Yesterday, while I was strolling around the park with my dogs, podcast in my pocket as usual, I listened to the words of Carl Hendrick and his words really resonated with me. They were not new to me, it is a message I have heard many times before, but for some reason this time they really resonated loudly with me. Loudly enough that I just had to share my personal journey with the ideas of 'engagement' and 'motivation.' For clarity I have posted the part of the transcript that contains the main part of the conversation I am referring to for reference at the end of this blog post, but you can also find the podcast here.
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| https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-22-mindsets-and-misconceptions-with-carl-hendrick/ |
So, motivation, it is such a widely used term. We speak about children being motivated learners and it being crucial that we employs strategies that will motivate students, hook them in to the learning. Teachers are also heard to say, that a child just won't learn, because they are not motivated to do so. In the past my beliefs did mirror these thoughts, I mean, it makes sense doesn't it, if you are not motivated to learn, you simply won't bother.
This brings up the image of an unmotivated child being passive, without inclination to try, that the fact they lack motivation is their fault.
I still remember the target we set as a school from 2012-2014, all around motivation and engagement. We saw children (boys in particular) struggling to engage in inquiry learning and showing a particular reluctance when it came to writing. Our hypothesis at the time, was that their reluctance to engage was directly linked to their motivation to do so.
Now, don't get me wrong, this review led us directly to Mantle of the Expert, which led us to dramatic inquiry, play, storytelling etc, all of which have become integral parts of who we are. The process we employed did appear to engage children more, particularly boys, and perhaps had a marginal impact on their writing output and it certainly had a big impact on our enjoyment of teaching inquiry, but it could never have had the impact we truly wanted. I think we completely misunderstood motivation and what it is that actually motivates us as human beings.
Looking at the idea of motivation now, after my ongoing journey into striving to learn more about the Science of Learning, I have a completely different take on what we did and how we can now use that lens (as we are currently) to directly ensure an impact on achievement and wellbeing.
When it comes down to it, being successful at something is just about the most motivating thing there is. Even the smallest amount of success, appears to have huge impacts on motivation. Therefore to get to motivation, we must be using teaching strategies in the classroom that allow this success. Obviously this is where explicit, direct teaching come in, it is hard to be motivated to 'discover' something if you lack the basic foundations to do so.
Basically being able to do something is a massive catalyst to want to do it again and vice versa, being unsuccessful, constantly struggling, is a massive reason children develop 'opting' out strategies. This motivation doesn't only need to be thought of academically, but it can be viewed through a social/emotional lens as well. If a child is successful in their play, if they get reward from what they are doing, they will seek to do it more often and deepen what they are doing. If a child is able to develop the social skills to establish solid friendships, they will feel happier and be more motivated to widen this circle, be more accepting of others and in turn will develop further social skills. On the other hand, being isolated or alone has an impact on everything for that child, it is very hard to be motivated to learn or take risks, if they feel unseen. In fact the frustration and sadness they feel at being isolated, spills over into the classroom as they desperately try to communicate their unmet needs.
A couple of examples.
We have all had them in our class, those children we perceive as being reluctant to read. We could motivate them by providing them with wonderful exciting stories around their interest (possibly work in the short term) or we could actually explicitly teach them the code they need to read. People that say those 'decodable readers' are boring have obviously not witnessed a child reading one on their own for the first time. Their face lights up, they want to share it with everyone, they read it over and over and over, because it really doesn't matter what it is about, the fact is they can read it! When it comes down to it, the decodable readers are not intended to be of interest to you. Now I am in no way advocating for not reading wonderful rich texts to children or providing them with wonderful books to look at, but nothing is more motivating to a reader, than being able to read. This success creates the motivation to learn more.
Personally I have a rocky past with mathematics. But I do remember one time of motivation in mathematics, I am unsure how old I was, perhaps 8 or 9. Maths didn't make much sense to me and I often opted out, because I struggled. It wouldn't have mattered how exciting the maths session was, I would never have been motivated. However one day we were playing a game, the answer was zero, it was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one in the class that got it. I was so proud, in that moment I felt successful, I was open to learning more. If at that moment my teacher had noticed the difference in my face and body language, and perhaps used that moment as a bridge to helping me, I may have built on this success. Instead, it is the one glimmer I remember from maths at school. Sadly I don't even think they realised how much I was struggling, I wonder how much of that is true for children in our classrooms today?
