Do I HAVE to do This? (online reflection #1)

     As I finish my third week of pre-student teaching, I am already seeing my students test their boundaries. What will I let them get away with? Will I do the work for them if they put it off for too long? Many times throughout the last few weeks either my mentor teacher or I will give the students directions on an assignment only to receive blank stares. At times I feel as if I have to walk around to each individual student and re-explain the task in order for them to get started. Ideally, we want our students to be self-starters – to receive a task and get to working right away, raising their hand if any questions arise. My question is this: how do we encourage and teach students to be self-starters? Is it by using motivation techniques, explaining the directions more thoroughly, both, or something else entirely?

     In the last few days I have tried different techniques in hopes of prompting my students to begin working without me having to repeatedly tell them to get to work. For example, the students were instructed to pick an article in a Choices magazine and do a one-pager over the article. The one-pager needed to include the title, author(s), at least two quotes, personal responses to the quotes, and an image to go along with each quote. While walking around, I noticed several students who had not started reading or working on their one-pager. I first asked the student if he or she had any questions about what they were supposed to do, which many of them did (this was one of the first times they had worked on a one-pager). After clearing up any confusion, I let them work for a while before I returned to their desk to see how they were doing. If they were working steadily, I praised them and encouraged them to keep working hard. If not, I asked them what their next step was going to be: did they need to find two quotes, write their response, or draw an image? I noticed a huge difference in the students’ willingness to keep working rather than if I had just said, “get back to work”.

     This has all been great and is working so far, but how do I take this a step further and get students invested in their work? One Edutopia article, “Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves” by Larry Ferlazzo, suggests that student-teacher relationships are among the most important factors for student motivation. My favorite suggestion from Ferlazzo’s article is using praise: he states that, “. . . praising effort encourages the idea that we primarily learn through our hard work . . .” (Ferlazzo). Admiring a student’s hard work rather than just the product of their work is an easy way to promote a positive student-teacher relationship as well as get them invested in their work. Another tip I definitely plan on utilizing is to just be flexible. As Ferlazzo says, we need to “. . . keep our eyes on the learning goal prize” (Ferlazzo). We can all get caught up in making sure the student does the assignment 100% correctly, but this may cause us to lose sight of our goal in assigning the work in the first place. Do I want students to show me they are capable of producing a one-pager, or do I want students to be able to pull important details from a piece of text and respond to the text in thoughtful ways?

     Ultimately, it is the student-teacher relationship that is one of the biggest determinants of student motivation. While giving praise and keeping our goals in mind are two excellent strategies, I have only just begun discovering the different ways to achieve this goal.

Edutopia article can be found at: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/strategies-helping-students-motivate-themselves-larry-ferlazzo