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.

Can't vs. Won't

"Kids do well if they can."  An interesting philosophy adopted by Dr. Ross Greene, author of several books on behavior and associate professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard University and one that challenged the core of my personal educational philosophy.  I was researching student-motivation for my IRC Conference presentation in March when I ran across this article in the Phi Delta Kappan written by Dr. Greene in 2008.  In this article, he presents the idea that if a child truly has every skill it takes to perform a task at a particular time, he or she will, indeed, follow through.  At first thought, many educators would squint our eyes, wrinkle our brows, and say, "Well, what about those kids who don't want to?"  Right?  But after reading through Dr. Greene's article with examples and explanation, not only do I support this statement, but I realize that it both supports and contradicts my entire educational philosophy.

Dr. Greene starts out by stating the alternative thought - Kids do well if they want to, and he challenges his readers to decide which philosophy they would prefer to follow.  Most of us would say that the difference in implication for both statements is pretty profound.

"Kids do well if they can" vs. "Kids do well if they want to."

"Can't" vs. "Won't".  A very respected colleague of mine uses this simple thought with some of her most challenging kiddos who show potential to swing one way or another.  Those kids who have made so much progress and then fall back and then move forward for a few weeks and then fall back for a month - the ones who appear as if they can do it, but they are "just unmotivated" (a common thought among educators).

Our first response is to say to ourselves, "What can I do to motivate this child?"  I can tell you, friends, that motivating our kiddos has been such a passion of mine for the almost-three-years I have been at this job.  But there are times when I collapse at my desk, put my head in my hands, and cry because I just can't seem to make some of them care.  WHY can't I figure it out?

Dr. Greene presented me with the idea that there is only one answer to this - when a child chooses not to do something, when a child chooses behavior we consider to be unacceptable, when a child chooses blatantly inappropriate behavior, there is a skill that he is missing and that he can be taught.  When we choose to approach the behavior (and this includes work ethic) from the top (rewarding good behavior or hard work with external rewards such as tangible items or grades or punishing undesirable behavior), the desired behavior is never taught, and the likelihood that the student will learn it and internalize it is not high.

Adversely, there are some struggling students who are motivated by grades and rewards.  These are the kiddos who work so hard to "make the grade" or get the reward, but when you take a look at their actual skill acquisition, often times these kiddos continue to exhibit low skill.  When the rewards are removed, they may or may not be able to exhibit the correct behavior, probably will choose not to, and if they do, there is no meaning behind it.  These are the kids who are the first to ask, "What do we get if we do it?"  Most of our kiddos, right?

Greene's eight page article focused more on behavior than it did to academics and was obviously more in-depth than my quick summary, but the idea is the same.  When I walk into our intervention language arts class, when I walk into an intervention SLC class, when I look at the detention list, when I look at the D-F list, when I look at the kiddos who get suspended most often, the kiddos who come up at our Tier 2/3 meetings, my "below the twenty-fifth percentile" list - who do I see?  The same kids over and over and over and over again.  Why is this?

And this is when I started making the alignment between what Dr. Greene says in this article to the RtI (Response to Intervention) model that we are currently using.  RtI spans both academics and behavior.  We currently work to catch our academic strugglers with our benchmarking tests (we use Scantron Performance Series and AIMSWEB) with the hope that we can service these kiddos before they become unmotivated, but at the middle school level, some of them have not known success for years and (as I have stated in previous posts) find it much easier to refuse to do it and deflect attention by misbehaving than to try and fail again.  Their egos have had enough.  Many of these strugglers have already hit that threshold and have stopped trying.

My job as a reading specialist is to identify the issues, and (holy smoke!) there are a lot!  Our PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention System) team's job is to identify the issues of our students with inappropriate behavior and provide supports for these students as well.  Unfortunately, we have the same exact problem - we have seven hundred students, and each one comes with his own recipe!  I've tried and tried and tried to be prescriptive for each, individual student, but as Dr. Greene points out - screening tests will often give us general information, but some of our kiddos will go their entire academic careers with skill deficits that never get resolved because we don't have a way of "collecting the data" on them.  And the skill sets are vast!  We also see that often students have social skill deficits that distract them from making academic gains (things like having difficulty empathizing with others' point-of-view), so no matter how much academic intervention we give, until we can identify their social skill deficits we watch some of our kiddos move from sixth to seventh to eighth grade, make a little and lose a lot and make a little and lose a lot.  Its devastating to watch, and I am sick when we ship them off to high school.  Sometimes we manage to qualify them for an IEP, and sometimes not, but regardless - I feel like I could have done more.

