Self-Driven Learning

Teaching Strategies for Student Motivation

Larry Ferlazzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138131330
• eBook ISBN: 9781317921615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this lively, research-based book, award-winning educator Larry Ferlazzo tackles everyday classroom challenges with creative instructional techniques to help middle- and high-school teachers develop self-motivated and high-achieving students.

The practical tips, online resources, and mini-lessons in this book encourage students to take charge of their own learning, boosting their success in and outside of the classroom.

Detailed lesson plans in every chapter align with the Common Core English Language Arts Standards and cover a variety of valuable skills, including:

• Personal responsibility and perseverance
• Social and emotional learning
• Standardized test-taking strategies
• And much more!

Chapter 1

I Still Want to Know

How Do You Motivate Students?

Those ideas and lessons in the last book were good, and I continue to use them. However, colleagues in higher grades who are getting my students as they advance would like to reinforce developing intrinsic motivation with fresh lessons. I could use some additional ideas, too. What have you come up with since Helping Students Motivate Themselves was published?

Summary of the Case Against Emphasizing Extrinsic Rewards

This chapter, and this book, will share a number of ideas and lesson plans building on the foundational concept that “pushing the rope” of student motivation through external rewards is not in the best interest of our students, their families, or ourselves as educators.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” made into the classic Disney film Fantasia, tells the story of an apprentice who is tired of doing the hard work of constantly carrying water into the house. When the sorcerer is away, the apprentice decides to take the easy way out and use magic he doesn’t fully understand to make a broom fetch buckets of water. The spell works at first, but it ends up making things far worse when he can’t make the broom stop and the house becomes flooded.

The use of carrots and sticks on a regular and systematic basis (though of course, there are some times when we all choose to use them) is one of those “magical solutions” that often ends up making things worse.

The application of these kinds of incentives has been proven time and time again to produce this “sorcerer’s apprentice effect,” as extensive research in Helping Students Motivate Themselves showed and new research in this book will reinforce. Professor Edward Deci is widely considered to be the most respected researcher in the field of motivation. He points out in The New York Times that his forty years of research shows that people will do something if they know how to do it and you pay them. But they’ll stop doing it when you stop paying them, and in fact they’ll then perform the behavior even less than they did before! The article continues:

“There is no evidence that paying people helps them learn—and a lot of evidence that it doesn’t,” Deci said. Then why . . . resort to paying students? “Because it’s easy,” Deci said. “It’s much harder to work with people to get them motivated from the inside.” (Guttenplan, 2011, para. 18)

Author Daniel Pink (2009) describes how extrinsic rewards might work in the short term for mechanical tasks that don’t require much higher-order thinking. But research shows that points, prizes, and presents don’t tend to produce true motivation for any work that requires higher-order thinking skills and creativity.

Pink also points out that everyone needs “baseline rewards.” These are the basics of adequate compensation. At school, students’ baseline rewards might include fair grading, a caring teacher who works to provide engaging lessons, and a clean classroom. If baseline needs are not met, then a person’s “focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. . . . You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all” (Pink, 2011a, p. 35).

In fact, recent research by Professor Armin Falk goes even further and finds that people who feel like they are not treated fairly do indeed feel increased motivation. However, they feel more motivated to do worse (Freeland, 2012)!

Does this book suggest that extrinsic motivators are always bad? No. On some occasions an extrinsic motivator can entice someone to try something new or can serve as way to deal with an immediate, one-student classroom problem without distracting the entire class.

The key, however, is to have an exit strategy in mind—one that will move your students in a relatively short time toward self-motivation. The suggestions in this book offer concrete ways to make that transition to a classroom culture of intrinsic motivation.

Recent Research on the Use of Rewards

Intrinsic motivation, sometimes also called autonomous motivation (Hout & Elliott, 2011, p. 30), is what the ideas and lessons in this book are designed to encourage. This kind of motivation drives students to put effort into learning because they see that it will help them achieve their personal goals.

Scores of studies—the National Academy of Sciences says at least 128, in fact—“showed clearly that tangible rewards do significantly and substantially undermine internal motivation” (Hout & Elliott, 2011, p. 26). Even reviews more sympathetic to the use of rewards in schools find that test gains are small and not sustained over time (Usher & Kober, 2012, p. 9). One well-publicized study that claimed to show giving cash or trophies would result in increased test gains (though they were not sustainable) found that it worked best if students were given the reward prior to taking the test and told it would be taken away if test scores did not improve (Levitt, List, Neckermann, & Sadoff, 2011). Here’s an excerpt from a television interview with one of the authors, Dr. Sally Sadoff:

Q: The ones that did badly—did you rip it away from them and then did they scream and cry?

A: Yeah, it’s hard when you rip a trophy out of the hands of an eight-year-old.

(“Is Bribing Students,” 2012)

It’s questionable whether an incentive system like that would contribute toward building a positive classroom culture.

One particularly intriguing study was published in 2011. It found that just mentioning the idea of rewards as a possible motivating tool (in that case, money) actually resulted in the participants in the experiment wanting to do the exact opposite of what they were asked to do (Pink, 2012). Another recent study reached the same conclusion—half of Swiss citizens who originally supported a nuclear waste facility in the community changed their minds when they were told they would receive money for their support (Rothman, 2012)—they said they could not be bribed.

Ed Tech Motivation Research

For a complete review of research on motivation, rewards, and incentives, including several insightful and funny video clips from popular television programs that highlight key concepts, go to “The Best Posts & Articles On ‘Motivating’ Students” (www.­larryfer­lazzo.­edublogs­.­org­/­2010­/­05­/­17­/­my-­best­-posts­-on­-motiva­ting­-stude­nts).

Using points, grades, and percentages as motivational levers might not always get the desired effect from all our students.

Updates on “Old” Strategies

Helping Students Motivate Themselves included many suggested immediate actions and several lessons plans in the student motivation chapter and elsewhere. All of them won’t be repeated here, but some will be reviewed and supplemented with updated information.

Engaging Lessons

Engaging lessons are an important part of the baseline rewards mentioned earlier in this chapter. Boring lessons don’t encourage the development of intrinsic motivation!

Recent research has reinforced the effectiveness of cooperative and discovery learning, and demonstrated the weaknesses of lectures and direct instruction (of course, that’s not to suggest that direct instruction should never be used, but it should certainly have a subordinate role).

One 2011 meta-analysis of hundreds of studies (Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, & Tenenbaum, 2011) highlighted by education researcher Robert Marzano (2011) found that “enhanced discovery learning” was clearly superior to direct instruction. The study identified three kinds of “enhanced discovery learning methods”—“generation, elicited explanations, and guided discovery conditions”—and defined them in this way:

Gene...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Supplemental Downloads
• Contents
• About the Author
• Online Resources
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 I Still Want to Know How Do You Motivate Students?
• 2 What Can You Do to Help Students Feel More Positive About School and Learning?
• 3 How Do You Handle Rudeness in Class?
• 4 How Can You Best Handle Classroom Management?
• 5 I Still Want to Know How Can You Help Students Develop Higher-Order Thinking Skills?
• 6 How Can You Get Students More Interested in Reading and Writing?
• 7 How Can You Best Prepare Students for Standardized Tests While Doing No Harm to Them?
• Afterword
• References