Success is the biggest motivator of all to achievement. In fact, strategies like dramatic inquiry will work so much better with children that are motivated by success. It becomes the perfect combination.
So what about our boy writers? Those boys we set out to help? Well if we had explicitly taught them the foundations of writing from the beginning, as we are now, the dramatic work we were doing at the time, would have contributed hugely to them having something to write about. What I have found in the last few years is there is really no such thing as a 'reluctant' writer when they have the foundations to actually have the cognitive freedom to write.
Engagement is something I have given a lot of thought to as well. People often look at a busy, happy class as being engaged. We think we need to pull out all the bells and whistled to keep them engaged, but again, there is nothing more engaging then actually being able to successfully complete the task.
Take Number Agents for instance, I got so wrapped up in creating the world that I completely missed the fact that some children (while the knew the world inside out) were missing the maths. It is why I pulled Portal maths back to the bare bones, the important parts to build the world, but not too much 'fluff' to overshadow the maths. It has been the perfect mix, the children still love it as much as they loved full blown agency, but the difference is, they are ALL getting the maths out of it.
I hope that as an educational collective we can take a good look at engagement and motivation and realise the role that success plays, that there is in fact a magic bullet and that is actually explicitly teaching the skills they need whether it be academic, emotional or social and noticing, reflecting on and responding to the needs we see in front of us.
We need to teach children and stop looking for the next bell or whistle to get their attention or keep them busy.
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Copied from podcast transcript
[00:22:05] Anna Stokke: You wrote a blog post called “Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching,” and I was hoping that we could talk about some of those things, I found that really helpful and interesting. And a big one I want to talk about is motivation. So you wrote that you wish you'd known that motivation doesn't always lead to achievement, but actually, achievement often leads to motivation. So, can you elaborate on that for us?
[00:22:33] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, I kind of came across this in two points. One was Graham Nuthall’s book The Hidden Lives of Learners, which is, I just would recommend to everybody. It's a really short book. I think it was the first time I encountered this idea that motivation and achievement, there's a sort of an inverse relationship to them.
Then there was a review by Daniel Muijs and and Reynolds wrote a book, a really great, another great book called, I think it's called Effective Teaching. It's a review of the literature. And I saw it there again. And then I started to read some studies on this and started to notice that students who achieve things, even in the short term, it tends to have this knock on effect to their motivation.
My theory is that we kind of have the causal arrow the wrong way around. I grew up in a system where you'd try to motivate kids either through intrinsic or extrinsic awards or an assembly or a prize or whatever it was. Whereas I started to notice that, in my own practice, that if you can get somebody to a place where they experience success, even in just a small way and use that as a kind of a lever to move things forward, I noticed that that was a very effective way of doing things.
And that was really about explicit modelling of things, close feedback, and opportunities for practice. And again, it's one of those things that's very counterintuitive. It's one of these things that the more complex something is, the less it's going to fly with the public and with people in general because it takes explanation. That's one of those things, which I think is, it's a difficult thing to get your head around.
[00:24:07] Anna Stokke: I agree with this, and from teaching for many years, I've observed this as well. And I think, especially in math, which has a lot of applications, I think there's a lot of expectations that we're always supposed to be including applications when we're teaching. But often, the applications are really messy.
And I've observed that in fact when students are unhappy in class, it's not because I'm not giving applications, it's usually when they're lost or struggling with the material. Also, like, my students, the ones that have more difficulty with math, it's actually the application piece that they don't like that much.
I mean, I do motivate with applications. I just think that the idea that applications are going to cause students to like math more or be more motivated to do more math isn't necessarily correct. I think that when students feel success, that's when they feel motivated to do more because it makes them feel good. They feel like they're good at math.
[00:25:16] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, I think there's a lot of students who are going through the day feeling no success at all and not learning anything at all. They're just kind of going through the motions. Again, that’s where, I think, instruction and thinking about instructional design is so important.
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