As usual, the big question then becomes: So what?  What now?  What can we do?  How can we work with this new philosophy, keep our current curriculum moving, and address these needs?

• Do not ignore students who appear unmotivated.  Dr. Greene is emphatic when he states that these students CAN if they have skills needed.  If we ignore those who refuse to do what we ask, we are missing out on an opportunity to teach a skill that could change a life.  Bring this student up to whomever will listen, and don't rest until somebody takes action!
• Carry on, but keep a culture of trust and support in your classroom.  
• Communicate with your colleagues about students who struggle or act out in your class.  If yours is the only class, its time to keep track of when the negative behaviors are occurring.  If you find that the student is struggling in more than one class, start a conversation about the situations that cause the student the most problems.  You may find that there is a very quick and easy solution, or you might solicit the advice of an administrator, dean, social worker, reading specialist, or speech path.
• Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
• Pay attention all the time.  Academic issues may be masked by acting out and social issues may be causing a lag in academics.  Take note on trends or difficult situations.
• Plan engaging activities and don't leave room for down time.  Change scenery at least twice in a period.  An unmotivated student's favorite time to act out is when there is down time or when she has been doing something above her skill set for too long.  Keep her going with social, active, thought-provoking lessons - and don't give her a chance to think about whether she wants to do it or not.  
• Let your strugglers know that you care.  Whatever that looks like to you.  We had an issue with a very tough kiddo in the late fall who was on his way out because he was spending demerits like they were on his lunch card.  One "come-to-Jesus" meeting with the Tier 3 team, some of his most devoted and caring teachers, and his Mama - and we haven't really heard a peep from him since then. And the meeting wasn't a, "you'd better shape up, pal, or you're outa here!" kind of meeting.  It was a "how lucky you are to have your mom show up to your meeting and look at all of these teachers here who care and support you" kind of meeting.  A few quick and simple rules on a behavior plan, and he was good to go.  He's not our star student, by any means, but what a difference it makes when we could start identifying his needs!

Finally, consider approaching all unmotivated students with the idea that their difficulties are caused by a skill deficit somewhere and watch as your attitude changes about them.  As I was dealing with my ten-year-old daughter this evening, Greene's words rang in my head, and I could feel my energy shift.  Although her issues are anger and anxiety and not motivation, the premise of the feeling is still the same, and it seemed easier to work through with her knowing that there were skills that she needed to master, and I would have to be her teacher (not her disciplinarian).  It didn't go exactly as I had hoped, but we still have another eight years before she can legally walk out on me, so perhaps in that time I will get it right.  In the mean time, practice makes perfect, and we will all be better educators for at least considering the idea that kids do well if they can.

Using Station Teaching in the Middle School Classroom to motivate readers

I've been working with struggling readers long enough to know that when they don't want to do something, the likelihood of it getting done is slim to none.  Our job as teachers of strugglers is to first make these kiddos WANT to do it or feel like it NEEDS to be done.  We would call this motivation.  Sometimes this doesn't work, and we need to just not give our students time to decide if they want to do it.  That is one of the beauties of station teaching and something I witnessed last week while working and observing in classrooms.

Earlier in the week I had a chance to visit in our seventh grade language arts class designed specifically for struggling readers.  Students in this class hit the same curricular targets, but the teachers in our intervention classes use more accessible text, class sizes are somewhat smaller, a special education teachers is scheduled in each of these classes for a co-teaching model, and I can drop in to work with smaller groups and coach these teachers easily because the kids are all lumped together. In my experience these kiddos are more likely to participate instead of hide behind their peers because there is nothing to hide and nobody in there to "make them feel stupid".  We choose kiddos to be placed in this class when we have seen that the differentiated model of the regular language arts classroom doesn't seem to be working, and many of these students make double the gains of what their peers do in the regular classrooms.

