Mainely Middle
Journal of the Maine Association for Middle
Level Education
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2000/2001 |
What Gets in the Way for Underachievers?American public education faces a difficult challenge: educating every youth in the country. Educating every child is a wonderfully ambitious task based on the assumption that a well educated citizenry is necessary both to support a functioning democracy and to compete in a global economy. But, educating every child has proven to be a challenge. Even early in the twentieth century, there was concern that many students had dropped out physically or mentally (Kaminsky, 1992). In the 1915 book, All The Children of All The People, Smith's exploration into the challenge of educating all students begins: However reluctant one may be to acknowledge the fact, it is none the less certain that the task of trying to educate everybody, which our public schools are engaged in, has proved to be far more difficult than the originators of the idea of such a possibility thought it would be when they set out upon the undertaking. (Smith, 1915, p. v) There are many children who are undermotivated, disengaged, and underachieving. One of the most persistent questions facing individual teachers is, "How do I motivate all children to learn?" Both teachers and students are frustrated and disillusioned. Teachers are challenged daily by students who don't seem interested in learning. Teachers struggle with discipline issues, and with meeting the needs of students at widely differing ability/achievement levels. Students are discouraged, told they must learn material they don't perceive as applicable to their lives, bored, and starting to believe that they are failures or stupid. Many are labeled at-risk, learning disabled, underachieving, or simply trouble.
Student Achievement: Good News & Bad NewsRecently there has been some indication that the focus on raising standards and accountability has had a positive impact on student achievement. The Maine Department of Education reports several ways Maine's students outperform students in other states. Maine eighth graders, for example, placed first in the nation in Reading and Science on the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results (Maine Department of Education, 1999). Student performance on the NAEP long-term trend assessments has improved since the early 1980s in mathematics and science, but not in reading. In addition, student performance on the main NAEP assessments has shown some improvements in mathematics and reading at some grade levels and no declines. These assessments are specifically designed to measure a broader range of higher-order thinking skills and capabilities for using knowledge than are the trend assessments. Between 1990 and 1996, the percentage of students performing above the basic level of proficiency in mathematics has increased. At least two-thirds of 31 states participating in these mathematics assessments also showed improvements in student proficiency scores, and none had declining scores. In contrast, little change has occurred since the early 1970s in reading. (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999) Despite these bits of good news, there are still many indicators that students are not achieving to desired levels. Maine reports, for example, "Although Maine students score at or near the top of the nation in mathematics, reading, and science, the statistics are deceiving &endash; 1 out of 4 Maine students have not acquired a level of literacy that is acceptable by most standards" (Maine Department of Education, 1999). Maine's concerns are shared by others. The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development reports that there is clear evidence that young people are at risk educationally (1996, p. 11):
The 1999 Conditions of Education Report points to similar findings: In 1996, average science achievement was higher at all three age levels than in 1982. However, due to declining science scores in the 1970s, scores for 13-year-olds were about the same in 1996 as in 1970 and, for 17-year-olds, were lower in 1996 than in 1970. For 9-year-olds, science achievement was higher in 1996 than in 1970…. The Southern Regional Education Board's Middle Grades Education Initiative warns: Eighth grade performance indicators from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal a discouraging pattern of middle grades underachievement nationwide. They describe students who: Even President Clinton presents this warning in his National Standards of Academic Excellence (1997): Student achievement is not improving fast enough. Across our nation &endash; in our cities, suburbs, and rural communities alike &endash; far too many students are still not meeting the standards that will prepare them for the challenges of today and tomorrow. What the top 20 percent of our students typically learn in math in the 8th grade is learned by most students in Japan in the 7th grade. And while today America's 4th graders read as well as ever on average, 40 percent cannot read as well as they should to hold a solid job in tomorrow's economy. So at the turn of the 21st century, the problem is really no different than it was at the turn of the 20th century: How do America's public schools provide a quality education to all the children of all the people?
