That was the assignment. “Reflective papers”, we had a bunch of them to write in Teacher’s College in one of my classes. Great teacher, one of the better ones I’ve had in my life, and interesting topics (usually psychology). The third one was to write about something that we have learned / taken from this course… and the nature of the assignments is to have them almost like journal entries, hence the very casual tone and the extremely poor structure. But, the teacher was so moved that somebody noticed that the class was a bunch of idiots that he wrote me a nice email thanking me for confirming his observations and reaffirming that he isn’t going crazy. While it is far from a good piece or what I consider a good piece of mine, I’m still glad I got to call out the idiots (nicely) in my courses AND get a perfect grade for it. Uncut, unmodified… so excuse the “blah blah I LEARNED THIS” stuff.
_________________________________
For the vast majority of my time at Niagara University, completing assignments has not been an issue until this third reflective paper. At issue isn’t that I have not been learning, but rather that nothing jumps out at me as something truly important that I had missed entirely in prior years. With this paper, the day came to hand it in, we had class, went home and I was still pondering what to put down on paper. Thankfully, today’s students and class material provided precisely what I had looked for. What I have learned and understood in my first term at Niagara University is that teachers spend a lot of time working on students’ motivations and this understanding will ultimately help me in my career.
To be clear, it is an obvious statement to make; students have varying motivational factors in classrooms. What is less obvious is that it can be classified and explained. Point in case is the easy split into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; some students display a genuine thirst for knowledge from within and attend class to learn as part of their natural urges and curiosities while others are there to reap benefits and rewards from attendance and good grades or to avoid punishment from bad grades or from not going to school at all. The possible extrinsic factors of reward and punishment are innumerable, from parents’ materialistic gifts for good performance to punishments of having a boring, low-paying job later in life. What I am getting at is that people all have different reasons for spending time in a classroom.
This was my first chance to observe adults (or rather really big kids) in a classroom since getting my undergraduate degree in 2004 and it has been a fascinating trip through psychology, disbelief and understanding – somewhat. While the following may sound extremely judgmental of me, I can’t think of a better place than a reflective essay to put it on paper. The class can easily be divided among certain lines, multiple times over. For instance, those students fresh out of university and those already out of it for a few years, or perhaps those who are paying for their education themselves and those who are receiving the funding from family and outside sources. Another type of split could be between those that pay attention in class and those that don’t. Or perhaps between those that bring laptops and those that take notes down by hand. Those that talk and disturb the class and those who respectfully sit there and participate when appropriate, those who pay attention to the material and those who pay attention to the clock.
While far from a perfect student, I personally know why I am in teacher’s college and why I work overtime to fund that college despite financial help from family. My personal motivations are from multiple angles, both from within and from without: wanting to gain more knowledge, wanting to gain a degree, hoping for work as a teacher, wanting to get good grades to impress myself, peers and family, wanting to do well to thank family, wanting to succeed as part of friendly competition with other students, wanting to be part of the more educated group of society, etc… the factors could go on for pages. The idea is that I somewhat realize why I am in school, which leads to me being aware of the money and time being spent on my education, and of the same applying to every other student.
I could not, for the life of me, understand why anyone would attend university classes to not pay attention, to write homework for other courses, or to chat with their neighbors. It totally boggles my mind. And I believe I am finally beginning to wrap my mind around it thanks to today’s glimpse in to “motivation”. In our classroom setting, there must be students who are there for similar reasons to myself and who therefore want to absorb as much information as they can, since that information will be needed some day in our hoped-for work placement. On a baser level, this group of people tends to want to “get their money’s worth” because it isn’t exactly very cheap to attend school in Canada. For these and other reasons – be they personal or stemming from a specific style of upbringing and values- this group pays attention, participates and behaves in a way that our society deems appropriate in classrooms. Due to limitations in length of this essay, I will simply split the class into two groups, and say that the second group behaves in a way that is almost entirely opposite to the one already described; this group does not seem to care about the knowledge being transmitted, they do not seem to care where they are and what they are doing, they do seem to care about having the day pass quickly and will go to any length to alleviate their personal boredom during classes. Each individual’s motivation is probably different in this group and since I do not share their outlook I can only speculate on some possible reasons. It would seem this group is here due to extrinsic motivations wherein someone, possibly parents, is urging them on and perhaps defraying the costs of education. If someone is attending school only because their parents want them to, then that someone does not truly care about the material or the possible career they can make out of it. Or they do care but have not figured out how to adapt their desire for personal freedom to the needs and requirements of higher education. Perhaps some in this group do not even want to be there in the first place and are only doing so at the urging (or ordering) of someone else. Once again, the possible reasons here could go on for pages and all would be speculation unless the entire class was polled regarding this. My use for this speculation is of a different nature.
Having seen the varying behaviours among a group of adults who theoretically are all in class of their own volition and for a common goal, it dawned on me that a high school setting, and an elementary setting, bring an entirely different set of motivations and motivational factors into play. Prior to university and college, students do not have a choice to attend school, they are forced to do so until their 16th birthday. With only that information, I can quickly split students into three groups now: those that care about school and want to be there, those that don’t want to be there and are forced by the system and those that just don’t care either way. To each of these three simple groups can be applied the approaches to motivation discussed in class: each of them will have behavioral (extrinsic), humanistic (intrinsic), cognitive (intrinsic), social cognitive (both), and sociocultural factors that come into play when it comes to their motivations for their approach to studying. I don’t believe age really factors here into eliminating any specific factors because students of all ages display similar behaviour, though perhaps the major factors will shift.
As a potential teacher, I see that one of my many duties will be to figure out how to stimulate all types of children to learn. Those that want to learn are motivated without me, but it will still be my responsibility to foster that motivation and not lead them to feel bored or careless due to their excellence. There is nothing sadder than a bright student slowly losing interest in educational pursuits because of lack of stimulation in a classroom that is not as advanced as he or she is. Nonetheless, that group already has the motivation and it is only a matter of feeding it more fuel. The other groups are the ones that will really require me to pay attention to them. If I realize that students are behaving in a specific way because they really do not want to be at school, then any method I use absolutely must take that into consideration. Movies and books that tell stories of teachers in impoverished neighborhoods come to mind, such as Dangerous Minds where the teacher finds a way to stimulate the students to want to learn, to desire knowledge. Similarly, the third group of students that just don’t care but don’t have anything against school specifically will have to be approached in another manner altogether.
As they say, knowledge is power. I may not fully understand how all this about motivation works just yet but I can clearly see it is an important part of any human being – and by extension, specifically of students. Understanding which factors motivate some students and which factors motivate others will be a crucial element of my approach to teaching and hopefully in getting through to many more students than I would otherwise. This semester has given me much in the way of material to digest and apply, but it has also given me a tremendous amount of information when I combine that material with the observations made in our classrooms of adults and not just children. I believe we can learn from every situation, and this has been a semester filled with situations to learn from.
