Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

This review of the psychological underpinnings of MOTIVATION THEORY is essential for parents as well!

The article identifies elements of good pedagogy ... and good parenting that can be applied at home, e.g. building a solid relationship with each child so the adult encourages growth within the context of the child's authentic interests.

Another benefit of strong adult-child relationships is that it front-loads resiliency -the capacity to bounce back from challenges and set-backs.

Not enough can be said for the magical and multiple gifts inherent in project learning -both at home and in school. Feeling responsible for accumulating a representative series of "grades" Classroom Teachers (CT) often feel reluctant to use project learning as the centerpiece of their classroom curriculum. Let's face it, projects need to be carefully designed...and lots of advance planning, materials, check points, assessment tools require up front planning time. Summer lends itself well to this type of advance organizing, planning, gathering, designing.

Home projects make just as much sense, and require parents to be diligent and consistent in checking on the stages of life-skills projects, e.g. maintaining a clean and organized room. It doesn't happen altogether on a Saturday afternoon, and if it does I am pretty sure we have one overwhelmed child on our hands...and trash bags filling up with a chaotic mass of "good stuff" because it would take a week to restore the hundreds of scattered parts and pieces back to their original boxes/kits. Throwing away "stuff" we paid good money for -as a way of restoring order to a kid's room that got out of hand -challenges our values and principles on many levels. And what is it teaching our children about the stewardship of resources, the value of our hard-earned dollars, conservation of resources, their capacity to manage their lives, and finally our capacity to manage them?

So if you are a parent, grandparent, engaged aunt/uncle, guardian, or babysitter...open the link above and enjoy an invitation to live in a more engaged way.

And if you are a teacher, jot down some key words connected to fascinating project ideas that will underpin any subject's content in much more meaningful ways than a textbook can. Ask the kids to dream up projects that would answer the deep questions they keep under their hats because there's usually no time in a school day set aside to project work. Bring in a baseball cap... everyone can deposit slips of paper describing ideas/asking big questions. On the last day of school this thinking cap goes home with you until one month of full leisure and recovery has passed. By the end of July, your summertime thinking cap will inspire you...and come September you will inspire your students to develop their own MOTIVATION through project-filled learning (and you will have creatively figured out how to gather grades at multiple check-points along the way).

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Very close friends of mine have cultivated their children's interest and affinity for swimming.  More than a dozen years back, the parents asked me what was really important to cultivate self-motivated and excellence oriented kids.  Among several key pieces, I noted the importance of developing commitment to something beyond school learning...music, art, physical performance.

This family chose swimming and the girls were enrolled in a structured swimming program throughout their school careers.  In high school now, each young lady competes in meets leading to Olympic proportions.  Naturally, their parents have invested in, have indeed stewarded their daughters' interest, affinity, and achievement.

Time, talent, and treasure have backed them up and launched levels of achievement that are synonymous with The American Dream.  The older daughter, about to enter her senior year, is being courted by five universities this summer.  Financially, she will be supported -well deserved for the five a.m. risings that characterize her hard-earned success across her high school years.  Financially, her parents will be partnered throughout their daughter's college career -well deserved for their steadfast persistence to being the parents that fashioned an extraordinary environment that made dreaming realistic and within reach and worth working for daily, monthly, annually since first grade!

My thrill comes during visits with this family in Colorado.  I witness first-hand the fruits of my professional advice merged with their faith in such, their focus, persistence, and steadfastness in their family pursuit of The American Dream.  Each teacher development program should witness then study the learning-training elements of swim practice.  Witnessing the mindfully coached workings of early morning swim practices, combined with focused interviews during meets, has made it clear to me as a veteran educator and psychologist, that student performance in schools would benefit greatly.  

This is particularly true for urban classrooms where we find the majority of learners arrive at school woefully under-prepared for the curriculum destined to be delivered.   The introduction of skill, modeling, mirroring, and zone of proximal development combined with formally structured drill of skill sets, and culminating in regularly scheduled real-life and self-informing "meets" matches the structure missing in under-prepared school kids.

In a file on my laptop, brews a practical handbook for urban teachers devoted in spirit to delivering the classroom learning structure that will do what stickers have failed to do: build and drill skill combined with motivation swim-style.  What's more, we can do this not only for a room filled with children who arrive and develop via different personal schedules, strengths and needs, we can do this on a school-wide basis.  As skill acquisition and drill design structuring advancement within and among widely varied individual swimmers successfully buoys them daily upstream  in their pursuit of bronze, silver, and gold -so can we channel the advancement of literate and self-propelled learners.

Let's hear it from the swimmers among us...

For our insider groups: Classroom Practitioners in the Great Field of Education

This is a call-out to our Public School P-12 Classroom Practioners only. 

... if your instructional practice is at a college or university 

... if you practice in a private, independent, or charter setting

... if you practice specialty consultations and school programming (i.e. School Counseling of Social Work, Sp/L, OTT, Vision/Hearing Impared, Autism Spectrum, School Psychology, School Administration, Support Staff: PTA, Security, Food Prep, Paraprofessionals)

...then your level of pedagogy/child development/content area training and population experience is inherently different.  THIS IS NOT YOUR SITE FOR DIALOGUE. 

The quantity and quality of the rules, regulations, and resources available under your particular circumstances differ sufficiently from those currently allocated to Public School P-12 Classroom Practitioners. 


Since our research intends to identify the true needs of  of P-12 Classroom Practitioners -as well as all support professionals, our methods strive for fullest integrity.  We know you support our highest intentions ... for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

Our Great Field of Intention at Palladio International Campus needs your utmost cooperation in order to maintain PIC research  purity!  Our many different "gardens" in the great field of education (designated in the qualifying statements above) are in fact different -and require resources and research assessment tailored to those differences. 

We thank you in advance for navigating to your designated site before 

• signing in, 
• identifying yourself/practice category, 
• and engaging in our SPRING campus-wide dialogue. 

Dialogue questions:

1. Which is preferable: practitioners devoted to the reciprocal relationship between instruction and learning? (or selective testing, outside-designed schedules and curriculum presecriptions?) 
2. Which is preferable: principals devoted to the principles of pedagogy? (or outward appearances, schedules, presriptions, selective test results assembled to reassure outsiders that the insiders know what they are doing? )
3. Why would professionally prepared and devoted practitioners be pressed to divert pedagogically sound focus and effort these ways,  when the actual learning needs of our nationally diverse population demands every bit of our focus and attention? (Okay, so this one wasn't brief...forgive me: it truly is the big question to begin with! Unpacking this question leads everyone in dialogue to sources of the real problems with our public education system ...as manufactured over time.)