Causes of UnderachievementMany factors are identified as contributing to students dropping out and underachieving. Educators blame students' lack of motivation, engagement, and achievement on a long list of factors such as psychological problems, emotional problems, poor study habits, low self-esteem, withdrawal, aggression, social isolation, conflicts at home, over-expectations of parents, under-expectations of parents, physical or medical causes, social/class differences and expectations, conflicts with teachers, lack of academic readiness and preparation, learning disabilities, poor home life, unsupportive parents, previous traumatic experience, poverty, and low self-confidence. The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1996) recognized that "[m]any problem behaviors in adolescence have common antecedents in childhood experience. One is academic difficulty: another is the absence of strong and sustained guidance from caring adults" (p. 5). Ford (1992) points to psychological, social, and cultural factors contributing to underachievement. Scales (1996) points to 40 "Developmental Assets" that help students develop socially, intellectually, and academically. They are organized into eight categories: support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, constructive use of time, educational commitment, values, social competencies, and positive identity. Without access to a critical mass of these assets, students are more likely to have social, intellectual, and academic difficulties.
Do Outside Factors Predispose Students to Failure?Some of the thinking on underachievement lays the blame on factors outside the school influence, such as poverty, home life, and students' academic motivation. The implication is that since schools have little control over these factors, then schools have little control over improving achievement. There is evidence, however, that underachieving students can be positively impacted by school practice. Although the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board (1997) recognizes that "[l]earning does not take place in isolation. Students bring to the learning setting what they have experienced and the values they have been taught at home and in their neighborhoods." They also note that the research says that, "[s]tudents who take more courses and at higher levels learn more. All students, regardless of race, gender, or ethnic background, can learn to higher levels." The Turning Points report (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1996) also concluded that studies of adolescent development had no persuasive evidence that young adolescents were unable to engage in critical thinking or meaningful learning. Nieto (1994) points to several studies that reinforce that school can have an impact on challenged students: Thus, poverty, single-parent households, and even homelessness, while they may be tremendous hardships, do not in and of themselves doom children to academic failure (see, among others, Clark, 1983; Lucas, Henze, & Donato, 1990; Mehan & Villanueva, 1993; Moll, 1992; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988). These and similar studies point out that schools that have made up their minds that their students deserve the chance to learn do find the ways to educate them successfully in spite of what may seem to be overwhelming odds. (Nieto, 1994, p 2) There is no doubt that there are factors beyond educators' control that contribute to the challenges of educating underachievers, but it is important to note that school itself may also contribute to the problem of underachieving and disengaged students. Emerick (1992) reports, for example, that the level of achievement occurring outside the classroom indicated that school was frequently the only place academic and creative achievement were not taking place. If this is so, then educators must closely examine the role played by schools and teachers in developing underachievement patterns.
An Overview of School Related Causes of UnderachievementEven during the first half of the 20th Century, there was concern that some school practices interfered with students' learning to their potential. In 1930, the Commission on the Relation of School and College examined secondary school performance (Aikin, 1942). Although the Commission was fully aware of the achievements of America's (then fairly new) high schools, their study revealed numerous areas needing improvement. Among other things, the study noted how there was little connection between teaching and what was then known about learning: Schools failed to create conditions necessary for effective learning. In spite of greater understanding of the ways in which human beings learn, teachers persisted in the discredited practice of assigning tasks meaningless to most pupils and of listening to recitations. The work was all laid out to be done. The teacher's job was to see that the pupil learned what he was supposed to learn. The student's purposes were not enlisted and his concerns were not taken into account. All this was in violation of what had been discovered about the learning process. The classroom was formal and completely dominated by the teacher. Rarely did students and teacher work together upon problems of genuine significance. Seldom did students strive ahead under their own power at tasks which really meant something to them. (Aikin, 1942, pp. 5-6) Dewey also warned about the important role school plays in whether a student achieves or not: If the pupil left it [the class, instruction] instead of taking it, if he engaged in physical truancy, or in the mental truancy of mind-wandering and finally built up an emotional revulsion against the subject, he was held to be at fault. No question was raised as to whether the trouble might not lie in the subject-matter or in the way in which it was offered. The principle of interaction