Conclusions
There are three takeaways from my findings that have significant implications for educators and those involved in the lives of children. The first is that more self-determined forms of motivation correlate with higher grit scores. The second is that student motivation for challenging work is not fixed; it is evolving and can become more self-determined as they mature. The third important finding is how to use elements, such as relevance, mastery and autonomy, to help students progress along the motivation spectrum towards more self-determined forms. Let’s look at each in turn.
Takeaway #1: Intrinsic motivation and more self-determined forms of motivation are correlated with higher grit scores
My class data suggests that students who rank higher on more self-determined forms of motivation such as external motivation–identity, or intrinsic motivation–to know, accomplish or experience, as opposed to less self determined forms of external motivation such as external motivation–external regulation, external motivation–introjected, or amotivation, also have higher relative grit scores. Research suggests that those with higher grit scores fare better academically and socially and that self-discipline is a better predictor of academic performance than IQ (Duckworth, 2005; Mischel, 1989). In light of these findings we should focus on increasing opportunities for students to experience and develop more self-determined forms of motivation and by extension increase their grit.
Takeaway #1: Intrinsic motivation and more self-determined forms of motivation are correlated with higher grit scores
My class data suggests that students who rank higher on more self-determined forms of motivation such as external motivation–identity, or intrinsic motivation–to know, accomplish or experience, as opposed to less self determined forms of external motivation such as external motivation–external regulation, external motivation–introjected, or amotivation, also have higher relative grit scores. Research suggests that those with higher grit scores fare better academically and socially and that self-discipline is a better predictor of academic performance than IQ (Duckworth, 2005; Mischel, 1989). In light of these findings we should focus on increasing opportunities for students to experience and develop more self-determined forms of motivation and by extension increase their grit.
Figure 1. Motivation scale related to decreasing levels of self-determination.
It makes intuitive sense that perseverance increases for activities that are undertaken through choice. If we choose to study to avoid having our computer taken away, our interest in the activity of studying is probably close to non-existent and the moment we meet the bare minimum requirements to get our computer back we will probably stop studying. Our perseverance to excel at the task at a hand is burdensome and quickly fades. In contrast, if we make an active choice to study independent of external consequences, either to further our way along a path to a goal or for genuine interest in the topic at hand, we are far more likely to persevere for longer periods and actively work at the task. In short, we are far more likely to be gritty.
Takeaway #2: Students can progress from less self-determined forms of motivation to more self-determined forms
Research from Deci and Ryan suggests that as students mature they move from less self-determined forms of motivation to more self-determined forms for academic studies (1985). Their motivation shifts from external regulation, where factors external to their sense of self compel them to complete the task, such as mom or dad, to more internal reasons, such as identifying as a good student, wanting to have options later in life, or truly enjoying learning, accomplishing or experiencing. As students mature, their capacity to willingly engage in more cognitively challenging tasks increases. The more that these tasks align with existing interests or emerging passions, the more likely the student is to do the task out of genuine interest in the task itself and therefore for intrinsic reasons. The more self-determined the decision, the more grit and perseverance are likely to be demonstrated to complete the task or goal.
Over the museum exhibit project, Scott, who ordinarily has low motivation for tasks he is not interested in, explored a new and challenging topic to create his Jacob’s Ladder exhibit. Due to his interest, he exhibited tremendous grit and produced an exhibit he was proud of. Successes of this nature help foster internal motivation and reinforce students’ confidence in their ability to engage in cognitively challenging work and persevere. John experienced a similar shift in his self-perception throughout the project, moving from a state of amotivation to a state of accomplishment.
These cases show that motivation is situational and not an inherent quality of a person. Educators often speak as if motivation is a fixed trait, “He’s just an unmotivated student” when in reality the student is just unmotivated in that particular situation. The power of John’s case is that motivation can also change. Creating the right set of conditions to foster motivation is a key step in helping students make the shift towards more self-determined forms of motivation.
