Motivation - the overlooked sixth component of reading

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Trina is an eighth grader trapped in her own prison.  She's the one whose seat you've had to move a dozen times in the last semester.  The one who pokes four different kids on her way to sharpen her pencil for the fifth time before you've gotten through the daily warm-up.  Yep, she's that kid.  That's the kid who, on the rare chance that she's absent (more likely suspended or in the dean's office), the class seems more . . . well . . . manageable.  And that kid is what prompted me to start really looking into what makes our "unmotivated" adolescents  . . . well . . . not tick.

 In a Stamford Advocate article entitled "The Disturbing Transformation of Kindergarten", columnist Wendy Lecker reports that kindergarten has changed drastically in the last fifteen years, shifting to reading instruction rather than discovery and creativity.   Anybody who knows a five-year-old is well aware that they have a natural curiosity that, if fostered, becomes a full-blown desire to learn.  In her March, 2014 IRC session, Stephanie Harvey said that when kindergartners come in to school, they are wide-eyed with curiosity and a desire to learn, but by fifth grade, our focus has become answers and not questions.  She quoted Albert Einstein who said, even in his time, “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”  Enter: the “unmotivated” adolescent. 

Reading instruction is commonly broken into five components: phonemic awareness (knowledge of sounds), phonics (the idea that sounds equal letters and those letters make words), fluency (pace and accuracy of reading), vocabulary, and comprehension.  When our kiddos are first learning to read, everything is new and exciting to them.  To some (probably our linguistic ones), reading comes naturally.  To others, not so much.  Well-meaninged educators identify those who struggle and give them more support, taking time away from other areas, and then during the process we begin to try to boost their confidence by showering them with praise and incentives when small successes are made.  Thus, the sixth component of reading – motivation.

But what of those kiddos who are now ten, eleven, twelve or older?  These are the ones who have heard the words of praise hundreds of times.  The ones who feel dumb because they have to miss art for reading.  They’re the ones who deflect their inability to function at the same level their peers are by throwing a pencil when the teacher isn’t looking or bullying others. Dr. Ross Greene, psychology professor at Harvard University, writes in his 2007 article, “Kids Do Well if they Can,” that all children would perform if each possessed the necessary skills to complete the task.

Kids are motivated to learn by three different factors: desire to learn, incentives, or fear of failure.  As they get older, desire to learn decreases, external and internal obstacles increase, and we find that they rely on incentives and/or fear of failure as their major motivating factor.  Most of the curiosity has been tested right out of them, and school becomes work.  JackCanfield, self-esteem expert and author of the Chicken Soup series, reports that in a self-esteem survey eighty percent of first graders reported high self-esteem, but by graduation this number had dropped to five percent.  Five percent of high school graduates reported high self-esteem.  That's staggering. 

But can this be reversed?  Can the motivation blockade be torn down?  The external factors such as family and neighborhood distractions sometimes cause internal factors to arise.  What starts as a hostile environment may cause a struggling eleven-year-old to develop low academic self-concept, and the downward spiral begins.  Often this happens much earlier than age eleven.  When the external factor of standardized testing provides feedback that spells intervention, our kids know, and their fragile sense-of-self takes a nose-dive.  

Certainly you aren't reading this blog for that bleak truth.  Your real question is Now what? 

Martha Farrell Erickson, PhD. (2003) of the University of Minnesota describes the Three C's as "critical ingredients for healthy child and youth development."   In my opinion, they are critical for educating any child, and most importantly, for reversing the earlier damage done to self-esteem, which can cause blocks in motivation.

Connection

Erickson says, "as children move into the school years, connections to teachers and other caring adults, and also to peers, become increasingly important, allowing children to feel a sense of belonging not only in the family, but in the larger community as well."  Shortly after I read this, I began to take inventory of the different ways teachers can make connections with their students, use the information to their advantage, and begin building back that battered self-esteem.  The idea is to get to know your kiddos so that you can best educate the entire child.  Brain research tells us that if negative emotions are present, internalization of information is unlikely.  When students feel happy, protected, and comfortable, they are more apt to take in and retain information.  Dr. Ross Greene (2007) says that if we can pinpoint and support students with skills they lack, they will begin to feel successful and want to succeed.  It is our job to get to know these kiddos inside and out.  Here's how.

·         Reader Self-Perception Scale - Some of our kiddos are completely disengaged with the reading process and have no reason to re-engage.  Others struggle, even though they want to do well.  With this information, you could determine which students need more encouragement and how to approach each one individually, which makes a huge difference in differentiating your instruction. 