makes it clear that failure of adaptation of material to needs and capacities of individuals may cause an experience to be non-educative quite as much as failure of an individual to adapt himself to the material. (Dewey, 1938, p. 46-47) Today, there continues to be evidence that school practices (or the lack of effective school practice) interfere with some students' learning. For example, in a study of gifted African American achievers and underachievers (Ford, 1995), those underachievers reported (a) less positive teacher-student relations, (b) having too little time to understand the material, (c) a less supportive classroom climate, and (d) being unmotivated and disinterested in school. Testimony provided before the Carnegie Corporation Quality Education for Minorities Project National Resource Group indicated that the following factors contributed to minorities dropping out of school (McKenzie, 1993): differential tracking, lack of identification with counselors and teachers, poor attitudes and low expectations from teachers, feelings of failure, and curriculum that does not include minority perspectives. Rimm (1986) identifies structure, competition, labeling, negative attention, boredom, and conformity (versus individualization) as school causes of underachievement. Wheelock & Dorman (1988) report that reasons for dropping out may grow from alienating practices in middle schools. Their factors include retention in grade, tracking and ability grouping, discrimination based upon standardized tests, boredom with standardized curriculum and instruction, punitive practices, suspension and expulsion practices, school climate and rules, and fragmented school organization. Davis (1972) reports that junior high students feel that they are "made" to do things that "don't make sense." If, as often claimed, American teachers underestimate the learning potential of low track students and expect more negative attitudes and greater trouble from them, it may well be that they partially cause the very failure, alienation, lack of involvement, dropping out and rebellion they are seeking to prevent. (Schafer, Olexa, & Polk, 1970, p. 8) This section will go on to explore three specific learning models which contribute to underachievement: the delivery model, behaviorism, and general intelligence.
The Delivery ModelSchools think of learning as the acquisition of objective factual or procedural knowledge: the banking or transfer model. Teachers transfer their knowledge to students and students save that knowledge for some unspecified time when it will be needed in the future. This view of learning is organizationally and beaurocratically appealing. It allows us to collect the world's accumulated knowledge and deliver it to all students in a logical and systematic sequence, insuring that all students have access to a quality education. It recognizes certain knowledge as being important to success in our society and provides it to everyone so they all have equal opportunity for success. It helps to insure that different schools, diverse in size, demographics, and location, provide a comparable education to their students. It allows schools to be held accountable by making it easy to assess the delivery and measure retention of that knowledge base. Because of this model, schools understand content very well. But a disproportionate focus on content, and especially a predetermined curriculum, may work against learning. Teachers know that "natural" learning has to do with following personal interests and curiosities or pursuing knowledge or skills that the individual sees as important to personal interests and curiosities. When we say, through arbitrary or analytical processes, that kids will learn "this" this year and "that" the next year, how do we know that it matches with the curiosities and interests of young people. Even when we can predict with some accuracy students' questions and concerns (e.g., the themes that Jim Beane (1993) identifies as being typical with adolescents), how do we know that our kids will have them? If we keep telling students what they need to learn, when will they learn to trust and develop their own learning instincts (keep in mind that I view the purpose of schools as being developing confident, effective, self-directed learners)? It seems that that kind of long range planning doesn't account for critical conditions for learning, including inquiry or curiosity. Perhaps we are killing those qualities by silently saying, "What you are interested in and curious about is unimportant. I know what you should know." The hazard of a fixed curriculum comes from how schools react to lists. They tend to focus more on the items on the list than what we want students to be able to do with them. Schools tend to have students memorize the items on the list and tend to consider themselves successful if students can recall the items. Cognitive scientist Roger Schank is strongly against literacy lists and national curricula because of how it works against what is known about how people learn: To really understand the impact that literacy lists have, it's necessary to take a look at how lists are taught. Inevitably, lists get taught by forcing students to memorize. If you are dead set on having children learn a specific set of things, there is no other way that seems as straightforward than simply having them sit and stare at them, trying to commit them to memory (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 57). The problem is that memorization (often called the transfer model) is not a very useful form of learning. We have learned from these studies that when students learn in meaningful contexts, they can transfer knowledge they have learned in one domain to another. When learning tasks are grounded in things students care about, students can establish mental indices from old situations to new ones, thus allowing