Takeaway #3: Educators can design learning experiences to shift motivation and maximize grit
We are innately curious, however, we don’t always have the patience, or the drive to pursue our questions. Why is this? What factors come into play that stifle the desire to explore that we see in the very young? If we take a moment to watch a toddler trying to open a jar, we see intense concentration, multiple trials and different techniques, followed by either success or frustration. What factors lead to building confidence and avoiding frustration and what factors contribute to building a pattern of trying less and less?
Several factors have been shown to increase motivation. These are purpose, autonomy, and mastery (Pink, 2009). Enhancing opportunities for students to experience motivation for challenging work leads to shifts in self-perception and more self-determined forms of motivation. Projects that include support for student choice, autonomy, and mastery help provide positive experiences for students that can advance their sense of self and their confidence in what they can accomplish.
How do we, as educators, move student motivation along the external-internal spectrum to maximize grit? Let’s take a closer look at each of the identified factors that increase motivation.
Relevance: How can we incorporate student passions, even when they don’t know what they want to do?
Another way to think of relevance is as purpose. Without purpose, tasks become irrelevant and draining. With a clear purpose they become imperative and engaging. Purpose can be in the form of interest in a passion, developing a product for a task or an audience, or contributing to an existing body of knowledge to advance a field of study.
Passion & Purpose
As educators we are tasked with teaching a particular content area. Our students may or may not have chosen to attend our class. They also may find the subject we teach painfully boring. We can overcome these obstacles by making room for student passions and creating a purpose. If we can incorporate student passions into our projects or lessons there is a higher probability that students will persevere in learning, even if the going gets tough. In the case of Maggie, her passion for the ocean was the only thing that kept her going in the face of demotivating circumstances. Without this linking factor she would have abandoned the project as soon as her personal life derailed her motivation for schoolwork.
What about students who don’t know what their passions are?
In every school there are students whose passions are either impossible to align with course content, or truly don’t exist yet. Young students who have not been given ample time in free play to explore and discover their passions, or who have come from high stress home environments that have inhibited early exploration, can feel lost or apathetic when asked to identify or incorporate areas of interest into classroom structures. In these cases it helps to look at relevance in terms of purpose. In the absence of passion, create a goal to unite and engage students. John fell into this category. As someone who self identified as amotivated for school, he nevertheless stepped up when faced with a public exhibition of his work at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center and feedback from an industry professional.
The Power of Audience
The second method for creating purpose is to create something for an audience other than ourselves. Parents, peers, industry professionals, and competitions are all great examples of external factors that can help students make more self-determined choices to engage and excel at the task at hand. Obviously the more professional the audience or the more prestigious the competition, the higher the stakes for the students and the more likely they will push themselves to do their best work. In the museum inquiry project, Erik, the Chief Exhibit Engineer of the Fleet Science Center, served as the industry professional that the students collaborated with to design and build their projects. He was both the industry expert and the client. In many cases, when I offered feedback to students they wouldn’t bother to make changes even if a grade was attached. However, the students took Erik’s feedback as if it were gold.
Part of Something Larger
The third way to create purpose is to become part of something larger. Scientists contribute to an ever-expanding body of knowledge. Artists create to engage the public consciousness and push our thinking in new directions. Students can enter the dialogue too. Posing big questions to guide student thinking, doing original research, or creating meaningful art for public display are all ways to link students to a broader context. When students experience their work as inherently important, motivation shifts to more self-determined forms. Their work now has meaning.
Mastery: How can educators scaffold learning effectively to ensure success?
Once purpose has been established the process of mastery can begin. To me, this is all about effective scaffolding for students; how to provide support and ensure success without doing any of the thinking for them. Not surprisingly, this ‘not doing any of the thinking for them’ involves a significant amount of work on our parts. Let’s look at some common challenges to having students do all the work themselves and how to scaffold effectively so that they do.
If students don’t know the content, how can they make an informed choice on what to pursue?
