Examining Importance
Teachers have about 15 seconds to convince students that the task they are about to do is important, has a high probability of success, and has a positive effect associated with it. Students decide within 15 seconds whether or not they are going to engage in an activity. We cannot be motivated for our students; that is something they must find for themselves. What we can do is directly teach them skills that will help them to begin a task with energy and to complete it even when it becomes difficult.
Motivation to pay attention to the learning, to begin a task, and to complete it are an innate part of the self-system and metacognitive system of the brain, and they can be activated through tactics used by the classroom teacher.
Tip: The processes of the self-system determine whether we will engage in the learning and how much energy or enthusiasm we will bring to the event. We pay attention to those things that we consider important. To be important it will usually be perceived either as instrumental in satisfying a
basic need or in attaining a personal goal. ~
Source: Tileston, Student Motivation
In response to the question, “When are we ever going to use this stuff?” a teacher should be able to say, ‘I promise that I will never teach you anything in this classroom unless I can tell you the real-world application.” Students feel overloaded by all that they must learn already, and then schools throw in mandatory testing to raise the anxiety level even more. Provide your students with the objectives for what you are studying (based on the state standards).
Put the objectives up in the room where students can see them and refer to them often throughout a unit of study so that students can see their progress. Three important aspects of the self-system that help the brain make decisions about the learning are interest, efficacy, and emotional response. (Efficacy: whether a student believes he/she has the resources or power to change a situation.)
Self-efficacy refers to the confidence a person has the ability to be successful based on past success. The old adage that “success breeds success” is true. Provide opportunities for students to experience success in incremental steps and provide specific feedback to help them improve. General statements like “good job” do not have a strong impact on learning. Students need specific feedback that is given often and consistently. The faculty at an entire school voted that they would begin the new school year with a positive attitude toward students. One of the tactics that the staff used was to tell students that they could be successful, even if they had not been in the past. That was reinforced daily through encouraging remarks, consistency in grading, treating students with respect, and having high expectations in every classroom. Within two months, scores were going up and parents were calling to say, “What are you doing differently? My kid loves school!”
Emotion is thought to be the strongest force in the brain. Negative emotion can literally shut down thought processes, while positive emotions can help shape our motivation to learn. Next time you lose your car keys, see if you can do higher-level math in your emotional state. The emotional response that a student brings to the new task will help shape the degree of motivation associated with that task. A positive learning environment includes both the physical and emotional structures in place. A warm and caring teacher who has no consistency or planning will have difficulty in terms of student progress.
MOTIVATION TO BEGIN A LESSON OR TASK
Most of what we learn comes to us through the five senses. The brain filters out about 98% of all incoming information. For learning to begin, it is necessary to get the brain’s attention. We do not want to keep the brain’s attention indefinitely, however, because we know that real learning comes in those times when students practice learning, process the information, and make it their own. Tileston recommends using the students’ age as a guide to how many minutes they will pay attention. If the students are twelve years old, do not talk more than twelve minutes at a time. For adults, twenty minutes seems to be the magic number. Add emotion to the learning through sound (try adding music to lessons), celebrations of the learning, visuals, simulations, and real-world applications.
According to Jensen (1997), when the learner’s emotions are engaged, the brain codes the content by triggering the release of chemicals that single out and mark the experience as important and meaningful. Emotions activate many areas of the body and the brain, including the prefrontal cortices, amygdale, hippocampus and often the stomach. To get the brain’s attention we must stimulate the quest for novelty, trigger the hunt for pleasure, and activate the desire to avoid harm. Try new things, seek pleasure, and avoid getting hurt. Emotional states that help us get our student’s attention: Anticipation - “By the way, when you come back to class….” and then give them a teaser about what they are going to do. Rearranging the desks into debate circles, horse shoe, etc. can give them the sense of anticipation
for a certain type of activity. Curiosity: Use lead-in questions or statements to make your students want to know more. “There is going to be
a fight between two rival gangs tonight. Want to know who wins? Read pages 328-340 in Romeo and Juliet and be ready to rumble (discuss it) tomorrow.”
Suspense: Provide challenges to your students or ask “what if” to raise the suspense level about the learning. Low to moderate anxiety (never high): Challenging work that involves higher-level thought will provide some temporary anxiety while the student formulates a plan for carrying out the work. Teachers must explicitly teach students how to plan and how to choose tools for problem solving.
High challenge: One of the major reasons that students tune out is because the work is boring and/or they do not see the relevance. “I will never teach you anything in this room that I cannot tell you how it is used in the real world.”
