in rural Bertie County, North Carolina (where Emily Pilloton, and Project H partner Matthew Miller, teach design thinking to high-school students) are on display and illustrate how a socially engaged design process can result in significant and positive solutions.

Farmers’ Market – In Operation

The MoCC exhibit highlights the products and process of the first year of the Studio H program. It features two design challenges – chicken coops and a farmers’ market pavilion. Both projects required students to design and build for real-world human (or chicken) interaction. Each project was firmly rooted in the agricultural context of Bertie County, but each looked closely at the local economy and fostered a more sustainable food solution – in one case offering an alternative to the local Perdue-scale chicken agribusiness and in the other, facilitating the production and sale of fresh local produce.

Emily Pilloton exemplifies an emerging generation of designers who believe that design has the power to positively change the world but that new design strategies are required to effect those changes. Pilloton is the founder and director of Project H Design (design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health and Happiness), which connects design to the people who need it most and to the places where it can make a real and lasting difference.

Pilloton and Miller moved to rural Bertie County, North Carolina in 2009 to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. Through a design/build high-school shop class called Studio H, Pilloton and Miller exercised both minds and bodies while bringing design strategies and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state. In August 2010 they began teaching their first class of 13 students.

We need to go beyond “going green,” Pilloton says, and enlist a new generation of design activists. We need big hearts, a bigger business sense, and the bravery to take action now.

The Studio H website is loaded with photographs, videos, student reflections and great curriculum ideas. The site describes the curriculum as follows:

Studio H is a public high school “design/build” curriculum that sparks rural community development through real-world, built projects. By learning through a design sensibility, applied core subjects, and industry-relevant construction skills, students develop the creative capital, critical thinking, and citizenship necessary for their own success and for the future of their communities.

Over the course of one calendar year, students earn high school and college credit, and are paid a summer wage to build the community project they have spent the year designing and prototyping.

Studio H is a different kind of classroom. We design, build, and transform.

The Museum of Contemporary Craft is sponsoring a Craftperspective Lecture by Emily Pilloton at ZIBA Auditorium 810 NW Marshall Street in Portland Ore on Dec 2, 2011 at 6 PM. Arrive early – it will be packed! More info

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Note from Peter: I’ve had some discussions with the folks at MoCC about offering a January teacher’s workshop. “Studio H and Getting Started with Project-Based Learning.” Stop back for more information.

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Image credits:
High Five by Studio H
Farmers’ Market Complete and In Operation by Brad Feinknopf.
Prototype @MoCC by Peter Pappas.

October 23, 2011February 19, 2013

Why Johnny Can’t Search – a Response

Image by Stephen Poff

I just got my latest issue of Wired Magazine (Nov 2011). In “Why Johnny Can’t Search,” Clive Thompson writes:

We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the webpages at the top of Google’s results list.

But Pan pulled a trick: he changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit – they’re putting too much trust in machine.

Other studies have found the same thing: high school and college students may be “digital natives” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the author’s credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is why can’t Johnny search?

Every day he walks into a sanitized information landscape with the expectation that anything he finds behind the school firewall is valid. How does that teach Johnny good digital hygiene?

If you spend any time around students, none of this comes as news. Given a research task, many go straight to Google and grab the first “low-hanging fruit” they find. Their inability to critically evaluate sources or context is more crucial as the barrier to the production and distribution of information has disappeared. (It doesn’t take much for any crank to start blogging the “true story of the Holocaust.”) While many applaud the digital revolution’s successful overthrow of the media gatekeepers, it does force us to become our own editors. (Should I forward the email that claims in next week’s sky, Mars will appear bigger than the moon?)

Many schools respond by sequestering students behind an information firewall. That allows school administrators to sleep at night knowing that students can’t get to any “bad information” during the school day. It’s a safe “CYA” for the educators, but it doesn’t provide any guided practice for Johnny to learn how to critically evaluate information. In fact, I think it sets Johnny up to fail in our “wild west” of information. Every day he walks into a sanitized information landscape with the expectation that anything he finds behind the school firewall is valid. How does that teach Johnny good digital hygiene?

Schools inhibit the development of critical evaluation skills in another way – the relentless (test prep) focus on mastery of facts. Johnny can assess the validity of information because he’s awash in a sea of text without context. Critically evaluating sources requires a deeper understanding of author and purpose. That’s developed with an inquiry-based approach to learning – exploring multiple sources, sussing out context, comparing perspectives, recognizing patterns, and encouraging constructive controversy and evaluation among peers. No time for that – we have to “cover” content for the test. In the relentless march to the exam, Johnny gets well acclimated to quickly stuffing his head with facts. No wonder he’s willing to take up Google on the bet that “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

Today’s student needs to become a critically-thinking citizen and the best response schools can come up with is to force-feed students in sanitized information feedlots.

It would seem that the demands of the information age would put a premium on teaching critical thinking skills. But the test regime leaves little time in the school day for that. Teaching information literacy is everyone’s (and no one’s) responsibility in school. (And I fear most of the librarians who were “fighting that good fight” didn’t survive the latest round of budget cuts.)

And isn’t this all so ironic. We live in an information age that puts a premium on the ability to find, decode, evaluate, store and communicate information. (All skills central to mastery of the Common Core standards). Today’s student should be in training to become a critically-thinking citizen and the best response schools can come up with is to force-feed students in sanitized information feedlots.

Image credit: flickr/Stephen Poff

Tag: Reform

How to Motivate Students: Researched-Based Strategies

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