As a problem based learning (PBL) practitioner, this is the most common question I field from non-PBL educators. This also happens frequently in classrooms, especially classrooms that are switching from a teacher guided to a more student centered environment or even between teacher guided lessons to student guided lessons. Thinking is hard. Students often want significant guidance in coming up with ideas. In order to shift the burden of thought from us back to the student it helps to put in a great deal of thinking beforehand. Anticipate the areas where students will feel challenged, and work through some scaffolding structures to provide maximum support while minimizing interference in the thought process so student ideas can bloom. Techniques such as pair sharing, group brainstorming and guided research can all help in exposing students to new ideas and perspectives from which to draw inspiration. In the museum exhibit project students participated in a sticky note brainstorming session about scientific phenomena that interested them. Afterwards we collectively grouped the phenomena into broad categories from which the students could choose something to study and worked in partnerships to create investigable questions for their experiments. Creating a classroom culture that supports trying and returning to the drawing board if necessary is essential.
My students do not know how to research on their own. How can they overcome problems without researching possible solutions or even just researching to clearly understand the problem?
Learning is difficult, messy, and occurs in layers. Repeated exposure to concepts and ideas creates connections in our long-term memory centers and creates schemas, frameworks we can use to understand new and novel learning experiences. When we encounter a new piece of information or experience, we store it in short-term memory where one of three things can happen: the new experience can build on an existing schema we already possess, altering and refining our understanding of our pre-existing schema, or, the new experience does not relate to anything we have stored in our long term memory and we either create a new tentative schema, one incomplete and yeasty in its newness, or we dismiss the new experience as unimportant and forget it 30 seconds later. This is the biological process of learning (Wagner et. al., 1998, Pollock et. al., 2002). Expecting a student to wade through the volumes of information on any one topic on the Internet and synthesize a complete understanding in a short amount of time is a physical impossibility.
Research skills must be taught in layers just as other experiences or content are. It is equally important to scaffold student research, as it is to scaffold any other component of a project. Of course, different students have different abilities; some may require significant guidance, while others may have already mastered research skills. Using graphic organizers to focus the search for supporting facts, modeling how to find reliable resources, and encouraging reflective journaling about understandings as they evolve can all help students add layers to their schema for effective research skills and understanding of content. All of these techniques were used in the museum exhibit project.
How can I encourage students to go beyond the bare minimum?
Build in time for drafts. Whether this is for writing, artwork, or experimenting, create a classroom culture of drafts throughout the teaching process. It helps to talk with professionals about their workflow and adopt similar structures so that class structures mimic real world work structures. Prior to launching the museum exhibit project, I visited the Exploratorium in San Francisco and spent a few days with the exhibit developers analyzing their creative process. I then converted what I had learned into a curriculum for the project. I learned from the exhibit developers that it was important to brainstorm phenomena as a group, to build in time to ‘play’ with phenomena before creating initial exhibit design ideas, and that it was very important to conquer the most challenging aspect of an exhibit idea right off the bat in the proof of concept phase of the engineering process. I also adopted the idea of creating a culture of critique and valuing trial and error. I embedded numerous critique sessions throughout the design and build process so students could continue to refine their thinking and improve their exhibits.
Reflective journaling was also an important aspect of the process. Prompts such as ‘What did you accomplish today and what are your next steps?’ and ‘Describe the challenges you faced in your proof of concept and what you did to overcome them,’ helped students to reflect on their progress and to generate new goals for their exhibits.
Autonomy–the delicate balance between success and frustration
Traditional methods of teaching have heavy scaffolding. Unfortunately, often the rich critical thinking involved in learning is scaffolded right out of the work students do. Learning is reduced to fill in the blank worksheets, rote memorization of facts and multiple-choice questions. Not surprisingly, some educators rebelled. New forms of teaching evolved such as inquiry learning and project based learning which focus on more student centered instructional strategies. Often projects or problems in these environments require significant critical thinking on the part of the student. However, project based learning environments with minimal guidance or complete student autonomy over the learning process often result in significant student frustration (Kirschner et. al., 2006; personal experience).
While some proponents of project based learning claim that this frustration is natural and even necessary for student growth as problem solvers, I think that too much frustration can destroy motivation and sabotage learning. Students are not yet adults. To ensure learning goals are met, project based learning requires significant planning based on student abilities to support and encourage student thinking. As students gain skills and mature, scaffolding can be reduced and eventually removed altogether. Of course this is always a challenge because students achieve these skills at different paces.
