Compelling Students to Read: Why One Question Might Matter

The questions you see in this post are from a preview of a Middle School Guided Reading by Genre: CCSS Aligned, a product  for 5th-8th grade teachers available at Teachers pay Teachers. What I appreciate about the product is that Kiehl (the teacher-author) distinguishes between the genres in the discussions. For example, she clearly notes that each genre leads readers to think in a way that other genres may not and the questions reflect that distinction. Further, the questions provided do offer teachers an effective template from which to work. 

The essential questions, though, the big questions, the ones that would help students understand why we’re asking all of these other, rather random questions, can't be put on this template for obvious reasons. There are just too many possibilities.

However, my fear is that teachers, particularly those who are either too new, too fearful, or too apathetic to personalize the templates purposefully and thoughtfully, will over-rely on the offered questions, using them verbatim and nothing else. Again, don’t get me wrong—the questions will work, and Kiehl is to be lauded for creating a clear, cohesive document.

But what these questions cannot do is inspire any sort of motivation to read other than to answer the questions.  The motivation is the grade that the student will get from answering the questions (possibly for a simple participation grade or maybe for accuracy, depending on the teacher).  

Without any reason to want to answer these questions about a text or a character within it, why should the student bother exercising his or her brain to use the skill?

Without that desire, the questions, much like the ones answered on a standardized test, the goal is just to get the right answer by demonstrating mastery of the critical thinking skill.  But is that all really what we want? Don’t we want more? Don’t we want students to either LOVE reading or LOVE reading the particular novel, short story, text, or poem?  How can we encourage and instill that love for reading in any genre if all we want them to do is plough through questions to demonstrate that yes, Johnny can infer, synthesize, predict, and connect? 

We have to take a crucial initial step.

Let’s use one of the recommended inference questions from the template to create a quick example from Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, a text within the historic fiction genre: 

                What can you infer about Creb based on what Ayla has to say about him in the text?

From the template: What can you infer about (insert character's name) based on what (insert character's name) says about him/her in the text? 

I dearly love this book, and I’ve read it over and over again. I have to wonder, though, what question I could ask before this one that might inspire a student to want to care about what Ayla has to say about Creb. Why should the student care what Ayla thinks about the Mogur?  What question can I ask to get the student to even bother to desire to make this inference and respond to it? 

That compelling question, whatever it is, must be asked first. 

There must be a compelling reason for students to want to understand other than just practicing inferences because it’s something that students have to do because it’s a standard they have to know because we’re being evaluated on how well our students perform on that standard because that’s how our school is graded and plays a part in how much funding we get.  

Are we asking these initial, compelling, driving questions? 

Perhaps:

                Does it matter what daughters think about their fathers or father-figures? Why? 

From this over-arching question the follow-up inference question would flow quite nicely. 

Does it matter what children think about their fathers or father-figures? Why or why not?

Based on what Ayla says about Creb in the novel, what kind of a person and father do you think he is? (for the girls)

Based on what Broud says about Brun in the novel, what kind of a person and father do you think he is? (for the boys)

Actually, from that initial question, several others would naturally flow, particularly those under the category of connections.   Further, the distinction of gender provides an even greater connection for students. (You’ll notice that I changed the wording of the template question somewhat, but the meaning and underlying skill is the same.) 

When we offer students a compelling, clearly connective question BEFORE we have them analyze from a text, we can instill a greater intrinsic motivation to analyze, but we also move the emphasis away from the grade and the test and the standards. We make it real. We make the story mean something to them.  Figuring something out has a purpose that might make a difference in their lives. 

Try it once and see. Create that compelling, connective question that will drive the rest of those aligned questions on that worksheet and discuss it with students, first. If you’re really adventurous, try it one class but not the other, and compare the final products.  Let us know what you find out! 

Mindy and some of her former students have collaborated on a book of teaching strategies: Transparent Teaching of Adolescents: Creating the Ideal Class for Students and Teachers.  Check us out on FaceBook, too!

Motivating Teens to do Research

Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock (2001) found that student achievement can increase when teachers show the relationship between an increase in effort to an increase in success. However, at the adolescent stage, the explicit illustration or discussion of this topic would most likely disengage at-risk learners who deem themselves (or have been deemed as) low-achievers. The condescension of the topic is off-putting, particularly for upperclassmen. In order to avoid coming across as “preachy”—which is very unproductive with teens—the secondary educator has to think more peripherally.

In order to support an upper-level learning environment, high-school teachers must consider the foundation of what drives effort or creates it in the first place: intrinsic motivation . Without intrinsic motivation, effort is merely compliance; thus, motivation must come first. Easier said than done with a group of adolescents who’d really rather be playing video games. How does one build intrinsic motivation in teenagers, particularly in a project that spans weeks of preparation and looks suspiciously like a research paper?

