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March 2008 | Volume 65 | Number 6
Marge Scherer
Table of Contents
Reva Klein
Although substantial cultural, social, political, and economic differences exist among countries, young peoples' attitudes toward school—their expressed desires, grievances, and reasons for staying away—are often similar. Finland boasts highly educated and well-paid teachers; as a result, the country has a negligible student dropout rate. In Rheims, France, the CIPPA project combines vocational education with booster classes in academic subjects to enable students to pass the Baccalaureate. In South Africa, the Better Life Options program focuses on helping young people develop self-esteem, self-understanding, and goal-setting skills. In Melbourne, Australia, a drama project helps students reengage in school by developing empathy and a sense of connectedness with others. In rural South Carolina, students help their community get a new fire station and see the practical application of their learning.
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Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner
Since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the time spent talking about, preparing for, and taking tests has increased exponentially in schools. The authors contend that all this testing has done little to increase achievement or close achievement gaps, but has had unintended negative consequences. "The tests," they write, "undermine teacher-student relationships, lead to a narrowing of the curriculum, demoralize teachers, and bore students." The article presents statements by teachers and students illustrating how the test-dominated school environment has decreased the motivation of both low-achieving and high-achieving students. The authors call on educators to work together to mediate the damaging effects of NCLB.
Kieran Egan and Gillian Judson
Why are so many students reluctant to expend effort on school learning when they expend prodigious intellectual energy on collecting hockey cards, learning the rules of complex video games, or maneuvering through the Internet? The key to engaging students in learning, write Egan and Judson, is to bring out the imaginative and emotional features of curriculum content. The article describes how teachers can use cognitive tools that people develop as they learn oral language—such as story structuring, binary opposites, and forming vivid images—to make the curriculum more imaginatively engaging and more human.
Richard Sagor
Motivation requires optimism. Optimism, in turn, requires two key variables: faith in the future and belief in one's capabilities. When students believe that hard work will pay off in career and personal success, they tend to put forth their best effort. When students trust in their own capabilities, they have the fortitude to persevere with complex tasks because they are confident that if they work hard and apply enough creativity, they will succeed. Teachers can promote optimism in the classroom by developing students' pride in their accomplishments, giving students responsibility for important and meaningful tasks, respecting student voice, and giving students the freedom to explore areas that interest them.
Betty K. Garner
As an art teacher in a K–8 school, Garner frequently encountered creative, intelligent students who were unable to progress in their academic classes and were an enigma to their teachers. She conducted in-depth case studies of hundreds of such students, interviewing them about how they processed information. Analyzing these case studies, Garner identified key cognitive structures, psychological systems for gathering and processing information. She groups cognitive structures into three categories: comparative thinking, symbolic representation, and logical reasoning. Students who lack these cognitive tools, especially the foundational comparative thinking structures, struggle to comprehend and process information in any subject area, and often give up on themselves as learners. Yet it is never too late to develop cognitive structures; with awareness, teachers can strengthen these structures through almost any lesson. Garner details the components of comparative structures and provides examples of how teachers can identify lacks and initiate repairs.
Marc Prensky
In the past, many children knew little of the world outside their neighborhoods. It was the job of education to enlighten children, to lead them out of ignorance into knowledge. Today's students are different. They grow up connected to the world through their computers and mobile devices. Instead of embracing students' technology-infused lives, however, schools seem to believe that students' electronic connections to the world are detrimental to their education. To prepare students for their 21st-century lives and keep them engaged in learning, schools need to allow students to use technology in school to learn and create, find out from students how they want to be taught, and help students learn the 21st-century skills they will need to succeed in life and work.
Kirsten Olson
Schools unknowingly wound students by overfocusing on single testing events, tracking students into fixed ability groups, or labeling students. Sometimes schools do not honor unusual or nonstandard ways of thinking, thereby wounding students' creativity. The wounds of underestimation involve tracking a student on the basis of a string of bad test scores, poor grades, a lack of proficiency in academic English, or lack of understanding of the codes of school behavior. The student then underperforms, living up to the label. Teachers can address these wounds and help students heal by acknowledging the wounds, questioning labels, reminding students of the power of persistence, seeking out professional development, and reflecting on how they speak with students.
Gail Thompson
When teachers encounter apathetic students, many blame the apathy on the students themselves or their parents. These educators fail to recognize the school factors that can lead to disengagement, frustration, and low achievement—especially for black and Latino students in high-poverty schools, writes Thompson. In her study of teachers and students in a low-performing, predominantly minority high school, Thompson found that these two groups had vastly different perceptions. Whereas teachers believed that they maintained good relationships with their students and taught them effectively, students expressed disappointment with the quality of instruction and with what they perceived as a lack of caring. Both teacher and student responses confirmed a climate of low expectations. The article suggests the kind of professional development that would change teachers' mindset and improve the schooling of black and Latino students.