In the museum exhibit project significant scaffolding was set up through following the engineering process. Students created a proof of concept, followed by peer and expert critique, followed by a prototype design phase, followed by more critique. After building prototypes the students went through yet another layer of critique and design before building their final builds. Scott’s final journal reflection on the process (which can also be found in the findings) is a good example of how the scaffolding helped his group succeed:
"The proof of concept helped me really understand what I was working with and Erik had some innovative suggestions that made our project more professional looking. All of the free time we had in class was extremely helpful because we could just work and do our own thing. Fro other teachers wanting to do this project I would suggest that they should give plenty of work time, and there should be many drafts of your exhibits so that it keeps improving."
For Scott, the scaffolding provided the right balance of multiple drafts to create goals and autonomy over the process. If students had not been given the intermediate goals of multiple drafts, it is unlikely that they would have refined their exhibit to the extent that they did. However, on the flip side, their motivation would have been stifled if I had micromanaged how they created their project.
If scaffolding is appropriate, students will report experiencing significant autonomy in the project. If they have been guided carefully and allowed time to self reflect on progress and plan next steps, ownership of the process will rest with them. The amount of scaffolding needed depends on multiple factors including the type of project, student ability, and desired outcomes.
Keeping dialogue open
Ways to ensure that there is a balance between scaffolding and student autonomy is to keep a dialogue open. Solicit feedback on how scaffolding structures are working. This can be accomplished through journal prompts, surveys, informal class discussions or any other forms of dialogue that addresses how students are feeling about their ability to move their project forward.
Provide access to experts
For students who are interested in their work and have a desire to excel, there may come a time when they need to push past your level of expertise. Providing access or helping them find experts outside of the school environment is a way to support continued learning and mastery beyond the classroom and link their work to the real world. Erik from the Rueben H. Fleet Science Center provided this link for the inquiry museum exhibit project.
Final Thought: Learning is Inquiry
All forms of authentic learning have inquiry at their heart. We explore our world through investigation, trial and error. These investigations create complex webs of meaning that we draw on to help make sense of our world. Often the learning goes far beyond the surface learning of facts; it extends our concept of reality, relationships, and our sense of self. Excellent educators seek to create experiences that link these aspects of understanding for their students through tapping into passions, creating purpose, expecting and planning for mastery, and providing autonomy over the process. In order to do this well, it takes time. Authentic learning–deep learning and immersion in problem solving–suffers if it is stuffed into the cracks of classroom practice. If it is to be successful, inquiry needs to be the focal point and it needs to be pursued with rigorous tenacity, careful attention to fostering the conditions of motivation, and acceptance of failure along the way. When students engage in extended inquiry and projects that have these principles at their heart, they are engaging in real world problem solving. They experience first hand the endurance and mental grit necessary to see them through high school, college, and the challenges of life beyond.
It makes intuitive sense that perseverance increases for activities that are undertaken through choice. If we choose to study to avoid having our computer taken away, our interest in the activity of studying is probably close to non-existent and the moment we meet the bare minimum requirements to get our computer back we will probably stop studying. Our perseverance to excel at the task at a hand is burdensome and quickly fades. In contrast, if we make an active choice to study independent of external consequences, either to further our way along a path to a goal or for genuine interest in the topic at hand, we are far more likely to persevere for longer periods and actively work at the task. In short, we are far more likely to be gritty.
Takeaway #2: Students can progress from less self-determined forms of motivation to more self-determined forms
Research from Deci and Ryan suggests that as students mature they move from less self-determined forms of motivation to more self-determined forms for academic studies (1985). Their motivation shifts from external regulation, where factors external to their sense of self compel them to complete the task, such as mom or dad, to more internal reasons, such as identifying as a good student, wanting to have options later in life, or truly enjoying learning, accomplishing or experiencing. As students mature, their capacity to willingly engage in more cognitively challenging tasks increases. The more that these tasks align with existing interests or emerging passions, the more likely the student is to do the task out of genuine interest in the task itself and therefore for intrinsic reasons. The more self-determined the decision, the more grit and perseverance are likely to be demonstrated to complete the task or goal.