One way to implement the strategy may be found in ourselves as “Teachers with high self-efficacy create mastery experiences for their students. Those beset by self-doubts construct classroom environments that are likely to undermine students’ judgments of their abilities and their cognitive development” (Gibson & Dembo, 1984; Woolfolk, Rosoff, & Hoy, 1990 as cited in Pajares & Urdan, 2006, p. 11). How's your self-efficacy level these days?

In a Research Paper Unit, then, it stands to reason that I should parallel the students’ efforts, working alongside them from start to finish. I.e. Completing my own research project, warts and all. Schunk (1991) echoes this thinking: “Classroom models—teacher and peer—are important sources of vicarious efficacy information; observing others succeed can convey to observers that they too are capable” (p. 216). Determining a problem that I really want to solve and working through my analysis of what causes the problem will help them see that not all ideas work right away nor will I necessarily be successful at all I attempt. Further, watching the messiness of research and problem-solving will help undercut the strange notion that some students have that everything should be “perfect” right away. Rather, it’s the thinking that matters, first, followed by a polishing later.

Another approach to consider in a research unit is the integration of a reflection component of the project.  To understand their self-efficacy, teens have to figure out where they are, where they're going, and where they want to be.  Collins (1982) found that “self efficacy predicts motivation and achievement across levels of student ability” (as cited in Schunk 220). Thus, how the student judges his or her ability directly correlates to the success of the outcome and the depth of learning.

Additionally, tapping into the students’ perceptions of self-efficacy as it pertains to their projects would help them see that they are, indeed, making progress as Schunk (1991) advocates: “Motivation is enhanced when students perceive they are making progress in learning (p. 209). Identifying the more difficult performance tasks and providing a booster shot of motivation/self-efficacy right before those tasks may help offset potential issues with laziness, apathy, or dwindling self-efficacy.

Addressing failure, what I call the “elephant in the room”, connects to all of these topics of effort, motivation, and self-efficacy. Failure has a bad reputation in the classroom, and dispelling it as such may actually contribute to effort. Kapur and Bielaczyc (2012) found that under different conditions a teaching method that involves invention and productive failure is more effective than direct instruction. The method requires students to struggle to figure out how to solve novel problems before they are given the solution. In their abstract, they note:

Despite seemingly failing in their problem-solving efforts, [productive failure] students significantly outperformed [direct instruction] students on the well-structured and complex problems on the posttest. They also demonstrated greater representation flexibility in solving average speed problems involving graphical representations, a representation that was not targeted during instruction. (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012)

How to deal with failure or the usefulness of failure, as a discussion, as opposed to the value of effort, may engage adolescent learners more authentically. It is a life skill and, most likely, would work best right after a student reflection on initial self-efficacy and before moving into research.

Although reward for effort and recognition of effort are effective strategies, in general, I do find that with teenagers, the act of doing so is not unlike walking on a tightrope. Things may go well at first, then, the wobbling starts. What then? The weakness to the strategy is found in what it doesn’t do: help students embrace intrinsic motivation. In his powerful TED talk, The Puzzle of Motivation, Dan Pink links motivation for performance to an economic model, but his findings can easily relate to students and speak to the weakness of the strategy.

Depending on the task, Pink (2009) asserts, the incentive may not work and may cause harm. For 21st Century tasks, which require less narrow and more abstract, right brain, conceptual, creative thinking, incentive slows workers down. If/then rewards work well for simple tasks and easy rules because “rewards narrow focus and concentrate the mind” (Pink, 2009). If the person can see the goal—incentive works. For a more complex, multi-step problem, rewards as motivation narrow possibilities. Given that a research project is not a simple or narrow task, providing concrete symbols for recognition may not work and may negate the effort.

Schunk (1991) also found that performance-contingent rewards for solving a math problem resulted in enhanced motivation. However, task-contingent rewards, such as participation, didn’t (p. 219). Again, the narrowness of the task seems to make a difference in the choice to include any sort of incentive as a motivator. My goal is for students to find or arrive at a sense of self-motivation and self-recognition as well as an enhanced self-efficacy. I don’t want them to think with blinders on or to “get” the trinket (whether symbolic or tangible). I want them to recognize their own effort.

All in all, I know the strategy of recognizing effort is worthwhile. However, its application for today’s adolescents requires a bit more tact and precision than presented in Marzano et al. (2001).

References

Glucksberg, Sam. (1962). The influence of strength of drive on functional fixedness and perceptual recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63 (1), 36-41. doi: 10.1037/h0044683

Kapur, M. & Bielaczyc, K. (2012). Designing for Productive Failure. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 21 (1), 45-83. doi: 10.1080/10508406.2011.591717

Marzano, R., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J. (2001) Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Pajares, F. & Urdan, T. (2006). Self-efficacy beliefs of adolescents. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Pink, D. (July 2009) The puzzle of motivation. [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Schunk, D. H. (1991). Self-efficacy and academic motivation. Educational Psychologist, 26 (3& 4), 207-231.