natural case-based reasoning to function. However, when students are just given principles and facts, out of the context of their use, they simply do not have the concrete experience they need as raw material to be able to properly apply what they have learned (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 59). When facts are memorized, they are not well indexed in memory. Students may be able to recall facts and sound intelligent, but because they are not well indexed, the students cannot apply those facts to new contexts or novel problems. It creates students with the appearance of intelligence but with a kind of intellectual dependency, looking to others to tell them how to use their knowledge. Curriculum planning could describe the structures and procedures for allowing students to become learners, following their own curiosities and interests with teachers coaching them, helping to monitor progress, insuring academic integrity, and challenging the students. The Norwegian national curriculum, for example, calls for "project-centered, integrated activities planned with the students," (Vars, 2000, p. 3). Many of the students have typical adolescent interests (socializing, sports, music, video games and computers). Teachers may struggle to find ways to connect those to academic content, but even remote connections, like using the names of bands or sports teams in classroom examples, were missing. There were few examples of teachers posing interesting problems or conundrums, or using mystery or fantasy to spark student interest. It is understandable how teachers might have difficulty building on middle school students' typical adolescent interests in their teaching. Middle school students, however, also have intellectual interests. When middle school students act like the young people they are, it is sometimes hard for teachers to see their intellectual side. Teachers, who plan curriculum with students, using a curriculum negotiation model (Brodhagen, Weilbacher, & Beane, 1992; Muir, 1998; Alexander, 1995; Nesin & Lounsbury, 1999) based on students' questions and concerns about themselves and the world they live in, do see students' intellectual interests. The students have very mature, sophisticated, and complex questions, including the following (Brodhagen, Weilbacher, & Beane, 1992; Muir, 1998; Alexander, 1995): • What will my future be like? Some educators have reflected on student intellectual interests and how elusive it can seem to uncover them. Alexander (1995, p. 20) wrote "Beane would never ask students, 'What do you want to study?' Themes are selected through a series of 'back-door' questions: 'What things concern you personally?' 'What are your concerns with the world around you?' 'How does the world affect you?'" I had a similar response when I reflected on the curriculum negotiation process: Perhaps, as a teacher, I had simply not asked my students the right questions. Students often separate what they are truly curious about from the more school-based idea of what they want to "learn." Or maybe "What do you want to learn about?" is much too direct and ignores the subtle and ubiquitous nature of learning. The longer process of prodding for questions and searching out themes seems to have brought them closer to their natural curiosities and therefore helped them pursue topics of greater natural interest to them. (Muir, 1998b, p. 16) Some educators and policy makers are concerned that we would end up with students who study a plethora of topics, and there would be no uniformity or consistency. Quinn reminds us "Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself" (quoted in Goodlad, 1997, p. 148). Besides, a fixed curriculum is fairly boring. One educator calls it the Spandex Curriculum &endash; one size fits all. We all know what spandex has done for the fashion world! In practice, a pair of spandex shorts might fit anyone, but they are functional for few of us, and flattering on even fewer. Papert agrees we should allow students to explore what interests them: Do we really expect children to sit still for the predigested curriculum of the elementary school when they have known the freedom to explore knowledge on the information highways of the world, and when they have been used to planning complex projects and finding for themselves the knowledge and advice they need to conduct them? (Papert, 1996, p. 170)
BehaviorismSchools seem to have adopted behaviorism as a common learning theory, perhaps because of how closely it melds with the delivery model. Skinner's behaviorism maintains that all learning is actually only behavior and that all behavior can be conditioned and shaped through attention just to the behavior, through the pattern of stimulus-response-reinforcement. Skinner did not deny the existence of attitudes, beliefs, opinions, desires, and other forms of self-knowledge, but rather qualified the role of these inner realities in a science of human behavior... Skinner contended that people do not experience consciousness or emotions but rather their own bodies, and that internal reactions are responses to internal stimuli. (Schunk 1996, p. 65). Although Skinner's behaviorism has strongly impacted the world of education, his minimization of the role of thought and the mind brought about fiery responses from other educators and learning theorists. Perkins (1992, p. 59) responds by saying, "by ignoring human thinking as an invalid 'folk theory,' behaviorism discouraged some people from interacting with students in ways that made plain the workings of the mind." Prior to the advent of behaviorism, it was accepted that thought and mental processes play a crucial role in determining human action. But behaviorism buried this belief, with its conception of humans as robots, or machines with input&endash;output connections. However, behaviorism no longer plays a dominant role in psychology, clearly