Over the museum exhibit project, Scott, who ordinarily has low motivation for tasks he is not interested in, explored a new and challenging topic to create his Jacob’s Ladder exhibit. Due to his interest, he exhibited tremendous grit and produced an exhibit he was proud of. Successes of this nature help foster internal motivation and reinforce students’ confidence in their ability to engage in cognitively challenging work and persevere. John experienced a similar shift in his self-perception throughout the project, moving from a state of amotivation to a state of accomplishment.
These cases show that motivation is situational and not an inherent quality of a person. Educators often speak as if motivation is a fixed trait, “He’s just an unmotivated student” when in reality the student is just unmotivated in that particular situation. The power of John’s case is that motivation can also change. Creating the right set of conditions to foster motivation is a key step in helping students make the shift towards more self-determined forms of motivation.
Takeaway #3: Educators can design learning experiences to shift motivation and maximize grit
We are innately curious, however, we don’t always have the patience, or the drive to pursue our questions. Why is this? What factors come into play that stifle the desire to explore that we see in the very young? If we take a moment to watch a toddler trying to open a jar, we see intense concentration, multiple trials and different techniques, followed by either success or frustration. What factors lead to building confidence and avoiding frustration and what factors contribute to building a pattern of trying less and less?
Several factors have been shown to increase motivation. These are purpose, autonomy, and mastery (Pink, 2009). Enhancing opportunities for students to experience motivation for challenging work leads to shifts in self-perception and more self-determined forms of motivation. Projects that include support for student choice, autonomy, and mastery help provide positive experiences for students that can advance their sense of self and their confidence in what they can accomplish.
How do we, as educators, move student motivation along the external-internal spectrum to maximize grit? Let’s take a closer look at each of the identified factors that increase motivation.
Relevance: How can we incorporate student passions, even when they don’t know what they want to do?
Another way to think of relevance is as purpose. Without purpose, tasks become irrelevant and draining. With a clear purpose they become imperative and engaging. Purpose can be in the form of interest in a passion, developing a product for a task or an audience, or contributing to an existing body of knowledge to advance a field of study.
Passion & Purpose
As educators we are tasked with teaching a particular content area. Our students may or may not have chosen to attend our class. They also may find the subject we teach painfully boring. We can overcome these obstacles by making room for student passions and creating a purpose. If we can incorporate student passions into our projects or lessons there is a higher probability that students will persevere in learning, even if the going gets tough. In the case of Maggie, her passion for the ocean was the only thing that kept her going in the face of demotivating circumstances. Without this linking factor she would have abandoned the project as soon as her personal life derailed her motivation for schoolwork.
What about students who don’t know what their passions are?
In every school there are students whose passions are either impossible to align with course content, or truly don’t exist yet. Young students who have not been given ample time in free play to explore and discover their passions, or who have come from high stress home environments that have inhibited early exploration, can feel lost or apathetic when asked to identify or incorporate areas of interest into classroom structures. In these cases it helps to look at relevance in terms of purpose. In the absence of passion, create a goal to unite and engage students. John fell into this category. As someone who self identified as amotivated for school, he nevertheless stepped up when faced with a public exhibition of his work at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center and feedback from an industry professional.
The Power of Audience
The second method for creating purpose is to create something for an audience other than ourselves. Parents, peers, industry professionals, and competitions are all great examples of external factors that can help students make more self-determined choices to engage and excel at the task at hand. Obviously the more professional the audience or the more prestigious the competition, the higher the stakes for the students and the more likely they will push themselves to do their best work. In the museum inquiry project, Erik, the Chief Exhibit Engineer of the Fleet Science Center, served as the industry professional that the students collaborated with to design and build their projects. He was both the industry expert and the client. In many cases, when I offered feedback to students they wouldn’t bother to make changes even if a grade was attached. However, the students took Erik’s feedback as if it were gold.
