DOCUMENT LIBRARY
Nurturing Motivation, Effort, and Investment in Schoolwork
Taking Center Stage, California Department of Education, 2001, pp. 119, 120.
Wheelock’s formula for a school culture that sustains standards-based education also involves the role of teachers in shaping their relationships with and among students in ways that nurture motivation, effort, and investment in schoolwork. She notes that:
Establishing a motivational climate in which every student feels safe to work with diligence, tackle new learning, learn from mistakes, and do work that meets standards—the essence of being smart—begins with individual teachers who care enough about students’ success that they repeatedly probe for clues that will help them understand how to best help each student to meet standards. Making student investment in school a norm schoolwide means taking individual teachers’ practices and beliefs about learning and structuring them into the daily life of all classrooms to create a “press for achievement” and a climate that motivates every student to learn.5
Experiencing these qualities depends on many important factors within a school’s culture that are reflected by its values, belief systems, and organizational priorities. In addition to those factors addressed earlier, Wheelock’s discussion of motivation, effort, and investment provides the context for identifying additional elements of a middle school culture capable of sustaining standards-based education:
- Effort, care, and quality are the primary bases of success in school. By their very definition, content and performance standards signal that it is more important to do work that reflects effort, care, and quality than it is to cover the textbook. Completing work quickly is no longer an adequate indication of a successful learner. Students who once depended on passing grades by subscribing to school norms that rewarded memory and right answers need to be helped to adapt to the classroom world of standards that requires much different learning behaviors.
- Beliefs about intelligence and learning affect performance. Wheelock reminds us that traditional assumptions about intelligence and learning have often been severely skewed:
For decades we have assumed that if we could only get the rewards and consequences “right,” we could motivate students to work harder and improve achievement. The “right” incentives must be worthy of students’ aspirations and dignity if they are to motivate students to work harder academically. . . . Programs that combine future financial scholarships for postsecondary education with structured tutoring, mentoring, and peer support motivate many middle grades students to persist in school.6
- School norms about effort and risk taking drive students’ success. Wheelock contends that educators who want to make sure that school is a place where it is “safe to be smart” counter students’ beliefs that learning depends on innate ability. For some teachers this attitude represents a substantial cultural shift professionally. Schools need to encourage all teachers to study the literature on motivation and achievement and to think through their private perceptions about actual or implied limitations that their instructional practices may place on student learning. Teachers should understand that praising students for taking on challenging assignments rather than praising them for less-challenging work leads to higher performance levels. “Motivating young adolescents depends in part on helping them understand learning in terms of expandable intelligence. . . .”
- Detracking and heterogeneous (inclusive) grouping support the success of standards-based education. Large numbers of middle-level schools have made progress over the past decade in overcoming the practice of tracking “like ability” students in classrooms in favor of heterogeneous classrooms. However, many teachers, principals, and parents remain uncertain about the practice. Wheelock responds by holding that tracking is incompatible with standards-based education and that such practices must change if it is to succeed. But the formation of flexible groups directed to accomplish a specific task or purpose is allowed, given that such grouping should be considered temporary.
(See also the following appendixes at the end of this chapter: Appendix 6-C, “Engaging Students: What I Learned Along the Way”; Appendix 6-D, “What to Expect Your First Year of Teaching”; and Appendix 6-E, “Creating a Learning Organization.”)