I knew that the teachers in this class had been planning for a station-teaching approach, and I was excited to see it in action.  On this particular week they were just starting out with training their students how to move between stations, work independently, and work under short time constraints.  The teachers had created four stations with different activities.  Each activity hit a specific target and aligned with a selection of text (all connected in some way).  One of the stations was a teacher-led station while the other three were more independent.  These two teachers are lucky because there ARE two of them in the room.  One can lead a station while the other one moves from station to station monitoring the work that the students are doing and answering questions.  We even discussed the possibility of planning me into the mix so that two of us could lead a station while the other one monitored and answered questions of the other two stations.  Students were at each station for about ten minutes before they moved on to the next one.  All materials and directions needed for the station were supplied. 

This type of teaching made me look back at my old approach to classroom instruction, and ironically the special education teacher who was in this class was the same one I had my last few years of classroom teaching.  She and I were able to reflect on that experience and how some of the theories were reflected in this type of instruction. 

The philosophy of station teaching works for a variety of reasons.  First off, at least one station is guaranteed small group instruction by a certified teacher.  Research shows that small group instruction works because each student can get that individual attention he/she needs, and there's no where to hide in a small group.  Sometimes (as seen in the picture at the left), we can even squeeze in some one-on-one time!  It also works because learning is bound to be more social.  As a part of the groups, students were told they could use each other to help them get through material with which they struggled.  There were a few times when students took advantage of this and worked  in partners or in small groups, and it was nice to see them try to rely on each other until the monitoring teacher became available to answer a question.  If you read my summer blog on social learning, you'll know that many of our students (especially our middle schoolers) lean more toward social learning because it makes them feel like they're a part of a whole. 


Finally, students were at each station for about ten minutes before they were moved on to a different station with a different activity.  I find this to be one of the most brilliant components of the approach because of the lack of focus so many of our kiddos have - especially our strugglers!  They struggle for a reason, and some of them struggle because they have very short attention spans. Others have short attention spans BECAUSE they struggle.  Whatever came first, the idea that we move these kids (physically and academically) from one  activity to the next keeps them fresh and engaged.  They don't have TIME to lose focus, and very few of them did!

So how can something like this work in another classroom?  Especially because most of us do not have the luxury of having an extra body in the classroom AND many of our classes are sitting with thirty-plus students.  Here are some ideas to consider while mulling over the idea of station teaching:

• Splitting your "groups" into partners might help in terms of management.  If you have eight students in a group that moves to a station, have them split into work partners so that they're not trying to work in a large group of eight kids.  The activities in these stations should have clear directions, and at least one student who is a natural leader should be put into each group to explain things. 
• Use the timer for both group work and transition time.  Saying, "You have one minute to pack up and move," gives students parameters in which to move and keeps everybody honest, because we all know that transitions can sometimes turn into disasters if not carefully constructed.
• Think about activities that you would normally do whole-class and how you can create stations out of those activities.  Plan four days of stations when you might plan four days of different activities.  Then move your kiddos to a few stations each day.  Try 20 minutes per station each day and have students visit each station twice to keep their mind fresh. 
• Make a station hands-on or more social so that students have a station or two to look forward to. 
• Give explicit directions for each station.  Include pictures and any materials needed for each station.
• Make a station or two a familiar activity such as a writing activity or reading log, so that students aren't met all period long with unfamiliar activities. Too much in one day may be overwhelming.
• If you can pull in a student support specialist (reading specialist, speech therapist, social worker, school psych, or even an administrator) you could create some more teacher-directed stations.
• If you want to do a teacher-directed station, create the rest of your stations to be VERY easily implemented, or you will spend the entire time repeating instructions.
• Lay the groundwork for what is expected by the end. 
• Train your students from the get-go.  Maybe even plan a few weeks of independent stations so that you can monitor their group work before you try to weave in a teacher-directed station.  You want your students to be able to work independently and be productive, but without guided instruction on this, the entire thing may fall apart before it even gets started!

