Improving Pupil Motivation Together

Teachers and Teaching Assistants Working Collaboratively

Susan Bentham, Roger Hutchins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136303951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Improving Pupils Motivation Together provides a refreshing and much-needed focus on how motivation can be enhanced by teachers and teaching assistants working both individually and collaboratively. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, the book explores various theories of motivation from a range of perspectives, applying academic theory to real life classroom situations. Using a combination of case studies and empirical research, this book demonstrates how teachers and TAs can successfully enhance the motivation of their students through collaborative practice. Improving Pupils Motivation Together starts by introducing theories of learning and motivation and goes on to offer insight in areas including:

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• Collaboration and ways to collaborate;

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• Motivation and giftedness;

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• Assessment for Learning;

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• Learning goals and learning objectives;

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• Common pupil responses;

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• Research in Action.

Improving Pupils Motivation Together is an ideal resource for both teachers and teaching assistants working with pupils who are difficult to motivate and who find learning challenging. Further, this book will be highly useful for teachers managing their support staff, and for trainee teachers looking to develop their skills in motivating and engaging pupils.

Chapter 1

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What is education for?

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An overview

This chapter begins with a story.

The way I see it

Rebekah is a junior school teacher of many years standing. As she looks back over the classes she has taught, she comments about how children learn differently:

There are some children who learn in a straightforward way, children who understand that they can develop themselves and they want to learn. They can learn because they’re interested in what they’ve done. They’re interested in listening to our reason for doing it and they will attempt to do what we suggest. If you give them feedback, they are keen to learn and to respond to it. Other children still think they come to school and teachers do things to them, and then their teachers mark their work. They might have a look at it, but they hope that they can just forget about it and carry on with their lives.

It’s difficult to tell where their attitude to work comes from – how much is their personality? Does their approach to learning come from their home, or from the fact that they’ve just switched off from the way that we teach them?

What is Rebekah saying when she makes these comments?

For sure, the main focus seems to be on the different personal traits of children which cause them to respond in various ways to school. But reading ‘underneath’ her comments, as it were, are words and terms that she uses which need to be unpacked and looked at carefully. ‘Feedback’, for instance, is one of those words, and will be considered more fully in Chapter 2 (p. 39) of this book. ‘Attitude’ is another – and some consideration will be given to this later in this book. For this chapter, the key term to look at is ‘learning’. Rebekah, along with every other school teacher, teaching assistant, parent and child in the country talks about ‘learning’ a lot – but what does she mean by ‘learning’? What does anyone mean by ‘learning’? If we are to investigate something about motivating pupils to learn, then we need to come to an understanding of what learning is, or could be. And, if we are talking about teachers and teaching assistants collaborating together in that learning process, then it is especially important that teachers and assistants mean the same thing when they use that term.

One of the defining characteristics of what it is to be human is that humans have to learn to survive and develop – and a major way we learn is by being taught. Learning does not happen merely by imitation or through personal experience, and much of human learning takes place in schools. School is the place in which young humans experience ‘education’. In this chapter we consider some of the purposes of such an education.

What is education for?

Children, by and large, are genetically hard-wired to learn. Young children are motivated to play, to learn to walk and run, to investigate their environment. They do not need to be told to look around them, to crawl, to make choices, to explore their immediate world. It takes an awful lot to entirely crush that instinctive and natural desire for knowledge and fresh experience. One of the tragedies of famine, serious illness or trauma can be seen in news pictures of children’s faces totally devoid of interest or desire.

Motivation in relation to schooling, however, is something different. In school we want children to be motivated to learn something imposed on them from outside – something they have not directly or consciously chosen to do. This process began, for them, a long time before they started school. They have, for instance, been taught how to use the toilet, how to eat with implements rather than fingers, how to get dressed and washed and how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. These are not things the young infants choose for themselves and, as any parent knows, these are by no means easy or straightforward skills to learn. The motivation to respond positively to training and requests can be decidedly lacking in toddlers. However, by and large, pre-school children spend their days in activities which, hopefully, are generally pleasurable and most, but by no means all, are ready for school by the time that they are old enough to attend.

And here is the rub. It is an all-too-truism to state that by the age of five children can’t wait to start school but by the age of fifteen they can’t wait to leave. Of course, this is a gross generalisation and over-simplification of a complex process, but there is enough truth in it to warrant attention.

As one primary school teacher put it:

I feel like children intrinsically want to learn and that during the course of their twelve years at school we batter that desire out of a lot of them.

What has happened?

A key factor is the purpose of education and, in particular, the views held by classroom or subject teachers and teaching assistants themselves. Why does a teacher teach? Why does a teaching assistant assist? What do they think they are doing when they engage in these activities? On a day-to-day basis, most time is taken up with the business of schooling – the curriculum, the timetable, planning, marking, responding to challenging behaviours and the like. Thinking about why to educate children in the first place can easily be seen as an irrelevant luxury: ‘We’ve got to do it and we’ve only enough time and energy to get on with the job at hand – never mind all this educational theory nonsense.’

Various views on the purpose of education

But, whether we think about it or not, everyone has some kind of view about why children go to school. Here might be some of them:

• Children need to learn in order to prepare them for adult life.
• Children go to school to learn to get on with others.
• Children are in school to expand their horizons.
• Children attend class to grow in wisdom and understanding.
• I send my children to school to get them out of my hair!

