Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners

Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond

Larry Ferlazzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317753643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Award-winning teacher, blogger, and author Larry Ferlazzo is back with more insightful research and strategies for helping students want to care more about school and learning. In his previous books on motivation—Helping Students Motivate Themselves and Self-Driven Learning—he tackled ways to help students build intrinsic motivation by how you use class time, manage your class, encourage students to feel positive about learning, help them not feel burned out by testing, and more. In this book, he looks at how teachers can create classroom conditions that are needed for motivation to grow in the first place. Ferlazzo provides research-based suggestions on what you can do today to help students want to develop qualities like physical health, grit, flow, and a desire to transfer what they're learning to life outside of school.

At the end of each chapter, you'll find high-interest lesson plans, correlated to the Common Core ELA/Literacy Standards, that set the stage for long-term positive impacts. Students will read about sports stars, how maintaining a healthy lifestyle can help them achieve their goals, and other engaging topics. They will integrate information from various texts and make connections to their own lives, hopes and dreams—a more powerful way to learn to care than being told they should. The readings for these lessons and other tools are available as free eResources on our website so you can easily print them for your students.

Chapter 1
I Still Want To Know

How Do You Motivate Students?

Motivation ideas from your first two books have been very helpful. I can always use more, though, and I suspect many other educators out there are thinking the same thing. Do you have any more suggestions?

Intrinsic Motivation: Why It’s Better and How It’s Nurtured

There are three things to remember about education. The first is motivation. The second one is motivation. The third one is motivation.

(Former U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell; in Hacker, Dunlosky, & Graesser, 2009)

When students feel more motivated to learn, they perform better academically, show improved classroom behavior, and gain a higher sense of self-esteem (Hattie, 2011, p. 252; Usher et al., 2012, p. 1). Unfortunately, data—and the direct experience of many educators reading this book—shows that lack of motivation affects many of our students, and appears to increase each year from middle school through high school (Busteed, 2013; Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 2003). Students can demonstrate this lack of engagement by withholding effort and by “voting with their feet” through rising chronic absenteeism as they get older (Balfanz & Byrnes, 2012, p. 18), and chronic absenteeism is among the highest predictors of dropping-out of school (Balfanz & Byrnes, 2012, p. 25). To use terms first used by Albert O. Hirschman (Gladwell, 2012), it appears that the lack of student motivation is a major contributing cause to many choosing this option of “exit” (withdrawal from active engagement) over “voice” ( active participation) in academic life.

How can we respond effectively to this “motivation crisis”?

One way to is to “double-down” on the common belief in the power of extrinsic motivation—bonuses, points, stars, etc.—and its equivalents in the punishment arena. This chapter and book, as well as the previous books in this series, Helping Students Motivate Themselves (Ferlazzo, 2011a) and Self-Driven Learning (Ferlazzo, 2013), provide a different perspective, one best characterized by Sir Ken Robinson, author and speaker on education issues, who has said:

Farmers and gardeners know you cannot make a plant grow … the plant grows itself. What you can do is provide the conditions for growth. (Ferlazzo, 2012, June 4)

One of the key ways to “provide the conditions for growth” or, as the National Research Council put it, “create a set of circumstances” (National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, 2004, p. 14; National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, 2004; as cited in Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 2003) is by emphasizing intrinsic motivation (choosing to do an activity in order to gain pleasure from it or in order to help achieve an internalized goal) instead of extrinsic motivation (doing a specific behavior in order to gain an outside reward).

Before reviewing what those “conditions for growth” might be, let’s quickly review some of the overwhelming research on “reward undermining” (Klass, 2012) that demonstrates why a reliance on extrinsic motivation should not be on that list:

• Extrinsic motivation can be effective over the short term in encouraging mechanical tasks and compliance, but tends to be destructive in advancing creative and higher-order thinking (Pink, 2009, p. 46).
• Extrinsic motivators, though possibly effective in the short term to gain compliance to do a task, tend to diminish intrinsic motivation for that same activity over the long term (Deci et al., 1999, p. 659).
• A recent study of 200,000 employees found that that those who were more intrinsically motivated were three times more engaged in their work than those who focused more on external rewards (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013).

These critiques, however, do not mean that extrinsic motivation has no role in the home, classroom, or workplace. Even Dr. Edward Deci (perhaps the world’s foremost researcher on intrinsic motivation) recognizes that there are going to be times when carrots or sticks need to be used to encourage or stop a behavior because of the immediacy of a challenging situation. As he told The New York Times:

If you’re under a lot of stress or in a bad place, then having a conversation at that moment is not going to work.