Ideas for stations might be things like:

• reading an easily accessible article with a specific purpose
• vocabulary organizers using the text book or technology
• completing a writing activity
• playing a game (my husband, the music teacher, created a pretty impressive music card game that would be PERFECT in a station)
• a guided reading activity
• independent reading with a reading log
• an activity that requires students to reflect on work they have done or edit/revise somebody else's work (with specific parameters)
• a very easy kinesthetic activity or lab (with specific directions and purpose)
• puzzles related to the topic
• watching short video clips with a specific purpose

The idea of station teaching is daunting at first glance, but imagine the engagement as students move from activity to activity.  If you can't imagine it, ask a colleague to considering working on it with you.  We started to get crazy in our "oooooo, this could be awesome if . . . " conversations as we imagined two classrooms where stations were going on in both, and students traveled from room to room working on different activities.  It was at this point that we had to shut ourselves down because we knew we were moving too far too fast!  But there is potential for lots of neat stuff to happen here!  And the social aspect paired with the smaller blocks of time is just what the doctor (or reading specialist, in this case) ordered for our kiddos who are unmotivated and apathetic. 

September 13 Crumble - Purpose Setting - the key to engaging our students

I have a ten-year-old who doesn't like to read.  But every once in a great while I can't get her head out of a book.  It's at those times when I look at her and ask myself, "What is different about this time, and why is she making the choice to read?"  In her case, eighty-percent of the time it is a non-fiction book that has captured her with a picture that made her go, "What's that!"  And at her age she knows that she will find the answer inside. 

So how can we transfer this type of behavior to our classrooms?  One of Project CRISS's Principles and Philosophies is Purpose Setting - but we're not just talking about telling kiddos why they're doing what they're doing.  Purpose setting comes in all sizes and shapes - including the "sneaky-teacher" ways of getting kids interested.  Here are some ideas to get your students motivated to read, learn, and participate.

• Play a video related to your content (YouTube, United Streaming, DVD clip) that is not too long (6-8 minutes max) - something that is edgy or entertaining, and maybe evokes emotion.  After the video, ask students to write observations and reactions.  Give them a sentence frame if you think it will help.  Expect them to give details about their observations and reactions. Have students discuss and share their thoughts and then have them ask questions about it. You now have the beginnings of purpose (their questions).
• Use music.  Kids love music.  Many of them write, and if you approach their lessons in a way that breaks down their own music or allows them to understand what goes INTO writing it, those with a musical inclination are more likely to participate.  Is there music that relates to the topic at hand?  I'm not talking a song about the scientific method or the fifty states, but music that somehow connects to the topic at hand.  You make the connections for them initially.  Have them observe and ask questions. 
• Google Images is, hands down, one of the most fun places to go when you're curious about something.  Why not use it to gather some attention and show images that related to something in the lesson before giving the lesson and see if you can get kids to react to it.  So how does your topic of study connect to students' lives TODAY?  Find some images.  Have students write and discuss their observations and reactions and . . . you guessed it - ask questions!

In the three general ideas listed above, there are some commonalities that I'd like to point out, and then I'll let you take it from there. 

• Get the kids thinking about the topic before they learn.
• Engage them in something other than reading or talking (viewing, listening, or playing).
• Require them to observe, write, and react.
• From those observations, require them to ask thoughtful questions.  The questions asked can be used to drive your instruction or not - but a good educator can easily find the balance between what the kids want to know and the stuff that we're being told is important. 

It's not tough - in fact, I find that our purpose setting activities can be the most fun part of the lesson because it requires students to express themselves.  This is the beauty of middle school!  They're just learning to express themselves - their viewpoints and opinions, and yet we don't have to reel them in too much.  You can learn so much from just talking to your kiddos, and who knows?  Maybe what you learn from them is a new way to look at the topic! 

Technology as a motivational tool: May 3 Crumble

The entire month of February I spent talking about motivating our reluctant middle schoolers to take responsibility for their learning.  Intrinsic motivation is not something that instantly appears in a twelve or thirteen-year-old student - it takes years to build this desire for academic success, and most of our strugglers lost that desire years ago when they found themselves failing more than succeeding.  Why try if I'm not going to succeed?  That is an excellent question.

So by middle school, the job of the teacher becomes much more than a deliverer of instruction and nurturer of curiousity.  If you are an educator who is responsible for our struggling middle school students, your job is to somehow re-light that fire that is natural in our young ones and then you can nurture that curiousity and deliver instruction.  You're working with wet wood though.  Wood that has been soaked for years in a downpour of frustration, humiliation, and embarassment and has become a soggy mess of anger, hyperactivity, apathy, and super-social behavior that no longer cares about reading, math, and science.  Pair that up with video games until midnight and Hot Cheetos for breakfast, and you have a pocket full of a hot mess walking your hallways on a daily basis!

