Contents
Introduction
Subjects & Methods
What the Students Thought about...
Learning
Styles
Book
Work
Relationship
Schools
Motivating?
Coprocessing?
Compliance
Final Thought
Another view of ADD
Go To The Full Research Report
Contacting the Author
Introduction
American public education faces a difficult challenge: educating every youth in the country. In the face of this challenge is the fact that there are many children who are unmotivated, disengaged, and underachieving. Both teachers and students are frustrated and disillusioned. One of the most persistent questions facing individual teachers is, "How do I motivate all children to learn?"Educators blame students' lack of motivation, engagement, and achievement on a long list of factors such as the lack of academic readiness and preparation, learning disabilities, unsupportive parents, previous traumatic experience, poverty, and low self efficacy. There is evidence, however, that these factors do not predispose students to school failure (Nieto, 1994). Further, there is evidence that all students, regardless of race, gender, or ethnic background, can learn to higher levels (The National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, 1997; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1996).
Subjects and Methods
The study involved students and teachers at a regional middle school, serving six towns in rural New England. The 550 seventh and eighth grade students are divided between five interdisciplinary teams and remain on the same team for two years. Each team has four teachers: Math, Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts. The students are divided into two seventh and two eighth grade classes.Both primary subjects for this study were on the same team, one was in seventh grade, the other in eighth. Andy is a bright, and creative young man who neither does well academically (he gets mostly C's), nor likes school much (by his own admission). Mike also is very knowledgeable, and intelligent to talk with, but his grades are mostly C's, and his teachers report he has great difficulty remembering to bring things to or from home, or to turn in work. Each teacher separately recognized Andy and Mike as readily fitting my (rather vague) description of "students who seem fairly bright, but don't do well in school, or students for whom school doesn't seem to work," adding to my confidence in their selection as subjects.
Students were interviewed separately, at school, way from other people and distractions. The interviews were semi-structured including both questions focused on recognized motivational factors and open-ended questions soliciting the subjects' own views. To improve my confidence in their responses, I prodded them to expand on and clarify their answers, conducted classroom observations and interviewed one of their teachers, Mrs. Carpenter. The reader should keep in mind that these findings are based on single interviews of two students, and a teacher, and about 10 hours of classroom observation. I only reported a finding, however, if I could do so with confidence, that confidence coming from the result being supported by multiple sources in the study.
Six key issues emerged strongly: learning styles; active, hands-on lessons; trusting, respectful relationships; the gap between what schools do and what could be done; coprocessing and multitasking; and compliance vs. learning.
A Matter Of Learning Styles
I was interested that, although students and teachers believed that many of the learning problems in school were because students weren't being taught in their learning style, students and teachers couldn't really tell me what being taught in their learning style would look like. Perhaps this reflects that teachers don't have mental models of what teaching might look like; our own experiences and expectations may shape what teaching strategies we see as acceptable. Identifying alternative approaches and helping teachers build mental models of those approaches may help with motivating all students to learn.
Doing Things Vs. Book Work.
Both boys made it clear that they prefer doing activities to doing book work. Even though both boys wanted to avoid book work and would prefer doing things with their hands, that did not mean that they didn't want to do any book work. In Shop, for instance, Andy didn't mind taking notes about different kinds of batteries. I wrote in my field notes: "Why are they so well behaved in Shop?... Do they not mind doing the book work and notes because they get to do projects and activities, too?" I noticed too, that the Science and Social Studies teachers, who do a lot of projects and activities, don't do so exclusively. Again from my field notes: "'Activity-based' teachers don't always do activities. They still deliver content, and review, and take tests.
Relationships, Trust, And Respect.
I had expected students to focus on intrinsic motivators closely related to content, including pace, choice, interest level, and alignment with personal goals. Those were validated by the boys, but not as strongly as the importance of relationship, trust, and respect in the classroom. One of the most important factors for successful learning, to my two underachievers, was the student/teacher relationship. Andy talks about how teachers who nag turn him off to learning. The Social Studies teacher's classroom permeates with a respectful atmosphere. From my field notes: "There is a real climate in the room of respecting student input and treating kids like people. There is more of a 'social responsibility' climate than an 'authority' climate and I wonder if this is part of why students seem to learn well in this class."