because we are not robots, machines, or hydraulic pumps. A broad array of mental processes, including information search and retrieval, attention, memory, categorization, judgment, and decision-making play essential roles in determining why students behave as they do. (Weiner 1984, p. 16) Behaviorism views learning content as conditioned response to stimuli. But this view has led to detrimental fragmentation of the curriculum. Behaviorism... cultivated a kind of excess atomism in which performances were broken down into microperformances &endash; the 30 key subskills of effective reading and such &endash; that students never put back together again in meaningful, thoughtful performances, a behaviorist's Humpty Dumpty. (Perkins 1992, p. 59) Critical to learning are the connections between ideas. Understanding the whole is key to fully understanding the parts. The Greek historian Xenephon formulated in the context of training horses a precept that is still often ignored in teaching children. Nothing forced, he said, is beautiful; if you want a horse to make beautiful movements you must make sure that the animal wants to do them. The history of more modern writing about horses is peppered with allusions to this idea, stated in opposition to what has come to be known in the twentieth century as behaviorism: the idea that the way to train a horse (or a rat or even a person) to perform a complex behavior is to break it up into pieces that may not be beautiful in themselves but which fit together in the end like a puzzle that is supposed to give rise to the magnificent final result. For the behaviorist, the final result has to be known only by the trainer-teacher. It has no meaning for the trainee-student. Many practitioners of the art of dressage, in which horses and riders move together in movements of breathtaking elegance, believe, on the contrary, that the horse should always be shown the result you want. (Papert 1996, p. 45-46) Behaviorism's dependence on extrinsic rewards can further impede learning. A student who performs "in order to obtain some reward or avoid some punishment external to the activity itself," (Lepper, 1988) such as grades, stickers, or teacher approval is extrinsically motivated. Teachers may rely on extrinsic motivators with underachieving students (either as a carrot or a stick) precisely because they are challenged to find a way to help these students learn. Extrinsic motivation, however, has received a lot of bad press in both the popular educational literature and research journals. The concern is that although extrinsic motivators may get a student to participate in classroom activities, they can interfere with optimal learning. When students perform for grades or other rewards, they no longer perceive that their learning has intrinsic value. At least two dozen studies have shown that people expecting to receive a reward for completing a task (or for doing it successfully) simply do not perform as well as those who expect nothing (Kohn, 1993). This effect is evident for young children, older children, and adults; for males and females; for rewards of all kinds; and for tasks ranging from memorizing facts to designing collages to solving problems. In general, the more cognitive sophistication and open-ended thinking that is required for a task, the worse people tend to do when they have been led to perform that task for a reward (Kohn, 1994). Further, Kohn (1993) indicates that at least ten studies have shown that people offered a reward generally choose the easiest possible task. In the absence of rewards, by contrast, children are inclined to pick tasks that are just beyond their current levels of ability. Grades in particular have been found to have a detrimental effect on creative thinking, long-term retention, interest in learning, and preference for challenging tasks (Butler & Nisan, 1986; Grolnick & Ryan, 1987). Emerick (1992) found that students she interviewed agreed that grades and similar indicators of academic achievement held little or no meaning and importance for them. Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973) found that an over-reliance on extrinsic rewards can damage the quality of work, impede the ability to be creative or to accomplish non-routine tasks, squelch any pre-existing intrinsic interest, and diminish interest in doing the activity once the rewards are removed. In one representative study (Birch et al., 1984), young children were introduced to an unfamiliar beverage called "kefir." Some were just asked to drink it; others were praised lavishly for doing so; a third group was promised treats if they drank enough. Those children who received either verbal or tangible rewards consumed more of the beverage than other children, as one might predict. But a week later these children found it significantly less appealing than they did before, whereas children who were offered no rewards liked it just as much as, if not more than, they had earlier. Perhaps the central problem with behaviorism is that it is presented as a general (comprehensive?) learning theory, instead of as a well developed, but small, piece of the puzzle. It has explanatory power for certain aspects of learning (such as appropriate behavior or recall of simple, disassociated facts) but lacks it for others (intrinsic interests, creativity, higher order thinking, anything related to the inner workings of the mind). This said, don't think of behaviorism as incompatible with the cognitive theories. The "anti-cognitive" dimension grows from how behaviorism is sometimes applied. The theory, instead, simply describes an aspect of learning complementary to cognitive theories. Even Lepper, et al. (1973) and Weiner (1984) admit that behaviorist approaches, such as token economy systems, are effective at maintaining appropriate behavior in the classroom, an important precursor to learning.
