Motivation in the Classroom

A visitor walks into a third grade classroom in Anytown, USA. For the most part, all of the students are actively participating and enthusiastic. Six years later, the same person visits this group of students once again as they enter high school as freshmen. Instead of finding the students enthusiastic and involved, he saw students writing notes, students talking to each other, students reading teenage magazines, students with their heads down on their desks, and a couple of students taking notes on what the teacher was saying. As he exited the room, he wondered just what had happened to these students over the last six years. Why do they seem so unmotivated?

The theories about motivated are as varied as the types of students that populate today's classrooms. Some focus on curiosity, and some focus on intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, still other theories focus on what the teachers should do.

High school students are still a curious lot. The curiosity, however, is not the wide-eyed, trusting soul that was in that third grade classroom. Instead, they are ready to question what the teacher says, investigate things that we as adults know they should stay away from, and rebel against the concepts they feel unfair or unjust. They do not have the wide-eyed, what-ever-the-teacher-says-is-right attitude.

As I walk down the hallway of the high school or listen in the teacher's lounge, I find that there are as many varied ways to teach as there are ways students learn. In one room, there is the teacher who sits on the desk and speaks in a near-monotone voice. In another room, there is the teacher who reads without expression to the students, believing that they are following along. Still another teacher is telling the students exactly what information is on the test and how to write to it. Further down the hall, however, the teacher is moving around the room, asking the students questions that incite them to think and respond without the threat of right or wrong answers. Many of these questions begin with "What do you think..."

Although there are still students who sleep in the last teacher's classroom, there is more interaction and more participation and, for the most part, more learning.

Case in point. Last semester I taught a unit on short stories. The day after I assigned the story The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, I began the discussion with the following question: "What did you think of the story?" One student, who rarely participated, spoke up and said, "I think it was stupid." I didn't argue with him, but asked him to explain why. It instigated a wonderful discussion about people and the choices they make.

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