·         Learning Styles Assessments - I use the VARK.  It can be done paper/pencil or online, and it comes in an adult and student version.  I ALWAYS take these assessments first because the epiphany that comes after learning something new about myself is mind-blowing.  Once you find out what YOUR learning style is, reflect on your teaching to see if your teaching style matches.  If it does (and it inevitably will), start to realize you will have to make some changes because teaching to one style leaves out three others.  And learning your students' styles and making them aware of them gives them power to learn and produce.  It's pretty amazing.

·         Multiple Intelligences Assessments - I can tell you that I've taken close to half a dozen from different websites, and they've all come out the same.  It doesn't matter which one you take or give.  But take one first, realize that there are reasons you do certain things in your teaching and life, and then give them to your students.  Allow them to reflect, gain power, and proceed carefully with this new knowledge of self.

·         Skill Deficit Inventories - Kids will perform if they possess the skills necessary, according to Dr. Ross Greene.  What better way to help these kiddos than to teach them those skills.  The problem usually lies in the fact that we never seem to dig deep enough.  My favorite question to ask about a student is, "Why?"  If, in a conversation with another teacher, the teacher mentions a student's misbehavior or refusal to participate, I always ask myself, "Why?"  What's missing?  The only way to find out is to assess (formally or informally) and observe, draw conclusions, and collaborate.  What skills are missing?

·         Interest Inventories - These are especially useful when looking for reading material for a resistant reader.  Here's my favorite, created by two of my colleagues (one whose blog you should definitely read!). Getting to know your students' interests allows you to match them up with good-fit reading material.  Pair this with a skill inventory, and you could quite possibly find a book that not only matches what a student is capable of managing but on a topic he enjoys!  You can't get any closer to getting a resistant reader to read.  I've done it dozens of times.  Lexile.com is great for choosing great-fit books.  Simply type in an approximate lexile score from a reading inventory and check the boxes of interests.  Lexile.com will narrow the millions of books available to adolescents to a much less intimidating list.  "There's nothing good to read in this library," may just become, "I never knew there were this many good books here!"

·         Types of Learners questionnaire – Dr. Valerie Rice and the US Army did a study on types of learners.  The gist of the study breaks learners into four different types, depending on their approach (or non-approach) to learning new material.  Imagine the power our students would have if they knew what type of learner they were and how his information could benefit them!

Contribution

In the book Bridging Cultures Between Home and School, the author team discusses collectivist cultures and what educators can do to honor this growing number of students.  Adolescents of immigrant families from all over the world grow up with a sense of collectivity, and parents emphasize working together and community instead of bringing attention to individual successes.  As educators, it is our job to support each student individually while maintaining that we have a large number of students who also need to feel like they are contributing.  

This is just as much an engagement philosophy as it is one of esteem-building.  Discussion activities can be as simple as a quick think-pair-share to a whole group activity or discussion model.  The more you use them, the more engaged your students become.  

Competence

Erickson's third C is the heart of intrinsic motivation.  The entire reason for the esteem breakdown in the first place lies solely with the fact that many of these kiddos have faced so much failure that success no longer seems attainable.  To build that back, we need to give our students a feeling of mastery, even on things that don't seem to matter.  For example, writing out a clear agenda and reviewing it at the beginning of each day allows our students to transition from activity to activity with greater confidence than they would without knowing what is coming next.  Over time, students begin to feel as if they "run the place" themselves, especially if daily routines are set and maintained early-on.

Providing specific and constructive feedback is another way to build competence in our struggling students.  Rick Wormeli, author and speaker in the field of education, told his audience last February that one of the worst things we can do for our students is assess without providing feedback.  Talk about an esteem breaker!  To assign a number or a letter grade to student work without providing any true feedback is meaningless, and yet we do it all the time.  Wormeli's idea is to empower our students.  To give them a true feeling of success, honor their work.  Observe.  Honor. Tell the student what the work does for you.  Then help them to set a goal to improve on it.  

"Trina, I noticed that when you read the first few chapters of your novel you wrote sticky notes that asked a lot of questions.  This shows me that you are really thinking about and wondering about your reading, and I'm wondering if you've found any answers to any of these questions.  As you read the next chapter, can we make a goal?"   At this time the discussion should move toward either writing questions that may have answers rooted in the near-future text or to look for some answers in the next chapter and record them somewhere. You can then check back with her in a day or so to see if she has met the goal, honor and re-adjust if necessary.  Help her make goals attainable so that she can begin to feel some success.  The more successes she feels, the more she will strive to succeed. 

