Student Engagement

Based on the high number of publications that one can find after a short search on google scholar, motivation in education seems to be widely studied. Nevertheless, we had no comprehensive course on this subject at university and no course on teenager psychology, as mentioned here. Given the central role of motivation in the learning processes, this is more than highly regrettable.

To be honest, I must say that Andrew, my university tutor, did give me a brilliant and useful piece of advice after he observed me for the second time. He advised me to tell my students at the start of my lesson, when I present the learning objectives, that they would be able to answer a certain question at the end of the lesson. Of course, the main difficulty resides in finding a suitable question whose answer seems worth knowing to students. However, I tried out his tip in my next lesson about mechanical waves by announcing to my students at the start that they would know, at the end of this lesson, how tuning of a string instrument works. It worked very well, maybe just because two or three students were interested in music, and that was enough to develop a positive dynamic inside the classroom, or because they also liked the demo of stationary waves on a string — I don’t know, but the fact is that the students were engaged during this lesson. Interestingly, the students would try to guess any reasons why violinists and guitarists tune their instrument the way they do as soon as I talked about it, suggesting that the fact that learning has to take place (which may involve listening, reading, thinking, discussing…) before you find a satisfactory answer to a new question is not a widespread idea.

But coming back to the PGCE course at university, I wonder why we did not receive such a piece of advice during a working session there. And to make it collaborative and interactive, we could have gone through many topics of the science curriculum and shared ideas for such lesson-guiding questions, eventually creating a sort of catalogue that can be tapped into when planning lessons.

Nothing of the sort happened, and the main message concerning students’ motivation that I have taken home from these university sessions is: “make the lesson fun”, according to the assumption that if it’s fun, the students will learn. I have never been convinced by this maxim: having fun does not mean they will necessarily learn, even if they will probably be more inclined to engage in the lesson, which is undoubtedly an excellent starting point. But judging by the development of gamification in schools (and at some work places), I believe that it has many followers. To be clear, I am not against the idea of having fun during lessons, but what I deplore is the fact that the fun element in a lesson overshadows any consideration for deep learning. For instance, I observed a science lesson on pressure in which the teacher heated on a gas burner a can of a fizzy drink partially filled with water. Once the water inside was boiling, the teacher quickly plunged the can turned upside-down into a basin of cold water. The can imploded, making a crazy noise. This demo was certainly fun for the students, no question. But the follow-up was almost non-existent. The explanation of the phenomenon given by the teacher was very vague and made only orally, and the students did not properly understand what happened with the can. The fun they experienced during the demo was not exploited. To understand the implosion phenomenon properly, they should have linked it with the concept of gas pressure, which in turn is linked with the number of gas particles in a given volume, and this number varies with temperature. Drawings would have been extremely useful. And then the students could have been required for instance to explain why jam jars are under partial vacuum (which can be deduced from the ‘click’ they make at their opening), knowing that they are filled with very hot jam and then closed hermetically immediately.

A commonly used way to make a lesson fun is to make a game out of every activity. So, for instance, you embed simple questions in a competitive game in which students have to run to the board to move their pawn as soon as they have filled a section of the sheet, and of course the first student or group of students to reach a certain position with their pawn wins the game. Play is an incredibly efficient learning tool for young children, and it is certainly a good idea to propose learning games to students in lower secondary school, where possible. However, there is a shift from the learning content and thinking skills to the game in itself, which often essentially requires being fast and is superficial. Also, the activities suitable for a game are in most cases very simple questions about facts and figures; it is only rarely about understanding a concept. In most cases, the game is just a packaging for increasing students’ motivation by simply calling on their competitive spirit, but not a learning experience in itself.

Also, the spiral curriculum is problematic in terms of students’ motivation as students who have already understood and remember very well a certain part of the curriculum will easily feel bored when it is taught again, and I expect those who found it inaccessible the first time to instinctively protect themselves from another failure by rejecting the subject altogether rather than to engage in the lesson.

