Navdeep and Gina conducted a 41 minute discussion about The Will to Learn: A Guide to Motivating Young People written by Martin Covington. The book was published in 1998. The MP3 download is 28 Mb in size. After listening to this conversation, please make sure to leave Navdeep and Gina a comment or question before Dec 5th.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Hi ladies!
If only our students would put as much effort into their work and learning as they do to preserve their self-image or ideas of self-worth, the students would have learned so much!
They are so motivated for the wrong reasons!
Nice job!
Navdeep and Gina,
Thanks so much for this conversation. Your voices were really good on audio… FYI.
Sounds like a good “companion” as you say for the class. I understand what you meant by being discouraged as you read… it’s easy to become overwhelmed when you read and learn about all the “good” things we should or could be doing. I felt the same way, at times, when reading my text for the class. What I try to return to is personalizing it and seeing where I am in the right direction and how I can alter where I am not. Remember that life itself is a learning experience.
You talked a bit about extrinsic rewards and as I think you know, this is something I am interested in. Navdeep you took the conversation deeper with your discussion of grades and made an interesting point about the student who doesn’t really need a good grade (the overachiever) and the student who is actually negatively affected (“it’s one more thing I can’t do”). One way I have found around this (to a degree) is basing grades on more than reiteration of coursework.
Gina, I loved the way you talked about a “visual” of a student’s motivation. We don’t often get this visual and it really could help. We’ve already learned that autonomy is important in working with student motivation and I wonder about asking students about the choices we do give them already. This could help give teacher more insight.
Navdeep , I appreciate the pressure you felt as you read this, but it also sounds like you both were inspired by it. It might have frustrating to read, but it also seems like it might be a tool toward understanding. While you might feel overwhelmed and discouraged at times, tt sounds like you have a great passion for what you do and a sincere interest in teaching your students. I bet you do more than you realize, and it sounds like you could already implement quite a bit of what you got from this book since you took it so seriously.
You talked about how the decisions made about a student can stay with them for their career, and it made me think about fresh assessments. It’s important to assess your students in multiple ways, and this brings me back to a motivational assessment. Time is short and so it seems to make sense to offer a curriculum assessment (a baseline if you will), but we need to think about more than just which facts a student can reproduce.
In your discussion of Covington’s suggestions you talk about how to teach something when the prior knowledge is not there… Is this more of a reintroduction in a new light? Prior knowledge is crucial in understanding, but you are right in that we shouldn’t give up if a student doesn’t have the experience. I am not sure how to approach this – does the book offer detailed suggestions here? Gina, your example of the teacher that won’t move on until the math facts are taught is a perfect example… it’s really hard to move forward in math if you don’t have your math facts (in my opinion), but at the same time, if it is not working, it’s counterproductive.
The discovery learning section was particularly interesting to me, and I would love to borrow your copy of the book if possible because I am trying to delve into the research in this area.
I am still confused as to why you would use me as an example of an overachiever… Now I am Anxious Amy! LOL (see I know cool texting lingo).
Gina & Navdeep-
I enjoyed your conversation very much. I understand how you felt, Navdeep, when you said you felt overwhelmed when you read the book. I, too, often have had that feeling while being in this doctoral program. We learn so much that we were unaware of and then feel guilty for not doing more! But education is an iterative process and we will all improve after taking this class
You mentioned 3 out of 10 people drop out of high school and that seemed to bother you. Our educational system is not for everyone, though. Aren't there many other factors in the US - many different ethnic groups, recent immigrants from agrarian societies, cultures that don't value education highly, etc - that contribute to the drop-out rate? We compare our educational system with other countries - many who have a homogeneous population that we don't have - and then complain that our educational system is "behind" others. Yet it is to the United States that immigrants come, it is in the United States where there is a tremendous amount of innovation, where risk-taking is encouraged. DON'T feel guilty if a student drops out. It is not your failure, but very likely the structure of the educational system that needs to be changed. Isn't that what the author of your text advocates? If you read "A Nation at Risk" you will see that, more than anything else, it is a POLITICAL document - it had many errors and incorrect attributions in it. It was a reaction to the liberal unrest on college campuses that Reagan and his cronies in the social conservative movement found so disconcerting. So much of our educational 'reform' has been a result of this document that was so wrong in its statements and assumptions. Instead of "No Child Left Behind', perhaps we need to have families value education but in a different way than has been done in the past ("Get good grades").
Gina mentions that students don't understand the concept of letter grades at 3rd grade. Going along with the theme of your book looking at educational reform, maybe we should not give grades but look at ways at motivating students to learn in ways other than giving grades. Can we 'grade' motivation? Navdeep, you mentioned the common misperception that giving out all 'A' means the class is 'too easy' - what if we can teach all the students to learn the material and they all earn the As? Shouldn't we strive for all students to get As? True, the perception is that a lot of As in a class means the class is 'easy'. We need to re-educate teachers. There are colleges and universities such as The Evergreen State College and UC Santa Cruz (at least in the past) that don't give grades but evaluations. These two schools had some of the highest percentages of undergraduates of any school in the country become admitted to graduate school. Obviously grades didn't matter.
Again, good discussion that got me thinking about education!
Hi Amy, thanks for your comments. I am not going to be at the last class session but I can definitley bring my book to the first teaching session for the Spring semester. Covington goes into depth about discovery learning and provides a scenario about what it looks like in a classroom and what the role of the teacher is.
I was very inspired by the book and it did get me thinking a lot about the different facets of our students and education itself.
About prior knowledge, Covington doesn't really provide much insight on how to facilitate learning when students have low prior knowledge but I feel that having several avenues for students to explore topics is a good way to activiate prior knowledge. Sometimes through inquiry based learning students are able to make connections on what they already know to what they learn.
Hi Stephen, your comments were very interesting. I will definitley need to get a copy of "A Nation at Risk." It sounds very enlightening.
Post a Comment