Reflection
The first iteration of my research question focused on inquiry. I was interested in how to get students asking and exploring their own questions.
Then I began teaching that class.
If you’ve been teaching for a while, you’ve probably come across them. None of the students seem motivated. Getting them to think is like pulling teeth. Of course it’s never every student in the class, usually it’s just a small contingent with significant power over class dynamics that decide to use their power in unhelpful ways. It was my first encounter with such a group. Previous classes had lulled me into a false sense of security and I skipped some valuable norm setting activities because the students had already been together for a semester. The previous teacher must have covered it right? And anyway, students usually worked hard and respected each other; my class norms were covered by the general school culture. Why waste the time? Blissfully unaware, I launched a rigorous and ambitious pilot of the inquiry exhibit project.
The students completed the project, with quite satisfactory results, but the process was intensely arduous for all involved, and when the semester came to a close, I had a new burning passion: student motivation.
When I began my action research, I had a new crop of students, which were, ironically, quite motivated. However, since there are always a few students who seem unmotivated for challenging academic work, I stuck with my action research focus: How I can effectively scaffold inquiry learning in my classroom and how does it affect student motivation?
On the first day of class I had my students take the first three surveys. Angela Duckworth’s Grit survey, and the two surveys I had developed which focused on inquiry and motivation. I diligently color-coded their free written responses, looking for evidence of mastery, relevance, autonomy or grit. Most students mentioned at least one or more and related them to all sorts of academic and non-academic situations. Wonderful! Now what? I realized I knew what I was looking for (sort of) but really had no idea how to foster it. How do you instill motivation? How do you create grit? I had no idea.
So I sat back and waited. I just observed for a while. And sure enough, the usual classroom behaviors emerged. I began to identify potential case study candidates. As a class we began to read some of the literature on grit and motivation. One of the most effective research tools I used was journaling. When in doubt have the students tell you what they think. I used a variety of different prompts around grit and motivation to try and tease out where I was trying to go with my research. Finally a month and a half into the semester I realized that as I looked over panel discussion transcripts and journal entries, I wasn’t seeing evidence of internal motivation. I found this fascinating and so I brought it to the students. We listed all sorts of things we found motivating on the board and then grouped them as either external or internal motivators. Then I had the students respond to the prompt: Looking at our list of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators which do you think have been most influential for you over the past week? Month? Your life?
The results were fascinating. Every single student except one listed external reasons as their primary motivators. At this point I realized I had to go back to the research. I read a dozen or so more papers on motivation and self-determination theory and finally stumbled on the Academic Motivation Scale questionnaire. When I analyzed the students results to that survey and graphed them against their grit scores, it was fascinating to see the correlation emerge. Students who reported more self determined forms of motivation also had higher grit scores. It was like I’d found the missing link. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I had been wrestling so much with how grit and motivation were related and how they connected to the classroom and how they could be modified, that it was a profound relief to come to the rather simple conclusion that the more self determined your motivation, the longer you’d probably persevere at a task. It was simple. Obvious. Yet, the first month and a half had felt like groping around in a stagnant lake for a dropped coin.
For a week I was elated. I was done. I had found what I was after, the mud had miraculously cleared and there was the shining answer. Intrinsic motivation = grit.
It was short lived. I soon realized that I still had to tackle exactly how I was going to foster internal motivation. It was great that I now believed motivation was a spectrum, that students were on a journey towards self determination and more internal forms of motivation, and that grit couldn’t be far behind, but how was I supposed to prod them along? What actions could I take to help this process? And alternatively, what actions should I avoid so I didn’t stop the process?
This section took me longer. I had to step back from the daily chaos of teaching and actively look at what I’d already put in place. Much of my teaching is intuition based. I try to get a sense of where I think students will get hung up and preemptively create a plan for how to guide them through. While my experience as a teacher so far helps in this regard, I still miss fairly often. It is extremely challenging in a project based environment because so much of the curriculum is dependent on the particular project at hand, it can be hard to carry the flow of one project over to a new one. Often I feel like I’m reinventing the wheel each time. However, I had done a pilot of this project the spring before and so I tried to analyze what challenges I had in the spring and what I had put in place to fix them this time around. Looking at the scaffolding helped me look at what helped students be successful. Then I went back and read the journal entries - this time focused on relevance, autonomy and mastery, the three factors that Daniel Pink describe as helping move motivation along the spectrum from external to internal in his book Drive: the Truth About What Motivates Us. I conducted a second panel discussion to try and tease out more information about when the students felt motivated and found that we were covering the same ground we had in the previous panel discussion. Students mentioned relevance, mastery and autonomy. These themes mattered.
I will admit that it was mildly deflating to come full circle to the design principles of High Tech High. Where I work. High Tech High has three design principles that link almost directly to these three aspects of motivation. They are personalization, giving students choice about what they work on and autonomy over much of the process, real world connection, which helps students see the work as relevant in a broader scope, and common intellectual mission, which encourages mastery as a goal for all students. I felt like I had just bent a twig into a wheel shape and was marveling at my genius, when an eighteen wheeler glinting with hotrod flames rumbled up to my cave. Not only was High Tech High designed around increasing student motivation, they had been honing their focus for years.
Nevertheless, the journey taught me some valuable skills for developing rigorous projects and supporting students as they navigate challenging academic work. Now I can get back to Inquiry. I plan to publish a book on simple inquiry explorations of common phenomena. The goal is to provide teachers with hands on activities that target the new science standards and give students practice asking and exploring their own questions.
