Recently, a colleague asked me what I thought was the biggest problem in schools today. Not just our school, mind you, but all over. It didn’t take long for me to arrive at my opinion: motivation.
Motivation, or lack thereof, is the root cause of the majority of problems in education. Some people might suggest student behavior, but even that can be traced to the motivation factor. If you’re not motivated to succeed or to even complete your work, you might find other things to occupy your time such as causing consternation with tomfoolery and skulduggery.
As we reach this time in the school year, things tend to ratchet up. Poor choices are on the rise as the end of the year approaches, and staff needs to be extra vigilant as some kids think, “Aw, what are they going to do to me anyway? It’s the end of the year.” But curriculum marches on; school days in May are just as important as they are in September. Granted, I have students doing more group work and big projects because of the extra energy, but it’s still vital work.
I struggle with seeing lack of motivation because it’s hard to understand not wanting to do your best. This is not to say that I’m never unmotivated, but the key is to find a way to push through that to get my work done. Believe me, sitting at home correcting essays is not my favorite thing to do, but I set smaller goals for myself. For instance, if I get through one section, I’ll take a break and play some Candy Crush.
We try to help students find this strength to battle through work they’re not fond of. But it’s difficult to watch, after giving 45 minutes in class to finish a vocab unit or to write a 100-word blog, to find so many assignments incomplete. And believe me, kids are pretty good at looking like they’re busy; some work harder at this feint than it would take to actually accomplish what is being asked.
The past three years, I’ve attempted an in-classroom motivation contest. Students are in groups and earn dice rolls for simply completing assignments on time. There are other areas, such as redoing assignments or showing exceptional work over a period of time. At the end of each quarter, each group rolls dice based on their accomplishments, and the winning team in each class wins food rewards. If anything will motivate kids, it’s food, right?
Wrong. The amount of late work in my room has not changed. Kids who were motivated to begin with continue to be and like the idea of rewards. But there is a too-large contingent that can’t even use the idea of pizza and soda to push them toward working just a little bit harder to get some work done. I don’t think I want to continue to spend money on this when it’s not showing an impact.
Schools have tried so many things. Lunch detention or after school detention for non-completion. Conferences with parents and the students. All kinds of things to find the root cause of this lack of motivation without much success.
Now understand this: I’m not talking about a majority of students. On a recent assignment, students knew about it for a week and it involved writing a 25-word response to someone else’s blog. I had 27 late assignments out of 115 students. That’s still significant.
When queried, one student commented, “If we had to write about Fortnite, I would’ve had a lot more than that for a word count.” And the sad thing is, if I had made that the topic of the blog, I might have had close to 100% completion. The sadder thing is, the topic of the blog was to choose someone to interview and come up with questions for that person. You could write about the creator of Fortnite!
Games like Fortnite motivate kids. They can’t wait to get home after school and see how many other players they can “kill” in the game to reach certain achievements. So how can educators take that passion students have for some inane game and funnel it into our required curriculum?
I don’t know.
I really don’t. I keep searching out what other teachers do that shows promise. Then I try looking at things from a different perspective, the individual student perspective. Is there something going on with some of these kids in their life that keeps them from getting work done?
I heard a recent sermon where the priest said we are only capable of showing love to the extent that we have been loved. It really made sense when I thought about it. If I, as a parent, don’t show my kids how much I love and care about them, they might well have a diminished capacity to love others because they only know as much as I’ve shown them.
The same might be true for work ethic. If that’s not taught and shown at home, it’s easier to understand why a child might not want to put much effort into homework. And then the line of thought continues. If parents complain how much they hated school and didn’t want to do work, that becomes infectious as well.
But that doesn’t cover it all either. I know plenty of examples of parents I’ve worked with to try to find that motivation for their kids. Many of these are people who are kind, loving, motivated folks. They work hard, and I know their home environment is conducive to kids finding success in their endeavors. So if kids have everything going for them, including parents and teachers who are supportive, why do some of them still feel unmotivated?
This is truly the biggest issue in education today. There are so many possible factors which lead kids not to want to work, which sometimes leads to unruly behavior, which sometimes leads to even bigger problems. If we can find that root cause, and it’s probably different for each of these unmotivated kids, we can bring them along to a point where they can succeed. But there is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
I don’t know the answers. But you can bet teachers everywhere will keep trying to find them.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is adhocracy, which means a flexible organization that lacks a formal structure, as in, “The school found it had to become more of an adhocracy to address all the individual issues that kept kids from succeeding.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!