What's Motivating My Learners

Many educators champion the goal of giving learners more agency over their learning.  I put myself in the category of being on this journey of helping learners own their learning. While reading Kasey Bell’s new book Shake Up Learning, I encountered the following reflection question, “In your classroom, how do grades affect learning?” This question led me to step back and think about student motivation in general.

We are a month away from the end of the school year. As students look towards the end of the year, I am looking to keep motivation high by using learning modes that my students find engaging.  So, I put together a survey for them to get some feedback about modes that they found engaging and those that were not. But in the first 3 questions, I asked them some more general questions about motivations in school. The answers I found were quite troubling.

This was not designed to be a highly scientific endeavor just a snapshot of my students thoughts. I had students complete an anonymous Google Form. To make the word clouds you see below, I categorized student responses when they fell into clear categories. When students provided multiple answers, I separated them. I used Jason Davies word cloud generator for the word clouds. I set the word clouds to scale words by a factor of n. So there is a linear correlation between size and number of responses.

The first question I asked was to get a sense of why students signed up for physics in the first place.

As you can see, the number one response to this question was a matter of credit. In order to graduate, students need 3 credits of science. The traditional path in our high school is biology, chemistry, physics. But, this is not a required sequence. In practice, the course requirements have clearly become a checklist to complete rather than part of a path that leads somewhere. How can we fix this mindset?  

The state of Wisconsin is in the process of implementing a program called Academic and Career Planning (ACP). The goal of ACP is to make the courses students take to be seen as part of a journey to their post-secondary goals and not simply be seen as names on a report card. We are in the infancy of this process at the high school level. I have been a part of a listening/planning team for this work in our district. But it really needs to be scaled and championed if it is to have an impact on the decisions students are making.

Over the sequence of my course, we explore the connections between physics and students’ lives. But, I believe that the motivation to take the course needs to be more than to get a credit. We keep talking about “the why” in education. Shouldn’t our learners understand “the why” for a course in the first place. If the why is to get a credit, we are failing them. To be honest, there are only so many options in high school science. So, maybe I’m not looking for more course options. I’m looking for students to understand what they are signing up for and why. How does this course fit into their larger journey.

I’d be interested to know how other schools/districts build that why and offer students an authentic choice or informed choices in the courses they take beyond, “If you’re going to college, you’ll need physics.”

In next question, I wanted to see how students selected classes when they felt that they had freedom of choice.

I loved to see that personal interest was the number one response by a long way. Yes, amount of homework was in there as well. But, it was smaller than I would have expected. I think this speaks to the fact that when given authentic choice, learners are intrinsically motivated. Seeing teacher as number 2 speaks to the power of relationships in our schools. This gives merit to the idea of offering students an authentic choice in the courses they take or giving them the space to determine how their interests are connected to courses offered. It’s easy to focus on credit requirements because they provide a clear number guideline to follow. If there are required courses for all learners or minimum credit requirements, educators should be working to build interest in the course or demonstrate how it ties into their post-secondary before the sign up for the course.

This year, our school held its first course fair in which students rotated to different departments for ½ day and were given introductions to courses offered by the department. It was a step in the right direction, but I look forward to doing a better job of selling the why behind the physics curriculum to build interest rather than inevitability.

The third question went to motivation for doing work in the classroom.

I don’t think this will surprise many teachers. It speaks to the a culture issue. In our current model, grades motivate the work students are doing more than the learning itself. Only one student mentioned the idea of being proud over an end product. Although it is a school wide issue, I believe it is something that can be addressed at the classroom level. It’s really something that I know I can and need to improve before I ask anyone else to. I am ultimately responsible for the emphasis put on grades and grading within my own classroom. It is up to me to demonstrate the importance I place on learning over grades. How am I designing the experience of my classroom? Is the perceived goal to get a grade or to learn? I hope to start this shift with the alignment of my physics curriculum to Next Generation Science Standards I’m beginning over the summer.

The Next Generation Science Standards have been geared to highlight the process of inquiry around observable phenomenon. The structure is to present a thought provoking phenomenon and let that drive the learning rather than introducing a learning objective and letting that drive the learning. The goal is the investigation and the outcomes are embedded in the process. With a truly engaging phenomenon or problem solving task, I can imagine the desire to find a solution would overshadow the desire for a “good” grade.

This is not a mindset that we will easily be able to change. Grades and scores are a fast way to communicate between student, parent, teacher, colleges, administrators, and stakeholders.(that doesn’t mean they are an accurate reflection of learning, though) As a teacher I can’t control all of the variables outside of my classroom. But, I can control the feeling within my own.

Reflecting on the student responses to these 3 questions, I see that I have agency to make changes and push the needle to allow learners to have more ownership in their science education. But, the change starts with me. Kasey has written about how students have become great at playing the game of school. She puts forth the following message about The Game of School:

Another applicable says would have to be, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”