I am a sales rep. I have to get my students to buy into what I’m trying to teach them. Psychologists call this motivation; educational professionals from central office call it “activating strategies”. It all amounts to the same thing, though: convince your students that what you’re teaching them is
- interesting,
- useful, and
- worth their time.
I don’t really recall any teachers doing that with me. I don’t remember having “activating strategies.” We walked into class and the teacher told us what we were going to be doing that day. I don’t recall the teacher worrying so much about whether she’s “hooking” us. I, for one, paid attention because I knew at some point, there would be some payoff. It was more difficult in some classes than in others, particularly in middle school (or junior high as it was called then), but I had some kind of strange faith that the teachers knew what they were doing, and that I would, eventually, use all this stuff.
Today, though, we talk about hooking students, competing for their attention, differentiating our instruction to keep it fresh and interesting. These are all good and worthy things, but when they start to be the focus of evaluation and training, it starts to be a little much. Add to it standardized testing and NCLB accountability, and you start to get the feeling that students’ failure to learn something is your fault, and your fault alone.
Even not doing homework is your fault. You see, when a student flatly says, “I’m not going to do it,” you have to “find another way to structure it so the student can learn it.” He refuses to do the homework; you have to trick him into learning the information another way.
You didn’t differentiate to account for different learning styles; you didn’t hook your students; you didn’t provide think-pair-share debriefing.
How about, “The students just didn’t do the work”? How about, “The students just didn’t care”? Well, you have to find a way to get them to do the work; you have to find a way to make them care.
I’m not sure a teacher’s job is to motivate, though. We spend all the time motivating and massaging and coaxing, and in the meantime, the Chinese and Polish students who sit in quiet, disciplined rows for hour after hour outperform our students in that Holy Grail of NCLB achievement, standardized testing.
The difference is, to some degree, cultural — a thought that is both soothing and depressing.