General IntelligenceSome teachers have also grown skeptical of the notion of general intelligence, g. The idea is that there is one general intelligence (considered measurable with IQ tests) that people have in varying degrees. But there is growing evidence that there is no single way to be smart. Gould (1996) shows, not only how IQ testing grew from invalid assumptions and procedures, but how data supporting g can be interpreted differently (both interpretations being statistically proper) to show multiple intelligences. The results of Sternberg's (1997) Yale Summer Psychology Program Study, which explored various ways students worked and learned, contradict the notion of g. When we did a statistical analysis of the ability factors underlying performance on our ability test, we found no single general factor (sometimes called a g factor or an IQ). This suggests that the general ability factor that has been found to underlie many conventional ability tests may not be truly general, but general only in the narrow range of abilities that conventional tests assess. (Sternberg, 1997) As Howard Gardner says (ABC, 1993), it is no longer "How smart are you?" but "How are you smart?" Different theorists classify these abilities differently. Some learning style inventories break the abilities into verbal, auditory, and tactile. Jungian personality types are classified around our preferences within four scales: Extroversion/Introversion (Source of Energy), Sensing/Feeling (What is Observed), Thinking/Feeling (Evaluation Style), and Judging/Perceiving (Energy Direction and Flow) (Fairhurst & Fairhurst, 1995). Howard Gardner (1983) proposes eight different kinds of intelligence. Each person has all eight but they are each of various strengths. Robert Sternberg's categories include the analytical, practical and creative aspects of intelligence. He points out that there are four things we can ask students to do with information (1997): • Recall who did something, what was done, when it was done, where it was done, or how it was done;
The Risks Of Not Providing MotivationAre these learning theories really a problem? They have been in place for a long time, and are generally accepted practices. It's important to remember how widespread a problem underachieving students seem to be. Further, across Maine, 58% of the seventh graders completing the Aspirations Benchmarks survey (National Center for Student Aspirations, 1998), reported they are bored in school (Muir, 2000). Many students feel that they aren't allowed to learn about what they were interested in or that they don't see how what they are learning is connected to their interests or was made interesting. As long as teachers are teaching valuable content (perhaps as defined by state or national standards), why should educators be concerned about whether they tie into student interests or help them see the connections between what they are learning and their goals and futures? If one of the most widely accepted purposes for a public education is to prepare students for their futures and the world outside of school, it seems a travesty that students would perceive that their education has so little to do with that goal. Helping students find meaning in their learning brings opportunities to help students become highly motivated and excited about school. It breeds curiosity and inquiry, and engages learners. Not being able to find meaning in learning, on the other hand, deadens the curriculum, disengages students, and shuts down learning, undermining the goal to prepare students for their futures and the outside world. Part of the problem is "incidental learning," the attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge students develop through daily experience. Students do not learn only when teachers teach. Memory is working and processing all the time; students are learning all the time. But they aren't just learning what is in the curriculum; they are observing what goes on around them and what activities are taking place in the classroom. They form enduring attitudes, likes and dislikes, which shape how they will approach learning and school in the future. Clearly the most desirable attitude to develop is the desire to go on learning. We should measure the success of our educational system by whether or not we are producing graduates who have internalized the ability and desire to learn. The best sign of a successful education system would be that students want to go to school, that they remain excited about learning once they get there, and that in the end, they are prepared to creatively respond to the kinds of open-ended problems they will actually face in the world. (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 23) Many students, however, have been through too many courses where covering the content seemed to be more important than helping students become engaged by it. I am afraid that those students may have developed attitudes about school which act as barriers to future learning. For example, Mokros (1994) discusses how texts shape students' perceptions of math into something that is noncreative, stuffy, formulaic, and filled with rules. "Their only search is a search for the right answer" (Mokros 1994). I described the attitudes of my own eighth grade Algebra students (Muir, 1994a). Despite the fact that these were the top students in the eighth grade, they didn't think that schools had much to do with learning. They were bored and disenfranchised. They saw learning as something others did to them. They felt school was irrelevant and unimportant, and had somehow convinced themselves that they didn't know much and didn't have many strengths. These bright students' attitudes illustrate how large the gap can become between what schools want students to learn and what they actually learn, especially when schools focus on covering the curriculum to the exclusion of what might motivate students. If natural learning grows from personal goals and interests, it is easy to see that some students may learn in spite of uninspiring teaching simply because either school itself matches their goals, or they happen to be interested in the subject taught. Many other students, however, see school as being much less relevant to their lives and are not so interested in what the teachers want them to learn. Jacobs (1989) comments that if educators are trying to devise a means of driving students out of school, they obviously are succeeding. Ellis and Fouts (1993) point out how Progressive educators