Response: Several Ways To Engage Students Without Carrots & Sticks

Becoming a father and making the transition to teaching primary students has made it very clear to me that our kids begin their lives with an inquisitive mind and an enviable level of excitement for learning. Primary students seem to have an energetic curiosity and require very little motivation for engagement; however, as these students progress through our system and the focus moves from the child to the curriculum and learning to grades, they often seem to lose that drive.

We, as parents and educators, often influence a shift in this drive by focusing on results and external motivators. By dangling things such as grades, praise, prizes, awards, and threats of punishment, we unintentionally rob students of responsibility and their intrinsic drive for learning; we alter the focus to what they will get rather than what they are doing. By the time students reach high school, their inquisitive desire to learn is often shifted to a quest for grades. For those students who do not see relevance and purpose in this quest, they often disengage as learners and then we feel the need to resort to motivating by offering carrots and threatening sticks.

I strongly believe that (to adapt from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, researchers of motivation at the University of Rochester (and written about by Daniel Pink in Drive), we cannot motivate students; we can only create the conditions in which students can motivate themselves. We cannot MAKE kids learn; we can make them behave a certain way, memorize and complete tasks in the short-term when we are supervising them but this does not mean they are gaining the skills and receiving the support needed to be learners.

Even in a system dominated by curricula, scores, and grades, we can still work to tap into that intrinsic drive by focusing on:

1. Relationships - a trusting, caring relationship helps students to understand the learning is about them rather than test scores and curricula. In order for us to make the curriculum relevant to their learning we must build relationships with our students.

2. Ownership - Work WITH students so they have a voice in their learning. Through a focus on Assessment For Learning, we include students in assessments and provide ongoing dialogue around descriptive feedback (rather than grades) based on agreed upon criteria and goals. Harvard professor and author Dr. Ross Greene states that “all students can do well if they can"; we need to provide the feedback on behaviour and learning skills so kids can do well. Too, we need to include students in this conversation.

3. Choice - Provide students with more autonomy of HOW they will learn and demonstrate their learning.

4. Relevancy - Relate the curriculum to the interests and passions of our students. They need to see meaningful connections and purpose for real learning to occur.

5. Success - Tom Schimmer, a BC author and leader in Assessment for Learning, says that we need to “over prepare ‘em” for that first summative assessment. Push back those first few assessments and ensure students do well then build on this experienced success. We need to focus on strengths, support the challenges, and help students have a growth mindset so they can experience failure and success as feedback and develop the belief they can all be learners.

Our students arrive at school motivated to learn. Through accountability measures and other structures we are often forced to produce short-term results. Unfortunately, this can lead to the use of extrinsic motivators that place the focus away from the learning and on the immediate result rather than the skills and support needed for long-term engagement and success. As educators, we must continue to work to create the conditions to best support our students so that they can maintain that intrinsic drive for learning and not become someone who only reaches for that dangled carrot.

Practical strategies for intrinsic motivation

When Michael Smith and I researched the literate lives of boys both inside and outside of school (2002; 2006) we found that the boys in our study were largely disengaged by school and impervious to extrinsic motivations and stimuli.
They were highly motivated by challenges that connected to their immediate lived experience. We found that Czikszentmihalyi’s (1990) conditions of “flow” experience - or total immersion in the present moment -explained every instance of motivation we observed, both inside and outside of school.

The conditions for situated motivation and flow:
* Clear goals & continual feedback
* A sense of developing competence and control
* A challenge that requires an appropriate level of skill and assistance as needed
to be successful
* A focus on the immediate experience
* The importance of the social (we added this one)

In our follow up study (2006), we found that the conditions of flow were created in classrooms through inquiry environments that reframed what was being taught as a compelling problem to be solved. Essential questions that were edgy and debatable promoted engagement and invited students into disciplinary discussions and meaning making.

Another highly effective instructional and motivational technique is frontloading. Frontloading activates kids prior interests and knowledge and builds on these. Frontloading is pre-writing or pre-reading work that prepares students for success. George Hillocks has asserted that the only resource you have to teach kids something new is what they already know and care about.

Sequencing instruction so that expertise is developed step by step, just like moving through the levels of a video game, is engaging because it builds competence and moves kids progressively through their Zones of Proximal Development. Nothing is more motivating than getting visible signs of accomplishment, and increasing control and competence.

Group work and collaboration around significant projects obviously foregrounds the social. Significant culminating projects that address the essential question, and that allow students to stake their identity (versus playing “guess what the teacher already knows”) are also highly motivating, particularly if the work is shared, made public, or archived (e.g. by posting it on the Internet).

Motivation doesn’t exist internally to a person, but in a person’s transaction with the conditions of a situation. It is under our control to make sure our classrooms are motivating environments.

Student motivation is the probably the primary and certainly the prerequisite challenge facing teachers. But providing for the conditions of motivation can help us to meet this challenge in ways that also deepen student understanding.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:
Harper & Row.

Smith, M. W., & Wilhelm. J. (2002). “Reading don’t fix no Chevys": Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Smith, M. and Wilhelm, J. 2006 Going with the Flow. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

Extrinsic motivation, whether carrots or sticks, serves a similar function as rubrics. These actions are primarily things done TO students, not WITH students. And the outcomes are effective only if measured against how well these teacher-actions create compliance in the students....

Instead of carrots and sticks, I use and recommend transparency--negotiating and confronting WITH students as a continuous part of the teaching/learning dynamic.