Motivation Matters

The challenges rookie teachers face are well documented. They have to design lesson plans, master new curricula, and learn to navigate the oftentimes tricky politics of school life.

But for many, the biggest challenge they face is figuring out how to react to student apathy. Do you punish lazy students by giving them more assignments? Do you devote most of your time and energy to the kids who want to be there, the ones who work hard and pay attention? Or do disengaged students deserve as much attention as engaged ones?

A nicely written piece in American Secondary Education, a scholarly journal published by Ashland University in Ohio, answers those and other questions about how new teachers can reach disengaged middle school students. But the lessons in the article could apply to kids at almost any age.

The article, "A Middle School Dilemma: Dealing with 'I Don't Care'," includes some poignant anecdotes from teachers in the trenches struggling with how to motivate the unmotivated . One 8th grade boy, for instance, consistently fails his history tests, but he's polite, shy, and doesn't cause problems in class. His student teacher offered to provide an extra study session for him. He thanked her in advance for making a special effort to help him, but then he didn't show up for the study session.

Sound familiar? There are countless students in schools all across the country just like that boy. They don't cause problems, but they are completely, 100 percent disengaged.

The author of the article, Foster Walsh, an assistant professor in the department of teacher education at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., offers some common sense advice for teachers dealing with these kinds of students, such as using questionnaires to see what students are interested in and what subjects they like or dislike and why. This gives teachers a starting point for discussion, and even the possibility of a little humor.

But maybe the best advice for new teachers is painfully obvious: Don't take what students say to you personally, Walsh recommends. Rather, he writes, try to see "adolescent disengagement and apathy not as a single case of defiance but as a pattern of practiced defense--a complicated problem, requiring a complicated solution."

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Students in special education programs benefit from having individualized education plans, or IEPs, which are customized to meet their learning needs.

But why should such customization be limited to special education students? What about those students who were right on the border of being put in special education, but were not put in that category? What about kids who are struggling in school? Couldn't they benefit from a customized education plan too?

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne seems to think so, according to a Jan. 22 Associated Press story. He would like to see every student in 7th through 12th grades have a customized education plan by 2011.

In Horne's proposal, personalized education plans are not exactly IEPs. They would be set up to ensure all students get one-on-one advice from educators in identifying a career path. The plans would have teachers assume the role of academic guidance counselors, frequently checking on a student's academic progress and helping establish realistic career goals.

Whether his proposal will succeed is another matter. The logistical implications for educators and schools of establishing such plans for every student are huge. And there are likely legitimate concerns in the spec. ed. community about going in this policy direction.

Even so, the potential benefits of having personalized education plans for ALL students are worth weighing against the logistical difficulties of executing such a policy.

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"Show me the money!"

That's the motivational slogan teacher Geralyn Raach uses with her 3rd graders at Central Elementary School in Coshocton, Ohio, to entice the youngsters to work harder, according to a recent story in Education Week that details an unusual research experiment in that Ohio district to pay students modest cash awards for passing or doing well on state exams.

Such an experiment is a virtual slap in the face to advocates of intrinsic motivation, who argue that such extrinsic motivators are educational gimmicks that might have some short-term results, but little impact over the long term. As the Education Week story points out, too, the effort runs counter to the findings from decades of research in motivational psychology.

To be sure, the critics have justifiable concerns. Some are even worried that cash for test scores could actually kill the internal desire to learn.

Still, such efforts are worth investigating. And that is all they are doing in Coshocton. They are testing an experiment. And if a little bit of extra cash can get a kid who hates math to work at it anyway, and eventually learn important concepts, then schools will have to weigh that important philosophical question: Do the ends justify the means?

I can't tell you how many times my kids tell me that my life at work is better than their life at school because I get paid to work, but they don't get paid to go to school. I usually brush off such comments, but maybe they have a point. Maybe they'd like to say to their teachers after acing a test: "Show me the money!"

Then again, maybe not. What do you think?

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The tale of the hard working immigrant teenager who balances the demands of school with the responsibilities of home has been told so many times that it has become a predictable narrative that many readers look at and say: "I've seen that story before."

Yet I hope readers' familiarity with such storylines does not prevent them from digging a little deeper into what lessons can be learned from hard working immigrant kids that can be used to heighten motivation among typical U.S. students.

Recently, I was reading our local weekly community newspaper, The Old Bridge Observer, a small, understaffed but loveable little paper that frequently runs photos of ribbon cutting ceremonies on its front page and soft features about the good deeds of local schools inside the paper. (The paper is also not on the Web.)

For a story in the Jan. 13 edition of the paper, staff writer Kate Godfrey held a roundtable discussion with 20 eighth graders from Woodbridge Middle School in Prince William County, Va. The 20 students were all immigrants. The message in the article, directed at the typicial U.S. student, was anything but soft.

In very frank comments, the 20 boys and girls told Godfrey that students born in the U.S. need to be more appreciative of all the opportunities that exist here. And they said their U.S.-born peers need to be more motivated to take advantage of those opportunities.

One female student told Godfrey: "I think American parents are too easy on their children. They need to expect more of them."

I agree, because sometimes I need to do just that with my own children.

At the beginning of every youth lacrosse season that I coach, I tell my players they have been given a gift: The opportunity to play and get better at lacrosse. I tell them that many boys, for different reasons, are not given that gift of opportunity. As a result, they must respect that gift.

But the cynical side of me wonders how many of them, because they are so used to having so much, truly realize when opportunities are virtually dropped in their laps.

How do we get this generation to respect the gift of opportunity and then transform it into heightened motivation? How do we prevent a sense of entitlement, so pervasive in today's society, from becoming a motivation killer in school and on athletic fields?

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As the loyal readers of this blog are well aware, one of my areas of interest is the motivational philosophies and tactics sports coaches use to build strong teams that might also be utilized in the classroom to raise student achievement.

And that brings me to a book I am reading, The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam, the author of The Best and the Brightest and other best-selling books about American culture, sports, and politics.

This book is a biography of Bill Belichick, the current head coach of the New England Patriots, the most successful team in the NFL in recent years, with three Super Bowl victories in the past five seasons.

You wonder: What lessons could be learned about education from a book about a football coach? The answer is many.

What struck me, in particular, were the wide range of coaching philosophies and styles of some of the most successful high school, college, and professional coaches highlighted in the book. In other words, much like teaching, there is no cookie-cutter model of a successful football coach despite the stereotypes of all football coaches as cruel, boisterous, task masters. Undoubtedly, some motivate their players through such tactics, but others use a quiet, analytical approach to the game that is just as effective. Still others pull from both styles to create a sort of coaching composite. They all base their styles, in part, on what they think the players on their teams need.

And that raises some important questions about teaching. What style of teaching, for instance, motivates a group of poor, underachieving inner city boys or girls? Is it the tough love approach or a more laid back style? And how about privileged upper middle class kids? What approach motivates them most effectively? Better yet, what style works best with kids from all kinds of backgrounds?

If you are interested in the intersection of ideas (and experiences) between coaching and teaching, you might want to check out two blogs by teachers who are also coaches. Those blogs are: A Passion for Teaching and Opinions and Teaching in the 408.

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