Tag: situated motivation

118/365 Mission Hill is What Theory Looks Like in Practice #YearAtMH

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. This piece was originally posted at EdWeek.

One of the great joys of A Year at Mission Hill is the glimpse it provides of the entirety of the teaching and learning experience. In Chapter 5, we are provided continued access to both the planning and implementation sides of teaching as we see and hear teachers planning lessons around a school-wide investigation of Chinese culture.

We find 2nd/3rd Grade Teacher Jenerra Williams (1:40) discussing the needs of her students in a planning meeting that draws a connection between both her professional expertise and the place of educational theory in the classroom, as she explains to her colleagues that they must take into consideration the cognitive development of their students while planning the introduction of new concepts.

There is beauty in Williams’ informal connection to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and its application to the “concrete” thinking Williams and her colleagues notice as prominent in their group of students.

While this episode is primarily concerned with the artistry and learning of the students, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the artistry and learning of the teachers as well. Williams weaves formal and informal assessments of students into her knowledge of cognitive theory to make sure the team is pacing the learning in such a way as to provide access for everyone.

So too, is there beauty in Kindergarten and 1st Grade Teacher Kathy Clunis D’Andrea’s interaction with a student (3:09) who has a “great idea.” Not only has D’Andrea created a space where her students continue to feel the safety and freedom to share such ideas, but her response shows a dedication to letting students play such ideas out in their own heads. D’Andrea’s reaction to the student is not to judge, criticize, or question the idea, but merely to repeat it back to him as a literal sounding board and then keep the space open for him to build on it publicly from there.

Such moments are excellent embodiments of Eleanor Duckworth’s ideas of “messing about” as described in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas. They are also spoken to in Art Teacher Jeanne Rachko’s description of how she sees her role in the classroom.

Rachko’s dedication to letting students “discover who they are as artists,” and “empowering them in their own choices,” is revealed not as some soft bohemian philosophy, but one borne out in research and educational theory.

In a sense, Rachko is co-discovering who her students are alongside them. Such practice answers the call made by Dave Rose in his book Why School?, when he wrote that “teaching carries with it the obligation to understand the people in one’s charge, to teach subject matter and skills, but also to inquire, to nurture, to have a sense of who a student is.”

Such an obligation is fulfilled in each of the considerations Mission Hill makes because the school attends to both the needs and the curiosities of its students. It motivates by creating situations that invite students to play and include the four key tenets of situated motivation as described by Scott Paris and Julianne Turner: choice, challenge, collaboration, and control.

Making room for each of these components, co-discovering who their students are, and applying educational theory to what they discover allows Mission Hill’s teachers, and others like them, to make practical decisions that are artfully executed.

49/365 We Must Stop Confusing ‘Authoritarian’ and ‘Authority’

Sit and watch any group of novice teachers – those in their first few years, those student teaching, those teaching a new grade level for the first time – and you’re likely to here some variation of the following, “Yeah, most days, it’s all I can do just to get control of the class.” It’s a frequent question asked of mentor teachers, “How do you get control of the kids?”

Lest you think such speech is solely the domain of novice teachers, try speaking at a conference sesssion or staff development meeting and advocating a shift in practice that would mean giving students more choice in the classroom. Within seconds, a few hands will be raised, one will be called on, and a veteran teacher will say, “Yeah, that sounds great and all, but if we did what you’re suggesting our classrooms would be madhouses. It’d be too difficult to keep control.”

Good.

There is a difference between being an authority and being authoritarian (and we should shoot for the former).

If the bulk of teacher’s practices are geared around maintaining control of the classroom or control of the students, then they’ve lost sight of what’s possible in schools. Scott Paris and Julienne Turner give four key components of this in their piece “Situated Motivation.”

Sometimes, we say motivation as a white washed way of thinking about control, “That student is really motivated,” or “That teacher is very motivational.” Replace “motivation” with “control” in those two students and you get to the meat of the meaning.

Paris and Turner found out motivation, like control, is not inherent in the individual. Anyone who has planned an amazingly successful lesson one day and then felt like a ringmaster the next knows this to be true. Instead, Paris and Turner found that motivation is situated in the context of an activity. Activities, it turns out, are motivational.

Well, they can be if they include four key components – choice, challenge, collaboration, and control. The more of these components a teacher builds in to a learning experience, the more likely they are to find a class that might be construed as being in their control. Structuring lessons to include choice, challenge, collaboration, and control will move the teacher to a different role than that of authoritarian. He will find himself as he should be – an authority.

The teacher as authority knows the content of the day, knows his students, knows the community, and knows how to structure a learning experience that will produce motivation in his students. This is the role of the teacher. Contrary to the tener of much of the driving conversation about teachers, we are authorities. We are authorities of education and we must be willing to stand up and say as much.

Sadly, it is not only the reformist/traditionalist camps that are wearing away the authority of teachers, though they are those whose practice tends toward authoritarianism.

Progressives have long contrued the works of John Dewey to suggest that teachers should step back, hide their authority and let students fail as they will without assistance. This is decidedly neither what Dewey meant nor what he wrote.

Writing in his small but powerful Experience & Education, Dewey wrote, “On the contrary, basing education upon personal experience may mean more multiplied and more intimate contacts between the mature and the immature than ever existed in the traditional school, and consequently more, rather than less, guidance by others.”

What Dewey was certainly arguing against, and what does not become a great school or great community is teacher as authoritarian, dictating actions, answers, and access with little-to-know regard for students’ abilities to navigate those spaces on their own.

Control is a tempting mistress. In the absense of wisdom and the ability or will to structure motivating learning experiences for students, it is frequently the goal of many classroom teachers of all stripes. To build the schools we need, though, we must be authorities within a democracy.