(This is Part Four in an ongoing series responding to specific teacher questions related to remote learning. You can see Part One , Part Two , and Part Three .)
Note: In addition to a recent and offering advice to educators making the transition to remote learning, and a offering advice to parents (along many more upcoming related posts鈥攍ook for a multipart series at the end of this month in which both teachers and students will be reflecting on their first five weeks of distance learning), I鈥檝e begun a series of short posts .
dealt with
was on .
Part Three shared .
Today鈥檚 question comes from :
What are ways to keep student engagement up? How do we motivate reluctant learners to continue learning in a virtual environment?
This post is not the first, nor will it be the last, response to that question.
Today, I鈥檓 sharing my own thoughts. ...
The four elements of intrinsic motivation
I have spent a lot of time thinking and reading about student motivation, as well as trying to help support the development of intrinsic motivation among my students. on the topic, with another on the way. Katie Hull Sypnieski and I also worked with Ed Week to develop four related videos earlier this year: . Finally, earlier this month, I made for Ed Week sharing some tips for teachers to maximize their success in distance learning.
Most researchers have identified four key pieces essential to the development of student motivation:
1. Autonomy: having a degree of control over what needs to happen and how it can be done;
2. Competence: feeling that one has the ability to be successful in doing it;
3. Relatedness: doing the activity helps them feel more connected to others and feel cared about by people whom they respect; and
4. Relevance: the work must be seen by students as interesting and valuable to them and useful to their present lives and/or hopes and dreams for the future.
Here are a few ideas on how to apply each of these qualities to a virtual learning environment:
Autonomy
鈥淐hoice鈥� is the operative word here. The more student choice, the greater sense of student autonomy. Many teachers are applying this concept virtually through the use of . An online search of that phrase will yield umpteen (a scientific term :) ) examples. They are basically a list of various learning tasks, often a mix of online and off-line ones, that students can choose to do. If you don鈥檛 want to do a formal choice board, you can do what I鈥檓 doing鈥攁sking my English-language-learner newcomers to spend at least 15 minutes a day on one of three sites where I can monitor their progress: , or .
Competence
I鈥檓 enforcing a rule in my virtual teaching: If it takes longer than 15 or 20 seconds鈥攐r more than two or three sentences鈥攖o clearly explain what I want students to do, I forget about it or modify the assignment. This rule functions as a double-check on me to increase the likelihood that my students will be able to be successful completing the task. In addition, I try to keep in mind what web developers talk about when they say the user experience has to be 鈥渇rictionless.鈥� In other words, whatever assignments or links I place on Google Classroom should only require one鈥攐r, at most, two鈥攃licks before students are at the page where they should be able to do the assigned work.
Relatedness
Having ! Especially when it comes to virtual teaching when students really don鈥檛 have to connect with you if they don鈥檛 want to! We must do everything we can to cultivate a desire among students to want to connect with us. Of course, that鈥檚 going to be pretty difficult if you were not able to develop a positive relationship with a student when he/she was actually in your physical classroom, but it鈥檚 not impossible. I reached out several times immediately following our school鈥檚 closure to a student who had offered some major classroom- management challenges during the year. My contacts with her were focused on how she and her family were doing. In the course of that texting, I received one that said, 鈥淢r. Ferlazzo, I want to take this as an opportunity to apologize for my past behavior in class.鈥� As I said in my Ed Week video, we need to lead with love, not with lessons.
Helping students connect with their classmates is another way we can encourage student intrinsic motivation. Yes, an occasional video conference call 鈥渃heck-in鈥� can be nice, but what I have found more helpful is having students do projects with partners of their own choosing. Being able to work in small groups of their own choosing and at their own times is clearly one of the reasons four-fifths of my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge students are on schedule with giving their end-of-the-semester Oral Presentations.
Relevance
I have taken my usual thematic schedule of topics that I always cover at the end of the year with my English-language-learner newcomer students and thrown it out the window. Instead, I have asked them for a list of topics they would like to learn about, and they鈥檝e identified ones like the coronavirus, getting a job, and immigration laws, among many others. Hey, it鈥檚 easy for me to teach vocabulary and grammar, and create speaking and reading opportunities, in just about any topic they choose. Why not?
It might be harder to do that in some classes, but it seems to me that most teachers can create space for students to identify things they want to learn that they are interested in or which will help them achieve their own goals and dreams. Just ask!
The last thing I鈥檓 trying to do (and, believe, me, my students would agree) is hold myself up as a motivation genius. I鈥檝e had my share of teaching flops and I will, for sure, rack up a whole lot more of them over these next two months.
I just figure it would be good to keep in mind what doctor鈥檚 say about doing no harm between now and summer, and trying to apply these four motivation principles can help us all be successful in achieving that goal.
Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it鈥檚 selected or if you鈥檇 prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
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91制片厂视频 Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It鈥檚 titled .
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Look for many more questions-and-answers in the future!