High anxiety: Should never be used. Putting students in high anxiety mode is the same as making them extremely emotional and their thinking will be impaired.
THE ROLE OF SELF-ATTRIBUTES
The student’s beliefs about physical appearance, intellectual ability, athletic ability, and social ability are his/her self-attributes. The phrase locus of control refers to the extent to which a person believes he or she has control over a situation as opposed to the control of other people or forces outside of themselves. Students who come to us from poverty often believe that they have no control over their lives or their circumstances. According to Ruby Payne (2001), destiny and fate are the major tenets of the belief system of those living in generational poverty. Choice is seldom considered.
Students usually attribute their success or failure to one or more of the following: ability (I’m just not
smart), effort (I tried really hard), task difficulty (That test was too hard), or luck (I guessed right.). Many students have the overriding belief that what happens in life is just fate: They have no control.
Students are more likely to engage in learning activities when they attribute success or failure to things they can control, like their own effort or lack of it, rather than to forces over which they have little or not control. Help students make the link between effort and achievement.
SENSE OF COMMUNITY
We all want to belong somewhere. What we believe our status to be in those groups – whether at home, with peers, or within a certain club or organization – determines our sense of acceptance. Learned helplessness is a condition that over time affects motivation. It is based on an experience in which the student felt he or she had no control. Learned helplessness can be overcome by building into our lessons opportunities for success and by teaching students basic emotional intelligence strategies, such as goal setting. Build lessons and projects around student interests and provide explicit feedback often. Stress causes the brain to trigger a reaction of defensiveness or a sense of helplessness. Under such conditions, the brain may go into a “survival” mode in which it becomes less capable of planning, patterndetection, judgment skills, receiving information, creativity, classifying data, problem-solving and other higherorder skills. Threats that students face include threats of bodily harm and threats based on what we do or do not know about learning. For instance, when students do not understand the directions for doing a task, it is an intellectual threat. They fear failure because of what they do not know. Students feel threatened when their ideas are attacked, they receive derogative comments, they are given little or no feedback, or they are not
provided with enough direction to complete a task. Self-efficacy is an important part of the students’ safety needs. Fear is reduced when the students know they can be successful based on past experience. Unfortunately, much of the self-talk that reveals how they feel about their ability to be successful is not spoken aloud. Teachers who cruise the room, talk to students, and constantly provide feedback to students are more likely to identify and stop threats in his/her own classroom.
In order for students to be successful, they need specific directions, adequate opportunities to practice
learning, and specific feedback for improvement. They also need to know before tackling an assignment what the expectations of the teacher are. No assignment should be given to students without a rubric or matrix telling them exactly what is expected. Students can do more work at a quality level if they know what qualifies as quality.
The teacher needs to be aware of both the emotional and physical atmosphere in the classroom. Students fear being made to look foolish in front of their peers. Anything that causes them to feel inadequate, silly, stupid, hurt, or embarrassed will be an emotional threat. A positive emotional climate in the classroom includes a student feeling acceptance by the teacher, acceptance by peers, a sense of order, clarity of tasks, and resources for success. Students should feel both emotional and physically safe in the classroom. For instance, do not offer
a system of rewards that will embarrass individual students. If the class is going to receive a party for reading a certain number of books and only one person does not meet goal, do not have the party and exclude that student. Instead, offer a class party to the entire class for meeting the class goal. Encourage everyone to ontribute to the team effort. Feedback should be specific, positive, and constructive. Be careful not to single out a student for something that should be said one-on-one and out of the hearing of others. When researching students from the urban poor and with certain ethnic groups, it has been found that these students learn through context better than they do by simply listening to a lecture or to general rules about how to do something. Most of what they have learned prior to combing to school has been in the context of experience, and thus they equate learning with the context of how or when it was learned. Teachers need to be aware of the contextualization of what they say and do and their affect on the feelings toward the content. Students of poverty feel they have very little control on their environment and will equate what they learn with
how they learned it. Rewards are those incentives that students know they can receive if they do certain things. A celebration, on the other hand, is spontaneous and occurs when students achieve their goals without expecting an extrinsic reward. Using a balance of each can encourage students when that little extra is needed. It is important to be consistent and only give rewards or celebrations when they are earned.
WHEN STUDENTS EXHIBIT OFF-TASK BEHAVIOR
1. Change the activity: Sometimes just changing from one activity to another or going from individual to group work will change the learning state
2. Change the environment: Change the lighting, the temperature, or the seating arrangement.
3. Change the way you are presenting the information: If you have been doing most of the talking, have students talk or bring in PowerPoint slides, computers, or other media to break up the lesson.