An unsettling aspect of ‘the carrot and stick’ behaviour management approach mentioned in a previous post is that it is essentially based on extrinsic motivation. Two main kinds of motivation are usually distinguished: the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. While intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions[1], extrinsic motivation refers to some separable outcome that shall be attained when doing a certain activity, for instance either get the carrot (in the form of good mark, praise, etc.) or avoid the stick (bad mark, sanction, etc.). Most of the activities students do in secondary school, and adults in general, are actually not only intrinsically motivated. I am probably taking no risk by assuming that not everything you do in a day is enjoyable, but still you do these less pleasant tasks, responding to an extrinsic motivation. However, extrinsic motivation does not necessarily mean that the motivation is completely external to the person doing the activity. For example, students can do their homework because they fear sanction by their strict teacher, or because they think it is important for their future career. Both motivations are extrinsic, but the latter example entails personal endorsement or internalisation. The degree of internalisation is believed to play a role in the development of greater persistence, more positive self-perceptions, and better quality of engagement, with intrinsic motivation being obviously regarded as the motivation with the highest degree of internalisation.

As already said, I had expected to hear extensively at university about the complex mechanisms of motivation and strategies to encourage the types of motivation that lead to better learning, and see how these strategies are implemented in schools. Only one of our teachers at university made a vague attempt to make us aware about the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. He gave us a sheet giving advice about how to increase our students’ intrinsic motivation, like for instance “less praise, less punishments, more encouragements”. But as this was in complete opposition to the common behaviour policies in school, it was impossible as a teacher trainee to follow these pieces of advice. The only way would be to change the whole school’s philosophy.

Competition between students is another widely used extrinsic motivator. I find it highly depressing, and even more so when I hear people justifying it with “It is how the world is”. They do not seem to realise that one of the ways we make the world is through our schools! If children are used to competition from an early age, how could we expect that they change behaviour when they are adults? Often, people say that children have to be competitive to be prepared to live in this more and more competitive world. I don’t know if the world is indeed more competitive than ‘before’ (what period do people actually refer to?). A maths teacher working in my school introduced a new procedure in his classes that consists in ranking all the students from a year group according to their result at the last end-of-unit test. He would then discuss with each of his students how they felt about their ranking and who they wanted to score ahead of at the next test. I thought it was one of the worst ideas I had heard during my PGCE. I suspect that teachers who encourage competition between their students are competitive themselves. However, the problem with this method is that you may motivate a certain proportion of students in a class to make more effort, but in the end only one of them will succeed. And you will create many other frustrated students.

Even the seemingly trivial prizes and praises commonly used in schools can have an adverse effect on those who do not get them. A child who is among those who did not get a reward may conclude that their work was not positively considered and may feel demotivated as a result. Inversely, too much encouragement can send a message of low expectations and children may develop the idea that as soon as they produce something, they will be rewarded. Like many other things, the difficulty is in finding the right balance, and it is even more arduous when you consider that children do not all react in the same way.

Recently, my sons explained to me that their (primary) school had put in place a system of incentives to foster attendance and punctuality by giving five minutes extra break time each week to the class with the best attendance and punctuality. But on one of the weeks, three classes had had 100% of attendance and punctuality, and so for this week no one could get the five minutes extra break time since no class could be singled out as ‘the best’. I would have naively thought that the school would strive for 100% attendance and punctuality in all classes and would simply reward all the classes with 5 minutes extra break time when this is the case! There are reasons to worry when the competition mentality overrides the very reason why competition was introduced in the first place…

Competition, or rather emulation, may work well for some pupils, but schools could also put other values at the centre of their philosophy and motivation system, like collaboration, which more children may feel aligned with. I applaud the trend in schools to have the students work in groups on projects, even if I think that it would be much more effective if they had an intrinsic desire to learn, to get along within the group, to achieve something together, and were not doing the task only for a praise, reward or good mark. I believe it is a shame that children miss the idea that doing something properly (or at least the best one can) or understanding something deeply can be intrinsically satisfactory, and I would even think it is somehow dangerous to have people working only extrinsically motivated. I appreciate that some employers may prefer this type of workers because they are easily manageable (with a similar carrot and stick approach that the one used in school) and less likely to question the methods and practices used in the company. I am however firmly convinced that an over-reliance on extrinsic motivations (e.g. money, rewards, career advancement, etc.) can lead to such tragedies where professionals or companies lied about the risks of some medical drugs, pollution of cars, climate change, etc. I do believe that rather than more competitors, the world needs more selfless people who believe in what they do, want to help others and are happy to contribute to society, in whatever role.

[1] Ryan, R. M., & and Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54–67