These are the kids who make their way into my heart, and it is because of these kiddos that I get up and come to work every morning.  They are the ones that I seek out in the hallway because I want them to know that it isn't too late.  And this is why I continue to dig for answers, motivators, and hooks.  How can I get them to start caring again?  What can we do to motivate them to want to read and write?

Well, one answer that we have found is the use of technology as a learning tool.  I once went to a session where John Orech spoke on the use of technology in lesson development.  In this session, one of his messages was that technology should be our "vehicle to a destination", and we should consider how we are going to get kids places and not "how should I use this technology?"  This message has stuck with me this year because, in my case, technology is one key to getting my kids where they need to be.

Recently, during a collaborative conversation, I spoke with our seventh grade intervention teacher.  She desperately wanted to give these kids one last shot at getting them hooked onto reading.  For three years, now, we have used Neal Shusterman's Unwind at the end of the year as a read-aloud or novel study.  This year, CCSS requires students to be reading at or above grade level before the end of the year, and what better way to continue to support this than by dousing them with a creepy and engaging novel about kids who are just like them.  Most of our kiddos are reading right around the level of the novel or below, and the language of the novel is fun - and so are the ethical discussions!

But the issue with the book always is the kids who flat-out refuse to participate - they sit with their books closed or heads down and they get up for Kleenex or to throw away something every three minutes.  At this point in the game, no number of discipline referrals for behavior like that is going to motivate these kids to open their books and love reading.  Period.

Until we let them crack open the 8-year-old computers we have been "storing" in her room off an on this year . . .

The day that we opened the kidblog site for the class and got the kids logged in, we gave them the anticipation guide and a list of possible prompts for writing. It took about 24 hours for 100% of our kiddos to get engaged in the book! Yesterday we even had one interrupt three times and ask if he could blog!

The first blog topic was written before we even started reading.  It was more of a "let's try this blogging thing out" blog than an actual blog.  The kids did pretty well with it, and they were able to get around the site very easily, so that wasn't a problem at all. 

We knew we had to read and write, and we knew we didn't have much time to get them going, so we gave them the option of using the computers to write down their thoughts in a word document before they wrote their second blog, which was to make a connection with one of the three main characters.  Kids who I have watched drag their feet on the way in the door were thinking and typing about Connor, Risa, and Lev yesterday!  It was reported to me this morning that first period sat silently as they typed and clicked for a half hour on the blog site.  We are actually considering the possibility of opening the classroom during lunch for "beautification" and commenting on the blogs as well.

Now, did we do an amazing job at forseeing the problems we would encounter?  Well, we sent a note home to parents inviting them to join us on the blog site, and we emphasized the idea that if the site is misused in any way (and we gave examples) that the misuser would be permanently removed from the site class.  So in that respect, I think we covered our bases.  But one thing I'm already seeing is the attention that is being paid to the way the blog looks vs. the content.  We have a lot of very pretty blogs.  Now that we have established the idea of the blog and motivated even our most unmotivated student to participate, our next battle will be to up our expectations on the content of the blogs.  I'm a writer, and I love to teach writing, so my expectations are going to get higher and higher for the next fourteen days, and I can't wait to see what these kids can produce! 

So how can you, a content area teacher, use this blog idea to enhance and motivate your kiddos?  Well, first off, edublog and kidblog are two websites that I would consider investigating.  We also have gifted students using edmodo in a "paperless classroom" situation that is truly fascinating!  All of these sites are private and can only be accessed by the members of the group.  They are all set up by the teacher and are accessible from home - some of them even have apps for devices other than computers!  Then establish a use for these fantastic writing tools!  Science logs, social studies journals, music journals, health journals or fitness tracking, favorite recipes, responses to art or music, even extended response questions in math can be adapted to blogging!  Kids can respond to books they're reading - even over the summer - and teachers can still see what they're reading!  You can give students specifications on their writing or have them write freely - just remind them that what they write will be seen by you, their parents, and the entire class!

If you're considering setting up a blog for your kids, let me know if you need help!  Once you get into it and get the hang of it, it is really easy.  And it's such a neat way to get the kids writing without telling them they're writing.