Peer to Peer: Engagement & Motivation
Post date: Feb 19, 2017 9:56:44 PM
By Mark Lonergan with Anne Slater
April 2016
From Boston Teachers Union newspaper
It's a little bit after 10 a.m. on a rainy April morning when I walk into Brenda Rosario's classroom at the Rafael Hernández K-8 school in Roxbury. Students are concluding their morning meeting
on a rainbow-colored rug by playing a quick game of “Simón Dice” (“Simon Says”) and getting ready to transition to their center work. A moment after the game wraps up, students go to their tables and get to work. Really get to work.
At one table, students are doing math problems: writing diagrams and explaining strategies to solve a word problem that they’ve glued into their yellow math journals. At another table, students are reading about polar bears and are writing down facts and an illustration in their green writing journals. Back on the rug, four students are listening to an audiobook and leafing through the pages to read along. Students at another table are holding magnifying glasses as they closely investigate a whelk egg case or I-don't-know-what and write down their observations using a scientific vocabulary word list. When students finish early, they are very eager to show me what else they are working
on. One student shows me a book she’s written about snorkeling with a mermaid. Another shows me her book about a princess with a pet unicorn.
A bell rings and Brenda checks in with the class. Then they get back to work, some staying where they are and others moving on to the next table and the the next activity. It’s a level of productivity and focus that would make Henry Ford jealous. When I come back to the room an hour later, students are still hard at work. What exactly is going on here? Are students motivated, engaged or both? And what conditions foster this level of engagement and motivation?
This month, we’ll look at what several experts have to say about the topic of DESE r
ubric element II.A.2 (Student Engagement) and element II.B.3 (Student Motivation). When I stepped into the the role of coach and evaluator, one of the biggest challenges I had was figuring out the question of what does student engagement and student motivation really look like and what conditions can foster its growth?
In Experience & Education (1938), John Dewey criticizes schools that “set a premium of passivity and receptivity,” because they often create environments where the only escape is to become disobedient. He also criticized traditional education for “its failure to secure the active co-operation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.” Even if he wasn’t using the words “en
gagement” and “motivation,” Dewey seemed to understand that disengaging and unmotivating environments were not the way to go.
The Skillful Teacher
In the 1997 book the Skillful Teacher, authors John Saphier and Robert Gower contrast the motivation skills (which “empower instruction”) with management skills (which “support and make possible instruction”). In their pyramid “Map of Pedagogical Knowledge,” the management skills are near the bottom and the motivation skills (which include building personal relationships, maintaining a class climate and setting expectations) are right in the middle. The management skills (attention, momentum, space, time, routines) are the “foundation of teaching,” which means that “if those jobs aren’t being handled, no learning can take place.”
Saphier and Gower talk explicitly about engagement in their chapter on attention. “Unless students are paying attention to the instruction it does not matter how good the lesson may be otherwise,” they said. “Engaging and involving students on task in large group, small group, or individual learning experiences is what attention is all about. Indeed, i
t is the precondition for instruction.”
Teach Like a Champion
Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like A Champion, lists engagement as one of the five elements of classroom culture. It starts with discipline (“teaching someone the right way to do something”), management (“the process of reinforcing behavior by consequences”), control (“your capacity to cause someone to choose to do what you ask”), influence (“inspiring students to believe, want to succeed, and want to work for it for intrinsic reasons”) and then engagement.
One of the themes of Lemov’s book is that “kids often change from the outside in.” And several of the strategies focused on classroom culture are about outside changes that may or may not lead to true motivation and engagement. The “SLANT” technique is one that comes to mind here. “SLANT” is the acronym to remind students to: Sit up, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head and Track the speaker. It has been widely popularized by the KIPP charter school network. Lemov says that if students are not alert and attentive, then “teaching them is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.”
Another interesting engagement technique from Lemov’s book is “Props” where teachers are encouraged to permit their class to spend up to one full second celebrating student accomplishments. One example is “The Hitter” technique: “You say, ‘Let’s give Clarice a Hitter.’ Your kids pretend to toss a ball and swing a bat at it. They shield their eyes as if to glimpse its distant flight. Then they mimic crowd noise suitable for a
home run for some fraction of a full second.” Sounds like fun.
Conscious Classroom Management
The book Conscious Classroom Management by Rick Smith is recommended by BPS as a resource to help teachers with student engagement. The BPS website says that the book “details the ways to create a positive classroom culture where students are invested in their success.” Although Smith spends much of his book giving advice about prevention techniques and intervention techniques for unruly classrooms, there’s also an interesting section on building positive connections. In this chapter, Smith discusses the value of including choice
s for students in our lessons. “The more we can build in choices for our students, the more likely they are to feel energized as participants in their learning process,” Smith says.