Barbara Bartholomew
Bartholomew maintains that to truly motivate students, teachers must reject the model of one individual delivering a flame of inspiration to another and instead think of motivation as fire-building. Teachers' goal should be to light a fire for learning that burns steadily on its own. She discusses the pros and cons of two common paradigms for instilling motivation—the inspiration model (in which one person offers powerful inspiration to another) and the preparation model (in which a teacher carefully plans appropriate interventions for students). Motivating students requires a balanced use of both models. Bartholomew stresses that at the heart of motivation is a student's sense that the teacher can be trusted and relied upon to give help in any situation. She details specific actions teachers should take that will develop such a "trust fund."
Julie Landsman, Tiffany Moore and Robert Simmons
Is there really any such thing as a student who doesn't want to learn? The authors of this article contend that it's not necessarily just students who are reluctant. Some teachers also feel disengaged from the very students who need the most support. To succeed, these reluctant teachers must adopt attitudes and practices that can reach every learner, particularly those who seem turned off to school. The authors offer ideas for staying motivated in the face of difficulty; connecting with students, families, and communities; creating a classroom environment where students feel respected; and making changes in instructional practice. By focusing on the elements they can control, reluctant teachers can build classrooms in which even the most reluctant learner will feel engaged and supported.
Johanna Mustacchi
Students today spend more time accessing digital and mass media than students of any previous generation. Teachers can make use of students' interest in the media while helping them become more intelligent viewers and users. With this reality in mind, Johanna Mustacchi developed and implemented a three-year media literacy curriculum for middle schoolers. Students learn to both produce and analyze print, broadcast, and digital media. Mustacchi kept students engaged by offering opportunities for hands-on learning, showing videos and YouTube, and discussing current media-related events. Students universally respond with amazement at learning so much they never knew about the media.
Jennifer Hartley
Hartley, a 5th grade teacher in an urban, low-income school, set out to change her students' reading reluctance through daily sustained silent reading. Although students chose the books for the class library and she set the stage for their physical comfort, at first, chaos—and little reading—ensued. After studying characteristics of good reading programs, Hartley worked with her class on how to choose appropriate books, monitor their own reading, set goals, and focus without disrupting others. With these supports in place, sustained silent reading motivated Hartley's readers. Surveys showed students increased their time interacting with books. Unexpectedly, the strategy helped shape her class into a learning community.
Susan Danoff
Danoff describes how she drew on folktales and Langston Hughes's poem "Mother to Son" to help middle school students in a high-poverty school create specific imagery, authentic voice, and emotional power in a series of poems. As a teaching artist, Danoff led students through exercises resulting in strong poems modeled after "Mother to Son," in which a mother delivers inspiration and advice. The middle school collected student writing into an anthology. The emotional connection, risk-taking, and openness to memory and precise imagery involved in telling stories helped these hesitant writers perform beyond Danoff's expectations.
Denise Gelberg
Gelberg suggests that scripted curriculums and teacher autonomy each have a role to play in educating students. Throughout more than 30 years in the classroom, she discovered that scripted curriculums contain many instructionally powerful components. Teachers can draw on the best of these components, using professional judgment to pinpoint which students need a more structured approach and which don't. As a new 1st grade teacher in the 1970s, Gelberg was required to use the phonics-based Distar Reading program. She used this curriculum to great success with members of her class who needed a closely-guided approach, while teaching other students through a basal reader. Gelberg recounts how, as educational trends swung between phonics and whole language, she continued to use effective lessons from Distar (now called Reading Mastery) as well as techniques like writing mini-lessons embedded in whole language. She concludes that any stance that views scripted curriculums and professionalism as mutually exclusive is harmfully doctrinaire.
Jane L. David
W. James Popham
Thomas R. Hoerr
Douglas B. Reeves
Amy M. Azzam
Laura Varlas
Kathie Marshall
As a classroom teacher and literacy coach, the author has used service learning to motivate the lowest-achieving students in high-poverty middle schools. These students often feel disconnected from school and disappointed by life. But when given opportunities to apply their learning to address real needs in their communities, they often become inspired and empowered. The article describes a range of projects the author has used successfully—such as having students create brochures and posters to share nutrition information with their peers—and includes a resource list for teachers who want to use this promising approach
Linda Inlay
Adolescent learners have powerful psychological needs for a sense of personal significance and a sense of connection with others. The author, a veteran principal, describes how her middle school motivates reluctant learners by orchestrating a school culture that meets these needs. The school provides opportunities for students to make choices, form positive relationships with teachers and peers, express their voice, and feel needed. As a result, reluctant learners are transformed into excited and engaged students who successfully navigate through high school.
Sara Kajder
With the advent of so many new technologies for communication, what it means to read and write has changed—more so outside of school than in. Many seemingly reluctant students are reading and writing, but in modes and media that are different from the print literacies valued in school. Sara Kajder describes a project in which middle school students explored these new modes of communication by creating multimedia trailers promoting books they read independently. Students wrote, storyboarded, and revised before creating their trailers in the technology lab. The class also took advantage of technological advances to invite authors of some of the featured books to join them via Skype and iChat for a screening of their trailers. For Kajder, this work was not about doing a "technology project." It was about using the unique capacities of the technology to provide a different kind of composing space and, more important, a different kind of a product for an invested, real audience.
Teresa Preston
Copyright © 2012 by ASCD
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