Part of Something Larger
The third way to create purpose is to become part of something larger. Scientists contribute to an ever-expanding body of knowledge. Artists create to engage the public consciousness and push our thinking in new directions. Students can enter the dialogue too. Posing big questions to guide student thinking, doing original research, or creating meaningful art for public display are all ways to link students to a broader context. When students experience their work as inherently important, motivation shifts to more self-determined forms. Their work now has meaning.
Mastery: How can educators scaffold learning effectively to ensure success?
Once purpose has been established the process of mastery can begin. To me, this is all about effective scaffolding for students; how to provide support and ensure success without doing any of the thinking for them. Not surprisingly, this ‘not doing any of the thinking for them’ involves a significant amount of work on our parts. Let’s look at some common challenges to having students do all the work themselves and how to scaffold effectively so that they do.
If students don’t know the content, how can they make an informed choice on what to pursue?
As a problem based learning (PBL) practitioner, this is the most common question I field from non-PBL educators. This also happens frequently in classrooms, especially classrooms that are switching from a teacher guided to a more student centered environment or even between teacher guided lessons to student guided lessons. Thinking is hard. Students often want significant guidance in coming up with ideas. In order to shift the burden of thought from us back to the student it helps to put in a great deal of thinking beforehand. Anticipate the areas where students will feel challenged, and work through some scaffolding structures to provide maximum support while minimizing interference in the thought process so student ideas can bloom. Techniques such as pair sharing, group brainstorming and guided research can all help in exposing students to new ideas and perspectives from which to draw inspiration. In the museum exhibit project students participated in a sticky note brainstorming session about scientific phenomena that interested them. Afterwards we collectively grouped the phenomena into broad categories from which the students could choose something to study and worked in partnerships to create investigable questions for their experiments. Creating a classroom culture that supports trying and returning to the drawing board if necessary is essential.
My students do not know how to research on their own. How can they overcome problems without researching possible solutions or even just researching to clearly understand the problem?
Learning is difficult, messy, and occurs in layers. Repeated exposure to concepts and ideas creates connections in our long-term memory centers and creates schemas, frameworks we can use to understand new and novel learning experiences. When we encounter a new piece of information or experience, we store it in short-term memory where one of three things can happen: the new experience can build on an existing schema we already possess, altering and refining our understanding of our pre-existing schema, or, the new experience does not relate to anything we have stored in our long term memory and we either create a new tentative schema, one incomplete and yeasty in its newness, or we dismiss the new experience as unimportant and forget it 30 seconds later. This is the biological process of learning (Wagner et. al., 1998, Pollock et. al., 2002). Expecting a student to wade through the volumes of information on any one topic on the Internet and synthesize a complete understanding in a short amount of time is a physical impossibility.
Research skills must be taught in layers just as other experiences or content are. It is equally important to scaffold student research, as it is to scaffold any other component of a project. Of course, different students have different abilities; some may require significant guidance, while others may have already mastered research skills. Using graphic organizers to focus the search for supporting facts, modeling how to find reliable resources, and encouraging reflective journaling about understandings as they evolve can all help students add layers to their schema for effective research skills and understanding of content. All of these techniques were used in the museum exhibit project.
How can I encourage students to go beyond the bare minimum?
Build in time for drafts. Whether this is for writing, artwork, or experimenting, create a classroom culture of drafts throughout the teaching process. It helps to talk with professionals about their workflow and adopt similar structures so that class structures mimic real world work structures. Prior to launching the museum exhibit project, I visited the Exploratorium in San Francisco and spent a few days with the exhibit developers analyzing their creative process. I then converted what I had learned into a curriculum for the project. I learned from the exhibit developers that it was important to brainstorm phenomena as a group, to build in time to ‘play’ with phenomena before creating initial exhibit design ideas, and that it was very important to conquer the most challenging aspect of an exhibit idea right off the bat in the proof of concept phase of the engineering process. I also adopted the idea of creating a culture of critique and valuing trial and error. I embedded numerous critique sessions throughout the design and build process so students could continue to refine their thinking and improve their exhibits.