Much of the time we do not think about the why of school because there is no choice – school is a fact of life and has been for many generations. But it has not always been like this and it is not like this in many parts of the world.

What does motivation have to do with education?

This chapter attempts to ‘lift the lid’ on teachers’ and teaching assistants’ views and understandings of the purpose of education. It tries to get underneath the taken-for-granted aspects of school life and to question and examine underlying principles and perspectives. The reason for this is straightforward: when teachers and teaching assistants talk about how motivated or not pupils are – for instance, saying things like ‘Jimmy is just not interested in school work’– they have in mind something called ‘learning’, but they may not have thought through just what they mean by ‘learning’. This chapter attempts to help teachers and teaching assistants think through various aspects of what is, or could be, meant by learning.

Thinking about the reasons for, and the purposes of, education is important and needs to be considered before we enter into a discussion of motivation itself – because motivation is always related to a purpose. Motivation is towards a goal. When we say we are motivated, we are motivated to do or achieve something. We cannot be motivated simply to be motivated. So, if we are considering motivation for education, we need to be clear about what we mean by words like ‘education’, ‘schooling’ and ‘learning’. If the goal of motivation is learning, both teachers and teaching assistants need to be clear about what learning ‘looks like’. This is part of our thinking when we ask such questions as ‘What do we want children to learn in this lesson?’, ‘How will we know when children have learned what we want them to learn?’ and ‘How is learning measured?’ All of these questions have to do with motivation, for how we answer them will determine both how we teach and what expectations we will have of our pupils. Motivation is always towards a goal – and we now consider some different ‘goals’ or purposes of education.

Differing purposes of education

Schools fail our pupils yet again

Exclusion rates up for the second year in a row

One third of children leave junior school not being able to read or write

Grammar is not taught any more

Exam levels are going up – but are the exams getting easier?

Parents up in arms at school closure

Pupils’ delight at GCSE results

More ‘A stars’ than ever before

Standards across the country have improved

These are some imaginary news headlines – but they reflect the tone of much media reporting in the papers, television and radio. A quick read should leave you confused – are schools ‘failing’ or are they ‘succeeding’?

The answer to the question is not clear-cut, but must have something to do with why schools are there. What do people, including the media, think schools are for? It is very easy to take the answer for granted, as though it were obvious and ‘natural’. Yet there is nothing ‘natural’ about it – different cultures and different times have expressed different reasons for the purpose of schools, and schools are judged as being ‘successful’ or ‘failing’ according to why people think they exist.

In this section, we outline some of the reasons that people have used, in different places and in different times, to justify the existence of schools.

An idealistic vision

Education is there to make children fully ‘human’. Morality, character, lifestyle (the virtues) are placed on equal par with knowledge, insight and information. Education is for everyone because everyone is an individual with the potential for personal and academic development. Diversity and equality are regarded as essential rights. The aim of education is to instil the young of a society with the values of virtue and justice. In this way, the good of society and the good of the individual will be mutually established.

Teaching the faith

Schooling is a means of educating all children ‘in the ways of God’. Parents and teachers together teach children the religious traditions of their society in such a way that their view of history and of current earthly affairs is shaped by their understanding of the divine purpose of the world.

Religious elitism

Formal education is reserved for an elite group of pupils to be taught rigid dogma in order that they might grow up to become the scribes of the state religion. Schooling is not for the benefit of the pupils, but for the preservation of society.

Political indoctrination

Schools are there to train children according to strict political and social ideologies. Children are given a narrow view of history and of the world, usually from an extreme nationalistic perspective. No deviation is permitted from the official view either in the school or in the home. Such schooling may well be given exclusively in the dominant language of the state.

Humanistic enlightenment

Education is seen as a human right. Schooling is to promote knowledge and discovery. Education is a ‘natural’, inalienable right for all children. Ignorance is not bliss – those without knowledge are disadvantaged in a ‘knowledge society’. Education is not to equip children to perform a specific role within adult society, neither is it to force a particular religious or moral ideology on them. Rather it is to educate for freedom; the idea being to provide children with an understanding of a wide range of perspectives and values so they can choose for themselves the ‘right’ way to live. Children are encouraged to be open-minded, tolerant and inclusive.

Democratic education

Educating children is a human right, but it comes with responsibilities. Education is not merely for the benefit and development of the individual child, but also for the development and betterment of a free and fair society. Children are to be educated to prepare them to live in freedom in a free society. Virtues such as tolerance, respect and understanding are to be consciously taught to pupils alongside a formal academic curriculum.

Utilitarian/functional education

Formal education costs a great deal, and whoever pays for it should get something in return: ‘value for money’ is essential. Governments pay for education through taxation and, therefore, governments say what education is for. Formal schooling is provided in order to render children fit for ‘society’ and ‘work’, and thus to produce people who can contribute to, perpetuate and help secure the future of the state. Education must be ‘fit for purpose’. A curriculum is to be followed, rather than knowledge to be explored. Teachers are to be held to account for what they teach. Children are to be examined to ensure they are learning what is deemed to be essential for their future employment and to sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is education for?
• 2 Motivation – the theories
• 3 Managing to collaborate
• 4 Motivation issues for students – what pupils say
• 5 Motivating students through assessment
• 6 Moving forward together
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index