The Master Teacher Blog
Providing you, the K-12 leader, with the help you need to lead with clarity, credibility, and confidence in the ever-evolving world of education.
Latest Posts
In Your Corner, Teacher Learning
Teachers: Heroes Among Us
Dishearteningly, we have witnessed again the ultimate sacrifice by educators in protection of their students. Appropriately, the news media, national and state leaders, and local communities are holding up these acts as deserving of our deepest honor and gratitude. However, too often such acts are presented without an important context.
Those outside of the education profession too often miss the reality that protecting students is a natural, consistent, and integral part of the lives of educators. Educators spend their days protecting the hopes and dreams of students who struggle to learn. They encourage, coach, worry, and nudge to build skills and stimulate learning progress.
Whether scraped knees and small bruises or bloody noses and broken bones, educators are often the first responders and immediate caregivers. They are vigilant about seeing dangers and anticipating activities in the classroom and school that may present risks. They are quick to recognize behaviors that may threaten the safety of students themselves or others and move to prevent and intervene at the first signs of danger.
Educators often spend their evenings and weekends wondering and worrying about students’ lives outside of school. Are their parents fighting? Is there enough to eat? Do they have a safe place to sleep? Will they be ready and able to learn when they return to school? Are there emotional bruises and breaks that will need attention?
They think about their students’ futures and whether they are on track. Will they master the ability to read, learn their math skills and progress at a pace that leads to success? Will they be accepted into the college that matches their needs or find a job to support them and a future family? When motivation and learning wane, teachers quickly become preoccupied with what they can do and how they can protect students so they will not have to suffer the consequences of not learning and preparing for future success.
The jarring reality of a mortal threat is not a circumstance for which we can or should have to be fully prepared. We hope that such a decision will never be required. Yet, the instinct to protect is already present.
In Your Corner, Student Learning
A Powerful but Often Untapped Source of Motivation
Student motivation seems more difficult to generate today than in the past. At least in part, we can blame the pandemic. Students found it easier to disengage and become less motivated when they were learning at a distance in makeshift space at home. Many students have brought the habits and routines they adopted at home back into the classroom with them.
Yet, learning is heavily dependent on motivation. Motivation – commonly defined as interest, readiness, and inclination to learn – is a necessary element for engaging successfully in the learning process. We cannot make students learn. We cannot learn for them. For learning to occur, students must be motivated.
It’s also true that we play a role in influencing the level and direction of the motivation of our students. We can create conditions that make it more likely that students will choose to be motivated. At times we design experiences that are inherently attractive, so students are more interested and inclined to learn. At other times, we may create conditions that make not learning unattractive, whether by threatening negative consequences that are influential with students or offering rewards that students value enough to do what we want them to do. Of course, there are significant downsides to the use of threats and rewards related to learning in terms of their diminishing effectiveness over time and messaging that learning is not important or valuable enough to invest in without extrinsic influences.
While efforts to stimulate student interest and readiness for learning are often necessary at the beginning of teaching and learning cycles, if we retain full responsibility for stimulating student motivation, we can leave them dependent on us to get ready to learn. We risk students being unprepared for a world in which they can ill afford to depend on others to stimulate and direct their motivation for learning and work.
We can tap a far more effective and lasting approach by nurturing the self-motivation of students. Our efforts need to extend beyond our motivating students, to a focus on nurturing their skills and strategies to motivate themselves. When we instill in learners the ability to generate and direct their motivation, we give them a gift that opens a world of potential learning and life success.
We can start the journey of transforming waiting-to-be-motivated students into self-motivated learners by helping them see that motivation is a choice. Certainly, at times motivation comes easily. When they encounter something that is inherently interesting, becoming motivated is easy to choose.
However, they can also choose to find something interesting or engaging about issues and tasks that are less inherently compelling. As examples, by connecting a less compelling learning task to an important goal they can transform their attitude from reluctance to commitment. Additionally, they might engage a friend or colleague to learn with them and transform what may have seemed like drudgery into a pleasant social experience.
Most students do not realize or appreciate the power they possess to motivate themselves. Fortunately, self-motivation – like other skills – can be taught. However, it requires our commitment and support to nurture its development and application. Here are ten ideas to get started:
- Coach students to set and pursue learning goals.
- Coach students to focus on the value of learning over obsessing about grades.
- Focus student feedback on factors they control such as effort, strategy, progress, and achievement.
- Encourage, stimulate, and nurture student curiosity.
- Encourage and support students to celebrate their learning accomplishments.
- Provide students with meaningful and authentic choices about how they will engage in learning tasks.
- Give students choices about who they will work with on learning tasks.
- Coach students to look for connections between new learning tasks and what is interesting to them.
- Coach students to explore why they find some tasks inherently more interesting and how they can transfer or leverage that interest to other activities.
- Remind students of their power to make choices about their motivation, regardless of circumstance or challenge.
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
In Your Corner, Student Learning
Share Your Tips & Stories
Share your story and the tips you have for getting through this challenging time. It can remind a fellow school leader of something they forgot, or your example can make a difficult task much easier and allow them to get more done in less time. We may publish your comments.
Send Us An Email
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Relationships and Connections
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
We’re In Your Corner!
Sign up to have the weekly publication delivered to your inbox.
We can attempt to shut down disruptive student behavior with quick admonishments and directives, but this approach is more likely to prolong such behavior than prevent or extinguish it.
More Featured Articles
Categories