Engage and Motivate

With the start of school around the corner, I’ve been contemplating various ideas for motivating my students to become responsible for their own learning.  Then, I stumbled upon Krissy Venosdale’s Because School Should be Exciting Like the Ultimate Theme Park inspiration poster.  Her message was school should be fun, complete with wondering, success, struggles, and the push to do it all. Children spend most of their waking hours in our classrooms; they should be excited to come to school and learn. 

A flurry of questions have been racing through my head.  When are students engaged in their learning?  When are they smiling and having fun learning? Why are people motivated to do certain things?  How do we accomplish those things we are not interested in but know have to be done?  So many questions with so many answers varying between people and different situations. Reminding myself to start small in order to make a difference, I decided to focus on a couple of ideas.

Purpose – If I am going to spend time doing something, I like to know how it fits into the overall picture.  This summer, I laid a flagstone patio in our front yard.  As I read various websites on how to install the patio, people repeatedly stressed the importance of taping down the sand base layer and ensuring the stones were level in order for the patio to remain stable and level in the future.  When I was spending hours in the heat of the sun tapping and leveling, I reminded myself to “do it right the first time or redo it.”  This was when I made the connection to students and their need to understand how various lessons fit into the grand scheme of learning to read, write, and problem solve (notice I didn’t say “do math” – that’s for another day.)

Thinking about the meaning of reading, using everything we know to decode and understand the meaning of print, and the five components of reading, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, how many of us have ever tied these together for our students?  When we teach a phonics lesson or a comprehension strategy, do we help students understand how this will help them become a better reader and writer?  In math, when we teach different strategies for adding, do we help the students to understand when to use them and how they help our fluency?  It is tough to add more to our lessons, but making a simple tie or having them generate ideas of when to use their newly learned strategies will help them connect the small lessons with the ultimate goal.

Fun – This past year, my favorite math lesson in kindergarten was solving a problem from Inside Mathematics.  The children talked with each other, shared their ideas with the class, and used the manipulatives in order to answer several questions.  By the end of the lesson, they were using repeated addition (the beginning of multiplication) to find the answers, and all I did was facilitate their discussion.  In fifth grade, the students were smiling and having fun when they were sharing ideas and challenging each other’s ideas in order to find a solution in math or better understand the novel they were reading.  Again, they took ownership for their learning and I facilitated the discussion.  In first grade, they were creating writing pieces in the writing center or were exploring the idea of motion by rolling different sized balls down ramps they created.

Why were they engaged?  What was making it fun for them?  They were challenged to solve a problem or find information to share.  They were exploring ideas.  They were sharing ideas.  They felt safe to take a risk in our classroom.  Ultimately, they were seeking to understand and validate their ideas.  My role was to provide them the basic foundations necessary for them to engage in the discussions and problem solving activities.  Then my role was to facilitate so everyone’s ideas were heard, to ask questions, to help them learn to manage the conflict which arose, and ultimately, to observe them learn.  And in honesty, I was having fun watching them take on these challenges.

When are students in your classroom having fun learning?  What did you do to prepare them? What are you doing when they have taken ownership?