ED 219C Motivating Students (Spring 2004)

For most teachers I have spoken, one of the top complaints about their students is a lack of motivation. I am no different, and I have struggled in many of my teaching situations to get my students to engage in subjects that they may have no previous interest or experience. For this reason, I took Dr. Block's course in student motivation. Though I am an ecologist, this may have been one of the most influential courses I have ever taken. The course allowed us to look at the motivational difficulties of many personalities we regularly see in our classrooms and also exam the motivational implications of how we design our courses. Working through techniques to tap into each student's intrinsic motivation on a personal level was valuable and I continue to use many of basic principles with students in each of my classes. However, the area of the course that has changed my teaching and course design was the time we spent investigating how simple choices we made about the structure of our courses can have huge impacts on the motivation of our students. The main areas that I continually draw on are grading philosophies and the design of student projects. Decisions regarding whether students compete for grades (i.e. grading on a curve) and if we aggrandize effort or outcome in our grading and evaluation system can greatly impact how and why our students are motivated to complete tasks and learn information. This has led me to a grading philosophy that sets minimum standards for grades that are known from the first day of class, so students know what they have to do to achieve the desired level. Students are also told that they can achieve higher grades with increased effort and significant improvement throughout the term. This is accompanied by effort-based projects and tasks, where if a student works hard they can succeed to the desired level regardless of innate ability. I have also allowed my students to take a much more active role in determining the direction of projects, so they can better own the experience and therefore the outcome. These simple changes can often increase the motivational level of the class as a whole, but they are not always simple to implement in all teaching situations. This was one of the reality checks of the course. That while we know what is best from a motivational standpoint, sometimes the course of action is not realistic within our current teaching framework and the real challenge is finding a way to integrate those aspects that will help individual students and the class as a whole.