And succeed, she will.  If even one of Trina's teachers meets her with the attitude that says, "I'm going to get to know you, kid.  I'm going to give you a chance to be a part of this community and to feel success," she will respond.  The biggest challenge is changing our mindset so that she can change hers.  There are no kids who are "just not motivated".  They do not exist.  Each one of them has a story.  It's our job to read it, learn it, and help them to use it as power, not as a prison.  

The four types of learners and what we can do for them

This week I am traveling to the Illinois Reading Council's annual conference in Springfield to learn and to teach.  My esteemed colleague Karen and I have put together a presentation that includes information on why motivation should be considered a  key component in reading instruction and what we can do to turn our unmotivated learners around.  So after completing the slides for the presentation, I was mortified to find that, after counting up the number of minutes we would likely spend on each slide, that we had about 140 minutes of material to pack into a sixty minute slot!  We then began whittling down the material, in hopes that we wouldn't leave out the really important points.

Late in our research, we came across an interesting bit of information taken from another presentation on a similar topic.  After digging around for a few days, we discovered that this piece of research was duplicated several times, including being detailed by Dr. Valerie Rice, a researcher at the US Army Research Laboratory, Human Research and Engineering Directorate.  This parallel research is best illustrated by the graphic shown to the right.  As you can see, Dr. Rice's theory is that there are four types of students: the failure accepters, failure avoiders, optimists, and over-strivers.  According to Dr. Rice, the optimists are those who worry little about failure and desire success.  Brain research tells us that heightened anxiety can impede learning, so if you put low fear of failure and high desire of success together, it appears as if the optimists will have the highest rate of successful skillbuilding and, ultimately, the highest views of self.

Over-strivers are more motivated by their fear of failure than the optimists.  To help these students continue to make progress, we can aid them in planning for times when they might fail and come up with strategies to help them cope and deal with failure if it does happen.  This will give those students more of a sense of control and will hopefully boost their concept of self.  Going back to what Dr. Ross Greene says in, "Kids to Well if They Can," cited in a previous blog on student motivation, giving these students the skills they need to move past their blocks will allow them to learn and gain more control, making them more teachable.

As a reading specialist, the failure avoiders are the most difficult to bring to light. They will often fly under the radar because they work so hard.  My job is to look at data first, then the individual, and sometimes the data that I see doesn't reflect what we see in school.  It is then my job to figure out why, and what I often find is that we have a lot of kids who struggle and never say anything or show that they are struggling until it is too late!  A common generic example of this is when I am looking at reading comprehension data for a student, and I mention a specific student to a group of eighth grade teachers or the Tier 3 team.  When they look at me like I'm crazy, I know what is coming next.  "But she's getting Bs and Cs!" is often what I hear.  I then reflect back on Rick Wormeli's talk last week where he discusses the long-standing grading system of points, percentages, and letter grades and the glaring absurdities with how it is being used.  

Just because a student "earns" an A in a class, doesn't mean he is not struggling with reading comprehension.  In fact, in a the book Student Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement (Irvin, et. al, 2007), teachers were found to, with good intention, support those who appeared to struggle by loading those students with information verbally or visually (Yay!  Trying other learning styles!) or sometimes even copying teacher-notes or giving "cloze notes" to students who struggle - even in language arts!  While this helps the student in the content area, it does nothing to help our kiddos build reading skills, and therefore they succeed, as evidenced by the letter grade achieved for the quarter in that content area.  The reason is two-fold: teachers find ways around their deficiencies, and those students fear failure so much that they work hard enough to pass with decent grades.  I also know that these kiddos tend to resist interventions because they feel like if the grades show success, why would they need help.  

Most often, it is my latino students who struggle with this the most, as cited in Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: a Guide for Teachers (Trumball, et. al, 2001).  Many of them come from a more collectivist culture, where behavior and academics are often seen as reflective of each other.  As a reading specialist, part of my duty is to help parents accept reading intervention positively so that their children feel comfortable accepting it. It is also our job, as educators, to help these students put together some strategies to help them through failure so that they can face tasks with a mind that is more prepared to internalize instead of being in a constant state of fear.  Can we also plan ways to show these kiddos how they are making successes?  So often they don't see their successes because they are so worried that they will fail.  Just the idea that their hard work is paying off in their grades is one place to start, but giving them tasks where they can begin tracking smaller successes may give them the tools to feel more confident in their ability to grow and build a growth mindset.

Finally, our failure accepters.  We all know these students too well.  They are the ones who, after exhausting everything possible, we chalk up to a kid who is just "unmotivated".  A no-can-do in my book, and Dr. Ross Greene would agree with me.  There is something we are missing with these kiddos, and the graphic shows that first we need to give them tasks that make them feel competent and then provide feedback that is prescriptive and productive. Chances are, these kids have felt incompetent for so long, that they have forgotten the feeling of success.  Anything.  Even our relationships with these students could give them enough boost in confidence to give some of their school work a try.  Dr. Rice says it.  Rick Wormeli says it (see last week's blog on giving feedback after attending a Rick Wormeli seminar).  Dr. Greene says it.  This idea of feedback is such a powerful one, that it cannot be overlooked.