But, he emphasized, don’t let the situation end there. “You need to sit down the next afternoon when everyone’s calm, talk it through from both sides, then discuss ways so the behavior doesn’t happen again,” he said. “Always use the blow up as a learning moment the next day.” (Feiler, 2013, January 11)

In addition, author Daniel Pink discusses the need for “baseline rewards” (Pink, 2009, p. 35)—the basic and fair “compensation” that we must all receive in order to have any motivation at all. In school, that might mean a caring teacher, a clean classroom, and engaging lessons. In other words, extrinsic motivators have their place, but they must also be kept in their place.

So, if extrinsic motivation is not one of those “conditions for growth,” what is on the list?

Self-Determination Theory, one of the most respected theories on human motivation, was originally developed by Professors Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (Ryan & Deci, 2000), and suggests that three elements combine to nurture intrinsic motivation—autonomy (having a degree of control over what needs to happen and how it can be done), competence (feeling that one has the ability to be successful in doing it), and relatedness (doing the activity helps them feel more connected to others, and that they feel cared about by people who they respect).

Many other reports and research related to education, including from the National Research Council, generally concur that these three elements are critical for the kind of environment that should be created for our students (Farrington et al., 2012, p. 32). In addition, most also explicitly add a fourth criteria—that the work must be seen by students as being interesting and valuable to them (Usher et al., 2012, p. 4). In other words, they should see it as relevant to their present lives and/or hopes and dreams for the future (Self-Determination theorists often include this quality of relevance within their “developing autonomy” category, Assor et al., 2002, p. 264).

The ideas and lessons in this chapter, as well as those found in the entire book (and the first two books in this series), are designed to help our students motivate themselves through cultivating these four qualities and to counter what the National Research Council suggests—that these four elements become less and less visible as students move into secondary schools (Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 2003).

Years ago, I lived in an elevated house that was at the bottom of a small hill. It had a storm drain on the street in front of it. During the summer, I would pour wood chips in the small dirt area between the sidewalk and the curb, and during heavy winter rainstorms the drain would get clogged up with debris floating downhill. Water would go over the curb, and all the wood chips would float away leaving a muddy area. Each year my wife would strongly suggest I plant grass or bushes in that area so that it could withstand the water, and each year I instead chose the short-term solution of wood chips—it appeared easier to me and seemed to work most of the time—until the bad weather hit. I chose this solution even though planting grass and bushes would have saved me time and money over the long term, made the neighborhood look better and, in fact, would have probably attacked the cause of the problem by reducing the amount of debris that was clogging the drain. I had other things on my “to do” list that I felt were more important and I was more comfortable with a problem I was familiar with than with a solution that was new to me—having a “green thumb” was not on my resume.

Let’s see how we can get rid of the wood chips of extrinsic motivation. Instead, let’s plant some nice grass and bushes, and create the conditions in which they can grow well …

Ed Tech

Research on motivation continues to be done regularly around the world. Stay updated on the latest studies, and how to apply them in the classroom, at “The Best Posts & Articles On ‘Motivating Students’ ” (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2010/05/17/my-best-posts-on-motivating-students/).

Immediate Actions

Here are some strategies to support the four qualities critical to intrinsic motivation—autonomy, competence, relatedness, and relevance—that teachers can keep in mind during day-to-day work in the classroom. Though they are categorized into those four qualities for organizational clarity, many of the suggested strategies cover more than one area—for example, building a trusting relationship with students is listed under “relatedness,” though it’s also critical for differentiated instruction under “competence.” Obviously, the idea is not necessarily to apply every quality all the time—we’re not Supermen or Superwomen, after all. However, they provide a variety of tools to keep in mind in lesson planning and implementation.

Promoting Autonomy

Choice

Providing students with freedom of choice is one strategy for promoting learner autonomy. Educators commonly view this idea of choice through the “lens” of “organizational” and “procedural” choice. Organizational choice, for example, might mean students having a voice in seating assignments or membership of their small learning groups. Procedural choice could include a choice from a list of homework assignments and what form a final project might take—a book, poster, or skit.

Some researchers, however, believe that a third option, called “cognitive” choice, is a more effective way to promote longer-lasting student autonomy (Stefanou et al., 2004, p. 101). This kind of cognitive autonomy support, which is also related to the idea of ensuring relevance, could include:

• problem-based learning, where small groups need to determine their own solutions to teacher-suggested and/or student-solicited issues—ways to organize school lunchtime effectiv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• eResources
• Meet the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 I Still Want To Know: How Do You Motivate Students?
• 2 I Still Want To Know: How Can You Best Handle Classroom Management?
• 3 I Still Want to Know: How Can You Get Students: More Interested in Reading and Writing?
• 4 How Can You Get Students to Transfer Their Knowledge and Skills from One Class to Other Classes and Outside-of-School Situations?
• 5 How Can You Help Students Want To Live A Physically Healthy Lifestyle?
• 6 How Can You Help Students Get Into a State of “Flow”?