4. Change who is teaching: Let students take segments of the lesson or bring in a guest speaker. If neither of these option is possible, change your speaking tone or the tone of the lesson.
5. change the working environment. Change the amount of time students have to complete the work, or change the rules, the goals, the resources, or the method of obtaining information.
Source/Reference: Tileston, Donna Walker. What Every Teacher Should Know About Student Motivation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press: 2004.
Source: Tileston, Student Motivation
In response to the question, “When are we ever going to use this stuff?” a teacher should be able to say, ‘I promise that I will never teach you anything in this classroom unless I can tell you the real-world application.” Students feel overloaded by all that they must learn already, and then schools throw in mandatory testing to raise the anxiety level even more. Provide your students with the objectives for what you are studying (based on the state standards).
Put the objectives up in the room where students can see them and refer to them often throughout a unit of study so that students can see their progress. Three important aspects of the self-system that help the brain make decisions about the learning are interest, efficacy, and emotional response. (Efficacy: whether a student believes he/she has the resources or power to change a situation.)
Examining Efficacy
Self-efficacy refers to the confidence a person has the ability to be successful based on past success. The old adage that “success breeds success” is true. Provide opportunities for students to experience success in incremental steps and provide specific feedback to help them improve. General statements like “good job” do not have a strong impact on learning. Students need specific feedback that is given often and consistently. The faculty at an entire school voted that they would begin the new school year with a positive attitude toward students. One of the tactics that the staff used was to tell students that they could be successful, even if they had not been in the past. That was reinforced daily through encouraging remarks, consistency in grading, treating students with respect, and having high expectations in every classroom. Within two months, scores were going up and parents were calling to say, “What are you doing differently? My kid loves school!”
EXAMINING EMOTIONAL RESPONSE
Emotion is thought to be the strongest force in the brain. Negative emotion can literally shut down thought processes, while positive emotions can help shape our motivation to learn. Next time you lose your car keys, see if you can do higher-level math in your emotional state. The emotional response that a student brings to the new task will help shape the degree of motivation associated with that task. A positive learning environment includes both the physical and emotional structures in place. A warm and caring teacher who has no consistency or planning will have difficulty in terms of student progress.MOTIVATION TO BEGIN A LESSON OR TASK
Most of what we learn comes to us through the five senses. The brain filters out about 98% of all incoming information. For learning to begin, it is necessary to get the brain’s attention. We do not want to keep the brain’s attention indefinitely, however, because we know that real learning comes in those times when students practice learning, process the information, and make it their own. Tileston recommends using the students’ age as a guide to how many minutes they will pay attention. If the students are twelve years old, do not talk more than twelve minutes at a time. For adults, twenty minutes seems to be the magic number. Add emotion to the learning through sound (try adding music to lessons), celebrations of the learning, visuals, simulations, and real-world applications.
According to Jensen (1997), when the learner’s emotions are engaged, the brain codes the content by triggering the release of chemicals that single out and mark the experience as important and meaningful. Emotions activate many areas of the body and the brain, including the prefrontal cortices, amygdale, hippocampus and often the stomach. To get the brain’s attention we must stimulate the quest for novelty, trigger the hunt for pleasure, and activate the desire to avoid harm. Try new things, seek pleasure, and avoid getting hurt. Emotional states that help us get our student’s attention: Anticipation - “By the way, when you come back to class….” and then give them a teaser about what they are going to do. Rearranging the desks into debate circles, horse shoe, etc. can give them the sense of anticipation
for a certain type of activity. Curiosity: Use lead-in questions or statements to make your students want to know more. “There is going to be
a fight between two rival gangs tonight. Want to know who wins? Read pages 328-340 in Romeo and Juliet and be ready to rumble (discuss it) tomorrow.”
Suspense: Provide challenges to your students or ask “what if” to raise the suspense level about the learning. Low to moderate anxiety (never high): Challenging work that involves higher-level thought will provide some temporary anxiety while the student formulates a plan for carrying out the work. Teachers must explicitly teach students how to plan and how to choose tools for problem solving.
High challenge: One of the major reasons that students tune out is because the work is boring and/or they do not see the relevance. “I will never teach you anything in this room that I cannot tell you how it is used in the real world.”
High anxiety: Should never be used. Putting students in high anxiety mode is the same as making them extremely emotional and their thinking will be impaired.
THE ROLE OF SELF-ATTRIBUTES
The student’s beliefs about physical appearance, intellectual ability, athletic ability, and social ability are his/her self-attributes. The phrase locus of control refers to the extent to which a person believes he or she has control over a situation as opposed to the control of other people or forces outside of themselves. Students who come to us from poverty often believe that they have no control over their lives or their circumstances. According to Ruby Payne (2001), destiny and fate are the major tenets of the belief system of those living in generational poverty. Choice is seldom considered.
