Student Motivation; the Ingredient that Makes the MAGIC of Learning Appear!

When I was a principal, a common question that I would ask interviewing teachers would be, “Tell me about your management style.” I would often get answers about discipline philosophies, behavior charts or clip charts (*not a fan), extrinsic rewards, being “fair but firm” comments, etc. Unfortunately, these were not the answers that I was looking for!  What I was looking for was something thing like, 

“The first thing that I do is build relationships with students.  I get to know each student on an individual level.  I learn their strengths and relative weaknesses and build up their areas of strengths. I then create high interest lessons with real-life application that are appropriately scaffolded.  My lessons have a low entry and a high ceiling so that all students are getting exactly what they need and all are appropriately challenged.  When I design lessons in such a way, students are highly motivated to participate; creating a classroom that is excited about their learning.” 

As a lifetime educator, I have always believed that when students 1) Know that you care about them and they feel safe to learn and take chances (low affective filter) and 2) Are excited about their learning; very rarely will classroom management even be an issue. This is not to say that a teacher does not have to set and review routines, have clearly defined expectations, teach students how to have academic discourse and spend consistent time teaching and integrating interpersonal skills as well as restorative practices. These are all vital to classroom management; but to me, the magic of learning happens when we can get students intrinsically motivated to learn.

Daniel Pink, in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us asserts that if employers want to motivate employees to work beyond their basic job functions, then they need to provide conditions that foster the following three characteristics:

·       Autonomy — Our desire to be self-directed. It increases engagement over compliance.

·       Mastery — The urge to get better skilled.

·       Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important.

Businesses that only focus on profits without valuing purpose will end up with poor customer service and unhappy employees. When these attributes are provided at work, the result is increased performance and satisfaction.  Not surprisingly, these same attributes encourage greater motivation in our students, although, I would venture to say, because of the way school was initially designed as an assembly plant where students came to have knowledge given to them in the most efficient way possible, that students rarely received opportunities to have these motivating factors at school. Instead, many educators historically relied on the carrots and sticks approach to student motivation. 

In a study that examined 144 studies involving student motivation in nearly 80,000 students from around the world two conclusions jumped out: “First, teachers are far more influential than parents in motivating students to learn.”  If you are a parent, you have probably seen this many times within your own children.  Children often have selective hearing and mediocre behavior (at best!) with you, but with their teachers they are largely different and typically much more willing to listen, follow directions and be their best selves.  Teachers have amazing power to motivate and influence students!

The second conclusion they found was similar to what Daniel Pink shared about what adults in the workplace need; that students have three psychological needs: competency, belonging and autonomy.  The lead author of the study, Julien Bureau describes these three needs as “kindling” for intrinsic motivation. “If you start doing a task,” he said, “and it’s a new task, and you feel competent in it, and you feel connected with others, and you feel autonomous in doing the task, you’ve chosen to do it. You’ll have fun doing it. You’ll want to do it more. And you’ll be interested in learning.”(PROOF POINTS: What almost 150 studies say about how to motivate students, by JILL BARSHAY)

Cathleen Beachboard, in her article “Help Students Build Intrinsic Motivation” she echoed Pink’s, and Bureau’s claims by saying, “By fostering students’ sense of mastery, autonomy, and purpose, teachers can boost their desire and dedication to learn.”

A great platform that teachers can use to provide mastery, autonomy and purpose is BrainPOP, which helps foster each of these three motivating areas in ways that students love!

Let’s start with mastery.  BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. are teachers' go-to solutions for introducing students to new and complex topics across the curriculum through award-winning, curriculum-aligned movies, and content that reinforce essential academic and life skills.  As I recently wrote in, “What Students Need the Most is BrainPOP’s Superpower,” BrainPOP develops deep understanding across all curriculum areas and makes rigorous learning accessible to all students.  Allowing students to have content and background knowledge and build essential vocabulary are keys that unlock knowledge for students of all backgrounds. 

Autonomy; students relish when they are given the opportunity to choose their learning path or utilize their strengths and interests to demonstrate their knowledge. “Autonomy provides students the opportunity to lead their learning and increasing autonomy involves looking at the amount of voice and choice provided in a lesson.” (Cathleen Beachboard) BrainPop provides a multitude of ways for kids to have autonomy over their learning through knowledge-building content and learner driven projects (Creative Coding, Make-a-Movie, Concept Map, or Game-Up, BrainPOPs education game component 

This brief overview shows how BrainPOP can follow their own curiosity, which gives students agency and increases their motivation: https://go.brainpop.com/BTS_All  Jessie Erickson, a teacher with Grand Forks Public Schools summed up how BrainPOP provides student autonomy by saying, “BrainPOP provided ease of differentiation, freedom of student agency, and voice in learning-all by using bite-size chunks of reliable content delivered with a bit of whimsy. 

Building purpose is an area that can be especially motivating for students.  When they understand the why behind what they are learning (I always say that gone should be the days when students had to ask, “Why am I learning this?”), and if students can be given opportunities to apply their knowledge in ways that give them an audience (voice), or make a difference in their school, community or the world, students will be engaged and excited in ways that deepen learning!  One of the ways to help students develop purpose, is by giving them the social-emotional skills they need to be able to collaborate well with others, to manage themselves, have strong relationships, have empathy for others, understand their emotions, deal respectfully with conflicts, and all of the day-to-day interactions that successful people need to navigate in life.  BrainPOP is committed to developing SEL content that supports the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) framework and has many lessons that enable them to be successful in life. Topics such as mindfulness, conflict resolution, determination, relationships, setting goals, courage and perseverance, and more to help students have the strong EQ to interact in positive and respectful ways so that students can do project-based learning and collaborative learning opportunities. 

Additionally, when students are given choice to present knowledge in a way that they are interested in and passionate about, and when they can have a real-audience to present content that they created, students are more motivated to take pride in their work. BrainPOP's learner driven projects, Creative Coding, Make-a-Movie, and Concept Mapping, are three areas that can give students voice and choice!

BrainPOP's mission is to empower kids to shape the world around them and within them, and when we provide students Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose students are motivated to learn. Motivation is the ingredient that makes the magic of learning appear so that students can thrive in tomorrow’s world.