worry about not making learning meaningful to more students: Progressives were opposed to the factory-like efficiency model on which schools depended (and still do). They decried the artificial learning derived from textbooks and written exams. They said that school learning was so unlike the real world that it has little or no meaning to the average child. Robert Hutchins, not a progressive, said it best: "Students resort to the extracurriculum because the curriculum is so stupid." (p. 152) Learning experiences are educative when and only when experience promotes continued growth and learning. Noneducative experiences can stop learning cold. The defining characteristic of any classroom activity becomes the question: does it set up conditions for further growth or does it shut off the person from occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continued growth? What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur? (Dewey 1938, p. 49) Every experience educators provide students helps to shape their perceptions, as well as their knowledge base. The good news is that this can be a powerful positive influence. According to Dewey (1938), if an experience arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up purposes that are sufficiently intense, then it can carry a person over the dead places in the future. This is why educators must attend to motivating students.
What's Getting in the Way?Many teachers know the jargon of motivating students: make it interesting, relate it to their lives, give them choices, and don't always lecture. Why aren't they more thorough, then, in implementing motivating teaching? Nolen and Nicholls (1994) also report that teachers in their study had beliefs about motivating students that closely matched those advocated by researchers, but they weren't implementing those practices in their classrooms. What gets in the way of teachers motivating students? Is it the pace teachers think they need to keep? The perception of a need to cover material? Do teachers not want to bother? Or do they simply not know how? Further research is needed to really understand the roadblocks facing teachers' motivating students. I would suggest at least three factors which interfere: a difference of perceptions between teachers and students, teachers not having models for motivating teaching, and some effective models not being perceived as legitimate by teachers.
Mismatched PerceptionsOne of the goals of qualitative research is to understand phenomena by examining the different perspectives of those involved in an event. Often there are differing points of view, and a recent study examining what motivates underachieving students (Muir, 2000) is no exception. There were differences between the students' and the teachers' perceptions, and between their perceptions and what the author observed. There were discontinuities between data throughout the study:
There are implications for further phenomenological research around the perceptions of teachers and underachieving students. Making these differing viewpoints explicit, and trying to understand them and the dynamics that contribute to them may lead to a better understanding of underachievement and help find ways to re-engage underachieving students.
A Need for ModelsIt could also be that, although teachers know that they should use interest, hands-on activities, relationship, choices, and context to motivate students, the teachers lack mental models of what those practices might look like in action. Some of my colleagues relate, for example, that all students can be engaged in meaningful learning, even underachieving students. They have seen first hand that unmotivated students can be re-engaged in learning when they are given meaningful contexts for learning, choices and shared authority in the classroom, lessons made interesting or building on student interests, and work and content that matches student goals. Perhaps other teachers haven't had similar experiences. If they haven't been taught using motivating strategies or trained to teach using motivating strategies, they may not have mental models to work from. A critical step in the work around motivating and engaging all learners, then, is for educators and researchers to find examples of motivating, engaging learning in the classroom. Telling the stories of motivating teachers will help other teachers develop the appropriate schema to start reflecting on their own practice and to help staff developers design inservice to train teachers. Exploring diverse ways that teachers create and promote meaningful, engaged learning will give teachers choices about how they try to reverse underachievement patterns and re-engage unmotivated students. At least four approaches to teaching appeal to me for motivating and engaging teaching. The first approach is Project-Based Learning. Students can demonstrate their learning by creating culminating projects using interesting media. This might include posters and displays, plays or performances, books or magazines, or hypermedia, multimedia, or web pages (Muir, 1994b, 1997). Several of the teachers in this study use this approach, and students feel they learn well from it. A similar approach is Problem-Based Learning. Rather than placing a meaningful product at the center of learning, this approach focuses learning around a specific problem to solve. Through this approach, teachers can create the conditions necessary to get students to start asking questions about content (Delisle, 1997; Nagel, 1996). A third model for motivating teaching is Curriculum Integration. This approach involves building curriculum around student's own questions and concerns (Pate, Holmstead, & McGinnis, 1997; Alexander 1995; Muir, 1998; Beane, 1993; Nesin, & Lounsbury, 1999). Teachers using this approach report that it can be particularly effective for engaging middle school students in learning (Brodhagen, Weilbacher, & Beane, 1992; Alexander 1995; Muir, 1998). Another approach which involves students in designing curriculum and instruction with the teacher is the Foxfire Approach (Wigginton 1972, 1985; Smith, Wigginton, Hocking, & Jones, 1991). Instead of building curriculum around students' questions and concerns, this approach involves students in deciding how to learn a given curriculum by soliciting their ideas about how people in the real world use that content and what they might do to learn it. This can be especially powerful if there is little flexibility in the content middle school students must learn.