Students usually attribute their success or failure to one or more of the following: ability (I’m just not
smart), effort (I tried really hard), task difficulty (That test was too hard), or luck (I guessed right.). Many students have the overriding belief that what happens in life is just fate: They have no control.
Students are more likely to engage in learning activities when they attribute success or failure to things they can control, like their own effort or lack of it, rather than to forces over which they have little or not control. Help students make the link between effort and achievement.
SENSE OF COMMUNITY
We all want to belong somewhere. What we believe our status to be in those groups – whether at home, with peers, or within a certain club or organization – determines our sense of acceptance. Learned helplessness is a condition that over time affects motivation. It is based on an experience in which the student felt he or she had no control. Learned helplessness can be overcome by building into our lessons opportunities for success and by teaching students basic emotional intelligence strategies, such as goal setting. Build lessons and projects around student interests and provide explicit feedback often. Stress causes the brain to trigger a reaction of defensiveness or a sense of helplessness. Under such conditions, the brain may go into a “survival” mode in which it becomes less capable of planning, patterndetection, judgment skills, receiving information, creativity, classifying data, problem-solving and other higherorder skills. Threats that students face include threats of bodily harm and threats based on what we do or do not know about learning. For instance, when students do not understand the directions for doing a task, it is an intellectual threat. They fear failure because of what they do not know. Students feel threatened when their ideas are attacked, they receive derogative comments, they are given little or no feedback, or they are not
provided with enough direction to complete a task. Self-efficacy is an important part of the students’ safety needs. Fear is reduced when the students know they can be successful based on past experience. Unfortunately, much of the self-talk that reveals how they feel about their ability to be successful is not spoken aloud. Teachers who cruise the room, talk to students, and constantly provide feedback to students are more likely to identify and stop threats in his/her own classroom.
In order for students to be successful, they need specific directions, adequate opportunities to practice
learning, and specific feedback for improvement. They also need to know before tackling an assignment what the expectations of the teacher are. No assignment should be given to students without a rubric or matrix telling them exactly what is expected. Students can do more work at a quality level if they know what qualifies as quality.
The teacher needs to be aware of both the emotional and physical atmosphere in the classroom. Students fear being made to look foolish in front of their peers. Anything that causes them to feel inadequate, silly, stupid, hurt, or embarrassed will be an emotional threat. A positive emotional climate in the classroom includes a student feeling acceptance by the teacher, acceptance by peers, a sense of order, clarity of tasks, and resources for success. Students should feel both emotional and physically safe in the classroom. For instance, do not offer
a system of rewards that will embarrass individual students. If the class is going to receive a party for reading a certain number of books and only one person does not meet goal, do not have the party and exclude that student. Instead, offer a class party to the entire class for meeting the class goal. Encourage everyone to ontribute to the team effort. Feedback should be specific, positive, and constructive. Be careful not to single out a student for something that should be said one-on-one and out of the hearing of others. When researching students from the urban poor and with certain ethnic groups, it has been found that these students learn through context better than they do by simply listening to a lecture or to general rules about how to do something. Most of what they have learned prior to combing to school has been in the context of experience, and thus they equate learning with the context of how or when it was learned. Teachers need to be aware of the contextualization of what they say and do and their affect on the feelings toward the content. Students of poverty feel they have very little control on their environment and will equate what they learn with
how they learned it. Rewards are those incentives that students know they can receive if they do certain things. A celebration, on the other hand, is spontaneous and occurs when students achieve their goals without expecting an extrinsic reward. Using a balance of each can encourage students when that little extra is needed. It is important to be consistent and only give rewards or celebrations when they are earned.
WHEN STUDENTS EXHIBIT OFF-TASK BEHAVIOR
1. Change the activity: Sometimes just changing from one activity to another or going from individual to group work will change the learning state
2. Change the environment: Change the lighting, the temperature, or the seating arrangement.
3. Change the way you are presenting the information: If you have been doing most of the talking, have students talk or bring in PowerPoint slides, computers, or other media to break up the lesson.
4. Change who is teaching: Let students take segments of the lesson or bring in a guest speaker. If neither of these option is possible, change your speaking tone or the tone of the lesson.
5. change the working environment. Change the amount of time students have to complete the work, or change the rules, the goals, the resources, or the method of obtaining information.
Source/Reference: Tileston, Donna Walker. What Every Teacher Should Know About Student Motivation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press: 2004.
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