Reflective journaling was also an important aspect of the process. Prompts such as ‘What did you accomplish today and what are your next steps?’ and ‘Describe the challenges you faced in your proof of concept and what you did to overcome them,’ helped students to reflect on their progress and to generate new goals for their exhibits.
Autonomy–the delicate balance between success and frustration
Traditional methods of teaching have heavy scaffolding. Unfortunately, often the rich critical thinking involved in learning is scaffolded right out of the work students do. Learning is reduced to fill in the blank worksheets, rote memorization of facts and multiple-choice questions. Not surprisingly, some educators rebelled. New forms of teaching evolved such as inquiry learning and project based learning which focus on more student centered instructional strategies. Often projects or problems in these environments require significant critical thinking on the part of the student. However, project based learning environments with minimal guidance or complete student autonomy over the learning process often result in significant student frustration (Kirschner et. al., 2006; personal experience).
While some proponents of project based learning claim that this frustration is natural and even necessary for student growth as problem solvers, I think that too much frustration can destroy motivation and sabotage learning. Students are not yet adults. To ensure learning goals are met, project based learning requires significant planning based on student abilities to support and encourage student thinking. As students gain skills and mature, scaffolding can be reduced and eventually removed altogether. Of course this is always a challenge because students achieve these skills at different paces.
In the museum exhibit project significant scaffolding was set up through following the engineering process. Students created a proof of concept, followed by peer and expert critique, followed by a prototype design phase, followed by more critique. After building prototypes the students went through yet another layer of critique and design before building their final builds. Scott’s final journal reflection on the process (which can also be found in the findings) is a good example of how the scaffolding helped his group succeed:
"The proof of concept helped me really understand what I was working with and Erik had some innovative suggestions that made our project more professional looking. All of the free time we had in class was extremely helpful because we could just work and do our own thing. Fro other teachers wanting to do this project I would suggest that they should give plenty of work time, and there should be many drafts of your exhibits so that it keeps improving."
For Scott, the scaffolding provided the right balance of multiple drafts to create goals and autonomy over the process. If students had not been given the intermediate goals of multiple drafts, it is unlikely that they would have refined their exhibit to the extent that they did. However, on the flip side, their motivation would have been stifled if I had micromanaged how they created their project.
If scaffolding is appropriate, students will report experiencing significant autonomy in the project. If they have been guided carefully and allowed time to self reflect on progress and plan next steps, ownership of the process will rest with them. The amount of scaffolding needed depends on multiple factors including the type of project, student ability, and desired outcomes.
Keeping dialogue open
Ways to ensure that there is a balance between scaffolding and student autonomy is to keep a dialogue open. Solicit feedback on how scaffolding structures are working. This can be accomplished through journal prompts, surveys, informal class discussions or any other forms of dialogue that addresses how students are feeling about their ability to move their project forward.
Provide access to experts
For students who are interested in their work and have a desire to excel, there may come a time when they need to push past your level of expertise. Providing access or helping them find experts outside of the school environment is a way to support continued learning and mastery beyond the classroom and link their work to the real world. Erik from the Rueben H. Fleet Science Center provided this link for the inquiry museum exhibit project.
Final Thought: Learning is Inquiry
All forms of authentic learning have inquiry at their heart. We explore our world through investigation, trial and error. These investigations create complex webs of meaning that we draw on to help make sense of our world. Often the learning goes far beyond the surface learning of facts; it extends our concept of reality, relationships, and our sense of self. Excellent educators seek to create experiences that link these aspects of understanding for their students through tapping into passions, creating purpose, expecting and planning for mastery, and providing autonomy over the process. In order to do this well, it takes time. Authentic learning–deep learning and immersion in problem solving–suffers if it is stuffed into the cracks of classroom practice. If it is to be successful, inquiry needs to be the focal point and it needs to be pursued with rigorous tenacity, careful attention to fostering the conditions of motivation, and acceptance of failure along the way. When students engage in extended inquiry and projects that have these principles at their heart, they are engaging in real world problem solving. They experience first hand the endurance and mental grit necessary to see them through high school, college, and the challenges of life beyond.