I routinely work on two non-academic skills, outside of mathematics, with my students during the school year – engagement and motivation. While it seems like these are two skills that a teacher cannot directly control, I have come to understand that teachers have much more power over the engagement and motivation of their students than many of us realize. We think of the engagement and motivation of our students as something that is completely in their control, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Over the past several weeks, I have been researching and reading about how to increase levels of student engagement and motivation and have learned more about how teachers can help students with their engagement and motivation. Much of what we do on a regular basis within our classroom has a direct effect on our students’ levels of engagement and motivation.
The reason that I focus on engagement and motivation in my classroom is that I teach mathematics – a subject that so many people dislike; when in truth, they have never given it a chance. (I will talk about this in a future post). My job at times seems that much harder because I constantly hear, “I like you Mrs. Bledsoe, I just don’t like math.” For this reason alone, math is a low priority with completing homework and even when making up tests and quizzes. To try and address this problem, I dedicate much of my effort to increasing the engagement and motivation of my students.
In order for students to learn mathematics they have to truly engage with the material while they learn, practice and apply the concepts. Both the practice and application take motivation to complete – especially the application part of mathematics; which is where the true math learning happens! Before that feeling of motivation to work on a problem is possible, decent levels of engagement have to be present within my students so that they are willing to at least take some information into their brains. We all know that if students are not engaged, they are not able to learn what we are trying so very hard to teach them. If a student spends enough time disengaged from class, he or she will find themselves in a world of trouble come assessment time and subsequent engagement motivation will seem lost to us. If even a little of the lesson is understood and remembered, the students have a place to start their work.
Lack of engagement in classroom activities and lessons is an all too frequent problem that teachers of all grades and disciplines across the country work to address every school year. There are always reasons beyond the teacher’s control as to why students might not be academically engaged. Students could be dealing with less than ideal circumstances at home. Students are tired from staying up late for any number of reasons. Students are struggling to learn material or even to attend school. There are however ways teachers can help control the engagement within the class structure. Teachers are the primary driving force behind the routines, activities, presentations and levels of engagement in their classrooms. Students look to their teachers as a guide for how class will run. Will it be a boring class where they sit and attempt to take notes from the beginning to the end? Will it be a class full of movement and activities? When teachers provide an engaging classroom atmosphere and structure, students will have more opportunity to find academic successes. The right atmosphere will help even the most reluctant of learners at least attempt an activity.
Another part of the teacher’s job is to keep the engagement level high and focused. There are times when things happen that completely stop instruction that are out of our control, such as a phone call from the office or a fire drill. We can and must control the transitions in between activities and parts of the lesson as much as we can! Any time perceived as down time on the part of our students causes them to disengage from the lesson. When that happens, we have to spend our time reengaging them instead of continuing with the lesson. Remember in all of our under graduate classes when the professors stressed smooth transitions? When we are being evaluated aren’t transitions always commented on? Turns out these things happen for an extremely important reason – helping us to learn how to better keep students focused on what we want them to be learning. Transitions are something we can all struggle with, but when thinking of them in terms of keeping engagement levels high, they are totally worth our teacher attention and effort.
Motivation can be a harder skill to foster in students. We can have a student who seems fully engaged in the lesson but stops working as soon as it comes time to work independently or in a small group. It’s so much safer to answer questions when the teacher is guiding the lesson, but a whole other thing to produce work independently. Students have to believe that they can accomplish the learning task at hand, or many of them will simply not try. Much of this perceived shut down is due to past frustrations and perceived failures in their learning. In truth, when students avoid completing work it’s because they have changed their motivation from learning to avoiding failure.
Students who have learning successes are more willing to keep reaching for more success. I emphasize this idea in my own classroom all the time, each and every school year. I am of the opinion that success with one learning task will lead to more and more engagement in the classroom activities and learning. I cheer my students on to find this first successful task so that they have a reference point to think about when the next activity pushes them a little more. Humans want to be successful and accomplish goals – be they academic, job related or social related. All it takes is one successful outcome to get the ball rolling and then we can remind them of that success when doubt creeps back in to their minds.
I also discuss with my students the idea of mistakes being a great and expected thing in math class while learning material. Mistakes are where learning truly occurs and are a necessary and vital part of the process. We talk about not focusing on making the mistake itself, but on how this will fix our learning during the correction process. Many students are so worried about making mistakes that they quit working until they can ask more questions. Asking questions is terrific and I love to help my students. At the same time though, I need and want to foster a sense of independence and motivation to at least try work on their own. I work to change the motivation from avoiding mistakes, to not being bothered by them.
Engagement and motivation are two non-academic skills that are crucial for success not just with school, but with life beyond school. We have to show kids that these skills can lead them to so many wonderful and successful opportunities. They just have to be willing to stay engaged with the task at hand and stay motivated to complete it. Engagement and motivation are two skills that can and will lead to great outcomes for each and every one of our students and for each of us as well.
Musing of a Motivated Math Teacher 