Smith suggests that teachers should include some chances to build positive relationships with students as part of the curriculum or as part of daily routines. For fifteen years in my math classes, the first assignment of the year was always to write a letter to the teacher. And I would write one back to them and share it the next day. It was an efficient way to break the ice, to see what kind of writers and thinkers were in the room and to tell which students had access to a computer and printer. Smith also suggests class meetings or circles, journal writes or having students involved in setting the class rules and norms as ways to increase student choices.
Another technique that Smith suggests is a “4-H strategy” where the teacher greets students at the door and allows them to choose one of four greetings: hello, handshake, high-five or hug. Secondary teachers may have to swap out the hug option and replace it with “nod and grunt” or “ironic eye roll.” Whether at the start of class or somewhere else during the lesson, Smith suggests having a small moment of personal interaction with each student. He acknowledges that this approach can be challenging in particular to secondary teachers and specialists, who may see scores of students in any one day. “Meaningful and valuable personal contact can and does happen between teacher and student in ten and twenty-second connections.”
Drive
If engagement can sometime start from the outside in, motivation is always best when it starts from the inside. This is the central argument of the book Drive by Daniel Pink. This book has the least connection to the education world (Amazon.c
om lists it in the “Business and Money” category), and yet I think it has the most wisdom to share with educators about how to engage and motivate our students.
Pink explains that there are three things that motivate us: biological conditions (like the need to eat or sleep), extrinsic conditions (like the traditional reward and punishment systems) and intrinsic conditions. In the first half of the book, he explains why extrinsic motivational strategies don’t really work. These “carrot and stick” reward and punishment systems can crush creativity, foster short-term thinking and extinguish the possibility that students will find deeper sources of intrinsic motivation. PInk says, “We’re designed to be active and engaged. And we know what the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.” This made me wonder what kind of impact the extrinsic reward and punishment systems built into our schools (grades, detentions, behavior charts, suspensions) are really having on our students.
The second half of Drive focuses on how to recognize and foster intrinsic motivation. Pink describes the three elements of intrinsic motivation: purpose, mastery and autonomy. Purpose can be achieved by communicating why we’re tackling an assignment or how today’s task “contributes to the larger ent
erprise in which the class is engaged.”
The second element of intrinsic motivation is a chance to reach for mastery. Mastery is hard work: challenges that can be conquered in a single sitting will not promote mastery. Pink describes mastery as “an asymptote”--which you may remember from Algebra II as “an invisible boundary line that you can approach but never cross.” Mastery means lots of hard work along with an understanding that there’s always room to get better.
The third element of intrinsic motivation is autonomy. Pink uses 4 T’s to describe the choices that must be offered for us to feel autonomy: Task (choice in what we are doing), Time (choice in when we are doing it), Technique (how we are doing it) and Team (who we are doing it with). He highlights Google and other innovative companies that allow employees to spend as much as 20 percent of their time on self-directed autonomous projects. Many of Google’s most successful products have precipitated from this “play” time. Autonomy is also one of the central tenets of Montessori schools, where students are given choices about what to do and when to do it.
Pink has some specific advice for teachers around the question of homework assignments and giving praise. With homework assignments, Pink advises teachers to ask themselves these questions: Am I allowing any autonomy/choice over how and when they do the work? Does the assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task? Do they know why we are doing this assignment and how it connects to our larger goals and objectives?
In terms of praise, Pink cautions against public praise (“life’s not an awards ceremony”) and falsely inflated praise (“don’t kid a kid”). He also advises teachers to focus their praise on effort and strategy, not intelligence. “No fake praise,” says Pink. “Only offer praise when there’s a good reason for it.”
So what should student motivation and student engagement look like in our classrooms? Former principal of the Edison K-8 and current Principal Leader Mary Driscoll said, “I look at what students are doing and ask them questions about the task. If they can tell me what they are doing and why they are doing it, if they can tell me how they know their work is quality work then I know they are engaged. I listen for the productive buzz that students make when they are engaging with one another and with the content of the lesson.” Driscoll also warns that motivation and engagement do not always correlate. “If the task is too easy, or not relevant, students might still willingly engage, but with a performance orientation rather than a learning orientation,” she said.
Pink highlights the difference between true engagement and mere compliance. “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement,” he said. “While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night.”
Peer-to-Peer is a monthly column written by Anne Slater (from the Peer Assistance program) and Mark Lonergan (from the Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program). To find out more, visit btu.org/whats-working/peer-mentoring/
SIDEBAR
Intrinsically Motivating Assignments
From Drive by Daniel Pink
Autonomy: Am I allowing any autonomy/choice over how and when they do the work?
Mastery: Does the assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task?
Purpose: Do they know why we are doing this assignment and how it connects to our larger goals and objectives?