A Gap In Schools Providing For Motivation.
It was clear from talking with Andy and Mike that although some of their teachers had created respectful relationships with their students and that some teachers made sure that their teaching was activity based, many teachers were not. Both boys, for example, referred to teachers who yelled, or nagged, or bossed students. In reference to book work, Mike said, "Some of the classes that's all you do. You sit there all day doing book work, but you don't learn anything cause you just go back to find the answer and all that. And you don't learn anything."Although the boys put most of their emphasis on the student teacher relationship and on doing things, both boys said that they thought it would make it easier for them to learn if schools tied in learning to student's interests and goals, and connected learning to the "real world." These areas, however, are where I found the largest gap between what schools might do and what they are doing. When asked about how school learning relates to the real world, Andy said only that it teaches you not to sass back to adults. Mike saw no connections to the real world. When I asked him, "How do you see a connection between the work that you do here and [the town you live in]?" he replied, "Basically, I don't." When I asked Mrs. Carpenter, "How do you try to show students that course content is useful and important to them?" she chuckled and replied, "I don't even go there."
Coprocessing And Multi-Tasking?
Certainly, students act out if they are bored or aren't taught according to their learning style. But during my observations, I wondered if part of the problem was that inattentive students just didn't get enough activity. I wrote in my notes, "Is one of my issues how active the students are - are they turned off because they need to be more active and there just isn't enough going on? Do they need to use more of their senses and sitting doesn't do it for them?" During the study, I witnessed several instances of students appearing to be off task, but really paying attention AND doing something else simultaneously.I've started to wonder if some students don't simply coprocess and multi-task. Maybe they do several things at once. ADD and ADHD are increasingly evident in our schools and have been linked, not to not paying attention, but rather to paying attention to everything. Maybe ADD and ADHD is simply another version of multi-tasking. Maybe with all the fast paced media available to young people, we have a new and different generation who does more than one thing at a time. I commented in my field notes, "How much of the noise and stuff isn't really being off task, but is just coprocessing? Are we (educators) making a mistake by killing the drive to learn because students need to be doing more than one thing at once and we only allow them to do one thing?" Project-based learning, for example, may appeal to some students because it is natural to do more than one thing at a time when working on the projects.
Compliance Vs. Learning
Keeping students on task raises the issue of whether students view school as a place of compliance or a place of learning. Secondary students I have informally talked to see the purpose of school as learning to obey others. This is the concern of conflict theorists, that not all people, or groups of people, are treated equally and that some are taught to think and lead, and others are taught to comply.This study raised further questions about issues of complying and learning. For one, I learned that you can't tell if someone isn't learning because they are doing something else, nor if they are learning because they appear on task. Learning is an internal process which may have few, if any, external indicators. It is hard to tell from those indicators whether students are learning or simply not being disruptive. Therefore, although teachers do need to keep an orderly and safe classroom, they must also be careful that they are not shutting down learning by how they react.
Attempts to keep the class orderly may inadvertently be squelching student interests. During one of my observations, I commented in my notes, "Part of me believes that kids who drop out mentally are objecting to inappropriate uses of power??? The kids at our alternative school do better because much of the control issues are done away with." Mike repeatedly came back to having choices and some control as important conditions which help him learn well.
A Final Thought
I am certain that most teachers have nothing but the best intentions for students. I worry, however, that much of what we do is driven by tradition, and not by reflecting on the ebb and flow of young minds. I am disturbed when I hear a teacher say that students need to adapt to school, when students are not in school by choice (they are there by law) and schools are supposed to be providing a service to children (not the other way around). Only through better understanding what motivates each child to learn can we provide that service to all children.
Another view of ADD:
Born to Explore at http://borntoexplore.org/
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