Legitimacy IssuesA third reason engaging instruction is not more widespread may be that educators, parents, and community members don't see some effective teaching models as being legitimate. A colleague's principal came into her classroom to conduct the annual observation. Students were actively engaged in creating their research products for a unit, and the teacher was moving between groups of students, checking the academic and mechanical integrity of their work, making suggestions, answering questions, and helping students find additional resources. The principal said, "I'll come back to do the observation when you're actually teaching." One of my undergraduate education students interviewed her grandmother about what her education was like. The grandmother described her classes and the student asked, "so it was mostly lecture?" Her grandmother became indignant and angry and barked back, "it isn't lecture, it's teaching!" When I do field service work with education majors, they are often concerned that I might observe them when they aren't actually presenting new information. The view that teaching is teachers presenting and students reading and doing bookwork seems very deep rooted. Teachers who use other strategies seem to raise the suspicion of their colleagues, administrators, and parents. For example, several communities are battling over their math curriculum. There is controversy around the Connected Mathematics Program. The Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) was developed at Michigan State University with support from the National Science Foundation (Connected Mathematics Project, & Michigan State University, 1996). The over-arching goal of CMP is to develop student and teacher knowledge of mathematics that is rich in connections and deep in understanding and skill. It attempts to achieve this goal by using interesting problems and contexts to develop understanding of concepts and skills. But parent groups and school boards are trying to keep CMP out of schools. In one Louisiana district, the school board refused to adopt the materials. The excuse they used was that the books were not hardcover, but teachers report the real issue was that the program didn't match what parents and community members had experienced when they took math. One Texas parent group has created a web site devoted to helping parents keep CMP out of their schools (Plano Parental Rights Council, 1999). One of their major arguments is that parents have a hard time helping their students with the homework. Perhaps their objections come from the fact that they don't see the work as familiar, and therefore not legitimate. This is happening despite the fact that the curriculum is very well reviewed by educators. Recently, the U.S. Department of Education announced that CMP is one of five curricula (from 61) to achieve exemplary status and that CMP is the only middle school program identified as exemplary (U.S. Department of Education Mathematics and Science Expert Panel, 1999). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) rates CMP the highest of twelve middle school mathematics curricula, stating that it "contains both in-depth mathematics content and excellent instructional support" (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999).
A Final ThoughtIt is not surprising that improved instruction, which involves students in meaningful, engaged learning, is viewed as a remedy to the growing concern over the high social and economic cost of large numbers of disengaged and at-risk youth (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1997; Williams, 1996). Identifying practices which help these diverse populations learn well is a step toward creating an educational system intent on serving all students. Finding out what motivates our underachieving students will help inform and equip teachers in the struggle to lead all students to academic achievement. We must use teaching strategies that more closely match how our students learn. Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys. We should ridicule a merchant who said that he had sold a great many goods although no one had bought any. But perhaps there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what people have learned. There is the same exact equation between teaching and learning that there is between selling and buying. (Dewey, 1933, p. 35-36)
ReferencesABC News. (1993). Common miracles: The American revolution in learning. Special aired on ABC.
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