Zak's Weekly Musings (February 20, 2022)

What is student motivation? Well, it can be thought of as a student’s emotional or cognitive attraction to a task. It is a student’s willingness and desire to participate in the learning process. And, why does student motivation matter? According to Larry Ferlazzo, “By stimulating motivation, students can begin to find that spark of engagement and make their own fire.” In other words, motivation is a necessary precondition for engagement. So, what motivates students? 

The apprenticeship theory offers a learner-centered view of motivation: the learner has a personal goal in mind and the desire to attain that goal motivates what follows. This theory posits that learners who have a personal and clearly articulated goal better perceive the importance of mastering discrete skills in the pursuit of their larger ambition. These students see the relationship between the parts and the whole. “A student practices pirouettes because they want to be able to dance, they practice their layups because they want to score,” they revise their rich essays in math because they want to be an engineer. The trouble is that our current model of education offers a lot of parts without a clearly defined whole. Students attend six classes each day, but where and at what point does the learning across these six classes intersect? Fortunately, this is where students’ Q.3 goals come into play. 

Students’ goals connect learning across their classes. They’re the sinews that bind the learning of one class to another. They lend a coherent and unified purpose to the school day. Our collective goal for the remainder of Q.3 should be to create the conditions for students to make the connection between the learning in our classrooms and their individual goal.

In chatting with a teacher the week before Winter Break, he shared that he couldn’t possibly be responsible for memorizing and tracking all of his students’ goals. And, he is absolutely right. Nobody is asking you to do this – it’s simply not feasible. It also wouldn’t help our students. We can’t do their push ups and expect them to gain muscle. So, how can we leverage student’s personal learning goals as a tool of motivation? Well, we have to make their goals an integral part of our class. 

One way to do this is by making our learning targets more interactive. Oftentimes, when we start class, we share with students the learning goal for the lesson. This lends clarity, but it doesn’t lend relevance. What if we shared the learning target and then asked students to cross-reference their Q.3 goal, take one minute, and write one sentence explaining how the day’s learning target will help them to inch closer to meeting their personal learning goal. This could also be done as part of an exit ticket. You could ask students to reflect on one simple question at the end of each class such as, “Has today’s learning helped inch closer to meeting your Q.3 goal? If so, please explain. If not, please explain what you can do differently next class to make the learning more relevant to your goal.” This small tweak to what we are already doing will allow us to leverage goals to motivate and, in turn, engage students. 

Instead of adding anything new to the Resource Archive this week, take a look at our shared Google Sheet containing all of our middle schoolers’ goals. Nobody expects you to memorize or track all of these goals; rather, ask yourself how you can integrate students’ goals into the day-to-day learning. If we want to motivate students, they have to see that learning in your classroom doesn’t take place on an island, but is an integral part of a larger, singular whole.