One thing that Karen and I wish we could have found was some sort of questionnaire or screening test that helped us to identify which of our students are which type of learner.  We searched and searched, but we were unable to locate one.  But as you are teaching this week, and as you interact with your students, contemplate which students might fall in which categories.  What would really be interesting is if all teachers of the same student were asked to place one student.  Would all of these teachers place the student into the same quadrant?  That, my friends, is something to ponder.

Feedback: Words are powerful

I had an opportunity to see Rick Wormeli today during our County-wide institute day.  Having never seen him present, I walked in with virtually no expectation except that I would be gathering some information on standards-based grading.  What he gave me was much more than that, and I walked out with a pocket full of ideas about instruction, intervention, grading, and working with students.

Since one of my pedagogical focuses has been student-motivation, I immediately grasped onto some of Wormeli's thoughts on ways to motivate students.  This year, one of my respected colleagues and I are planning to present at the Illinois Reading Council's spring conference.  Our presentation is entitled Motivation: the Overlooked 6th Component of Reading (shameless plug), so I make a point to note any new and innovative ways (or oldies but goodies) for motivating and engaging struggling readers.

Wormeli's session was six hours long, so really there were dozens of interesting points that he made.  Something that struck me, however, was his discussion on giving students feedback.  It brought me back to last summer when I was working on one of my last graduate classes on student motivation.  The book What Every Teacher Should Know About Student Motivation by Donna Walker Tileston (2010) was a quick and easy read, but it contained valuable information for any teacher looking to pad her philosophy with some ways to motivate and engage students.  Tileston quotes Marzano (1998) on several occasions in her book, saying, "Feedback that is consistent and specific has a strong effect on student success.  Just saying 'Good job' is not enough.  Feedback must be diagnostic and prescriptive, deserved, and given often - some researchers say every 30 minutes."  Wormeli's talk today reflected this exact point.

His point was that grades do not give accurate feedback, and then he illustrated this point over and over and over again throughout the day - oftentimes making his audience giggle with the illustrations that make our current grading system of letter grades and percentages appear absurd.  Since my focus was more on the struggling reader, and a large percentage of those students behave as if their grades are about as important as a wad of chewed gum, I paid particular attention to his idea of giving more specific, frequent, oral feedback - something that many researchers seem to agree is highly effective in getting positive responses from even the trickiest of adolescent personalities.

Here's how it works.  You are working on aerobic exercise in PE where your students are in the workout room using a variety of aerobic machines.  As you walk around, monitoring your students, you notice the posture, breathing, pace, and the way that students are using the equipment.  Each time you are in the workout room with these students, consider making a brief comment to ten students (or more, if possible), giving them specific feedback.

Use this format: "__________ (student name), I noticed that while you are _____________ (whatever it is that the student is doing), you ____________ (try for something positive so that you can start with an affirmation).  As a result, ________________ (then tell the student what it does for you).  I'm wondering if you will get better results by ____________ (and then give a suggestion to improve whatever it is and get closer to mastering the skill or technique).

Here is an example (Keep in mind that I am not a PE teacher, nor do I claim to have an expertise in the field, so use your imagination!).  "Giselle, I'm noticing that each day we are in here, while you're walking on the treadmill you keep the treadmill going for the entire thirty minute period.  As a result, I'm seeing that you are getting used to this type of exercise and might want to push yourself a little to get to that next level.  I'm wondering if you will get better results from the workout if you increase the incline (show her the button) or pick up the pace by maybe half a mile.  Can we give it a try?  I think you're ready."  Two minutes.  Tops.  She smiles or grumbles at you, but she does it, and you move on, vowing to check in on her tomorrow to see if she made the new changes permanent.

It works in any subject area and any level.  So simple, but it is specific, prescriptive, and effective.

This idea of noticing, observing, and being aware seems to be appearing more and more often in the world of education, from teaching students to notice or observe things and draw conclusions to asking teachers to reflect on things that they're noticing about themselves or their students.  This skill is deeply explored by another respected colleague of mine in his blog, if you're interested in learning how mindfulness can be used as both a classroom strategy and a strategy of self reflection.  I, myself, have blogged about this topic off and on since attending the 2013 IRC Conference, and am looking forward to going back to hear more about how I can use it more effectively with our students and staff.