What Underachieving
Middle School Students
Believe Motivates them to Learn
Middle School Students
Believe Motivates them to Learn
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Middle School Students Believe Motivates them to Learn |
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Chapter 1: The Challenge to Educate Everyone Chapter 2: A Review of Literature Chapter 3: Methods Chapter 4: The Results Chapter 5: Discussion
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It could also be that, although teachers know that they should use interest, hands-on activities, relationship, choices, and context to motivate students, the teachers lack mental models of what those practices might look like in action. Some of my colleagues relate, for example, that all students can be engaged in meaningful learning, even underachieving students. They have seen first hand that unmotivated students can be re-engaged in learning when they are given meaningful contexts for learning, choices and shared authority in the classroom, lessons made interesting or building on student interests, and work and content that matches student goals. Perhaps other teachers haven’t had similar experiences. If they haven’t been taught using motivating strategies or trained to teach using motivating strategies, they may not have mental models to work from. A critical step in the work around motivating and engaging all learners, then, is for educators and researchers to find examples of motivating, engaging learning in the classroom. Telling the stories of motivating teachers will help other teachers develop the appropriate schema to start reflecting on their own practice and to help staff developers design inservice to train teachers. Exploring diverse ways that teachers create and promote meaningful, engaged learning will give teachers choices about how they try to reverse underachievement patterns and re-engage unmotivated students. At least four approaches to teaching appeal to me for motivating and engaging teaching. The first approach is Project-Based Learning. Students can demonstrate their learning by creating culminating projects using interesting media. This might include posters and displays, plays or performances, books or magazines, or hypermedia, multimedia, or web pages (Muir, 1994b, 1997). Several of the teachers in this study use this approach, and students feel they learn well from it. A similar approach is Problem-Based Learning. Rather than placing a meaningful product at the center of learning, this approach focuses learning around a specific problem to solve. Through this approach, teachers can create the conditions necessary to get students to start asking questions about content (Delisle, 1997; Nagel, 1996). A third model for motivating teaching is Curriculum Integration. This approach involves building curriculum around student’s own questions and concerns (Pate, Holmstead, & McGinnis, 1997; Alexander 1995; Muir, 1998b; Beane, 1993; Nesin, & Lounsbury, 1999). Teachers using this approach report that it can be particularly effective for engaging middle school students in learning (Brodhagen, Weilbacher, & Beane, 1992; Alexander 1995; Muir, 1998b). Another approach which involves students in designing curriculum and instruction with the teacher is the Foxfire Approach (Wigginton 1972, 1985; Smith, Wigginton, Hocking, & Jones, 1991). Instead of building curriculum around students’ questions and concerns, this approach involves students in deciding how to learn a given curriculum by soliciting their ideas about how people in the real world use that content and what they might do to learn it. This can be especially powerful if there is little flexibility in the content middle school students must learn. |
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Send questions or comments to wilder@somtel.com Last updated April 25, 2001 |
Assistant Professor of Education University of Maine at Farmington 104 Main Street Farmington, ME 04938 207.778.7179 wilder@somtel.com http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mmuir |