Then I began teaching that class.
If you’ve been teaching for a while, you’ve probably come across them. None of the students seem motivated. Getting them to think is like pulling teeth. Of course it’s never every student in the class, usually it’s just a small contingent with significant power over class dynamics that decide to use their power in unhelpful ways. It was my first encounter with such a group. Previous classes had lulled me into a false sense of security and I skipped some valuable norm setting activities because the students had already been together for a semester. The previous teacher must have covered it right? And anyway, students usually worked hard and respected each other; my class norms were covered by the general school culture. Why waste the time? Blissfully unaware, I launched a rigorous and ambitious pilot of the inquiry exhibit project.
The students completed the project, with quite satisfactory results, but the process was intensely arduous for all involved, and when the semester came to a close, I had a new burning passion: student motivation.
When I began my action research, I had a new crop of students, which were, ironically, quite motivated. However, since there are always a few students who seem unmotivated for challenging academic work, I stuck with my action research focus: How I can effectively scaffold inquiry learning in my classroom and how does it affect student motivation?
On the first day of class I had my students take the first three surveys. Angela Duckworth’s Grit survey, and the two surveys I had developed which focused on inquiry and motivation. I diligently color-coded their free written responses, looking for evidence of mastery, relevance, autonomy or grit. Most students mentioned at least one or more and related them to all sorts of academic and non-academic situations. Wonderful! Now what? I realized I knew what I was looking for (sort of) but really had no idea how to foster it. How do you instill motivation? How do you create grit? I had no idea.
So I sat back and waited. I just observed for a while. And sure enough, the usual classroom behaviors emerged. I began to identify potential case study candidates. As a class we began to read some of the literature on grit and motivation. One of the most effective research tools I used was journaling. When in doubt have the students tell you what they think. I used a variety of different prompts around grit and motivation to try and tease out where I was trying to go with my research. Finally a month and a half into the semester I realized that as I looked over panel discussion transcripts and journal entries, I wasn’t seeing evidence of internal motivation. I found this fascinating and so I brought it to the students. We listed all sorts of things we found motivating on the board and then grouped them as either external or internal motivators. Then I had the students respond to the prompt: Looking at our list of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators which do you think have been most influential for you over the past week? Month? Your life?
The results were fascinating. Every single student except one listed external reasons as their primary motivators. At this point I realized I had to go back to the research. I read a dozen or so more papers on motivation and self-determination theory and finally stumbled on the Academic Motivation Scale questionnaire. When I analyzed the students results to that survey and graphed them against their grit scores, it was fascinating to see the correlation emerge. Students who reported more self determined forms of motivation also had higher grit scores. It was like I’d found the missing link. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I had been wrestling so much with how grit and motivation were related and how they connected to the classroom and how they could be modified, that it was a profound relief to come to the rather simple conclusion that the more self determined your motivation, the longer you’d probably persevere at a task. It was simple. Obvious. Yet, the first month and a half had felt like groping around in a stagnant lake for a dropped coin.
For a week I was elated. I was done. I had found what I was after, the mud had miraculously cleared and there was the shining answer. Intrinsic motivation = grit.
It was short lived. I soon realized that I still had to tackle exactly how I was going to foster internal motivation. It was great that I now believed motivation was a spectrum, that students were on a journey towards self determination and more internal forms of motivation, and that grit couldn’t be far behind, but how was I supposed to prod them along? What actions could I take to help this process? And alternatively, what actions should I avoid so I didn’t stop the process?
This section took me longer. I had to step back from the daily chaos of teaching and actively look at what I’d already put in place. Much of my teaching is intuition based. I try to get a sense of where I think students will get hung up and preemptively create a plan for how to guide them through. While my experience as a teacher so far helps in this regard, I still miss fairly often. It is extremely challenging in a project based environment because so much of the curriculum is dependent on the particular project at hand, it can be hard to carry the flow of one project over to a new one. Often I feel like I’m reinventing the wheel each time. However, I had done a pilot of this project the spring before and so I tried to analyze what challenges I had in the spring and what I had put in place to fix them this time around. Looking at the scaffolding helped me look at what helped students be successful. Then I went back and read the journal entries - this time focused on relevance, autonomy and mastery, the three factors that Daniel Pink describe as helping move motivation along the spectrum from external to internal in his book Drive: the Truth About What Motivates Us. I conducted a second panel discussion to try and tease out more information about when the students felt motivated and found that we were covering the same ground we had in the previous panel discussion. Students mentioned relevance, mastery and autonomy. These themes mattered.
I will admit that it was mildly deflating to come full circle to the design principles of High Tech High. Where I work. High Tech High has three design principles that link almost directly to these three aspects of motivation. They are personalization, giving students choice about what they work on and autonomy over much of the process, real world connection, which helps students see the work as relevant in a broader scope, and common intellectual mission, which encourages mastery as a goal for all students. I felt like I had just bent a twig into a wheel shape and was marveling at my genius, when an eighteen wheeler glinting with hotrod flames rumbled up to my cave. Not only was High Tech High designed around increasing student motivation, they had been honing their focus for years.
Nevertheless, the journey taught me some valuable skills for developing rigorous projects and supporting students as they navigate challenging academic work. Now I can get back to Inquiry. I plan to publish a book on simple inquiry explorations of common phenomena. The goal is to provide teachers with hands on activities that target the new science standards and give students practice asking and exploring their own questions.