Maha on Motivation

Jigsaw Discussion and Reflection on Motivation

Maha Qazi

Within our home group discussion on the articles related to Motivation, there was a common theme running through the 3 articles Lulu, Matt and I read which was primarily how to engage struggling students, or how to engage students to get motivated about reading. One of the articles which we discussed, “Reading, Gender and Engagement” looked at the role of gender and it’s influence on reading, providing examples of five developed countries (United States, Germany, Korea, Finland, and Ireland) and middle school students. Girls tend to do better in reading, especially print reading; whereas the gap between males and females narrows for digital reading.

While the gender article provided recommendations how to motivate boys more to become interested in reading, the other two article on the “Seven Rules of Engagement” and the “The Social Side Of Engaged Reading For Young Adolescents” was more targeted to HOW to engage both girls and boys. Here are some ways to increase motivation in students:

1)    Students’ readings have some connection with their life.

2)    Students can access a variety of reading materials, for example comics, novels..

3)    Students are given choices about what to read.

4)    Students are able to socially engage and talk to their peers about what they read.

5)    Students are praised in a way that reflects their efforts, more than the result.

6)    Students get time to read in classroom, and it can be anything they enjoy, fiction or non-fiction.

7)    When students think they are reading something that is a little challenging they have the incentive to read it.

As someone who enjoys reading, especially fiction, I felt reassured that even this type of reading is fine, because it reading should be a process of “social engagement” where the reader becomes engaged with the writing, the plot, characters and stories to the extent they can visualize themselves in it and how they would respond to a given situation. It’s all about engaging the different senses to enrich the reading process.

One of the things that I don’t necessarily agree with in the readings is that it’s not probably always the best idea to have a male figure be a mentor to a male student to improve their reading. The motivation does not have to rely on the person being a male, just someone who can be an effective of change. Another one of the articles (“The Social Side of Engaged Reading for Young Adolescents”) focuses too much on catering to the students likes constantly. Sometimes it’s important that students are taught that new things can be fun and meaningful if they are willing to take a step outside what’s familiar, otherwise, how else will they learn about the world around them, which is important to critical-thinking. Reading should not be about only what one likes, although it is a big part of reading, but not the only way. I really do agree that access to books is a very important issue facing a lot of students especially in the developing world.

It is not that they are not motivated enough, it’s that they don’t have the opportunity.

If students had more opportunities, they would run with the readings and motivation would not be such a problem. I also tend to think that family and home plays a big part in how students think about reading. This is again about access. When there isn’t a figure to model after due to lack of a reading environment then the student would not know any better. A self-motivated individual is rare, and that person is someone who is able to rise above their surroundings to motivate themselves and doing this through books can be very empowering. I have seen such examples.  

Kirti's Literacy History

Kirti Don Hemlani

1156-RDLG579- T3: Content Area Literacy

Literacy History

Though I’m born three decades after Indian Independence, but its impact is still evident in my life. I am from a small town of North India. My father was a wealthy man, who had a well-established business of wholesale grains. We lived in a joined family with my grandparents, uncle and aunt and their children. We were six children growing together. We all went to a catholic school. Every morning, if we had school or holiday, I very well remember, bells and hymn were first sound I heard in the morning. Even before breakfast as a child, we had to get ready and go for prayers and then the day would move forward. During prayers there were few lines read from holy scriptures and in the evening my grandmother would sit with us and have a session of discussion where the core was to teaches us the values of ideology, devotion, duty, relationships, dharma and karma and it made a huge impact on our thinking.

Before India got independent, traumatizing part was partition of India and Pakistan, my grandmother had a choice to go to America with her family, or stay back and get married to her fiancé (my grandfather). So every summer, we had my grandmothers family and their kids visiting us. It was like barter system, they had to learn Indian culture and in exchange we were preached on eloquence. To keep it in practice, we had a tuition teacher, (who’s mother stayed back after British left and got married to an Indian man) who converted one of the rooms into a study and had alphabet charts and rhymes and lots of books my father bought, when he traveled. This young lady, would spent hours at our place, teaching us everything – reading, writing, table manners, and games so on….

My earliest memory till today is sitting in her lap, where she would read us stories or evening session with my grandmother when we would listen tales of immortal heroes. Our study had a huge collection of books, but they had to be scanned from our teacher as she was bound by a code of conduct. It was sheer joy, when during summer vacation my dad from one of his trips came back and got Malgudi Days, we were glued to it. It had 19 stories and I had to share it with my sister. I would wait for my turn and would climb on one of the trees and read peacefully. Initially reading was a chore but it became a passion- Indian Fables and Folk Tales, Readers Digest, Nancy Drew, Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon…..

But I was still illiterate, when my son was born 11 years back, my grandmother was quite adamant for my son being well versed in Indian literature and culture. But, with him, I thoroughly enjoyed Eric Carle, Dr Seuss, Donald Dale and once he started school at American International School of Guangzhou and I embarked on a new career – teacher’s assistant at AISG followed by support teacher in EAL department.

Apart, from reading from school library, I look forward to reading blogs of students of the books they have read and at their age when I was little I had merest hint of character traits or in-depth knowledge or understanding they have of their content. I look forward to reading book review on my son’s blog who’s in middle school now and I giggle with sheer delight when I read his blog. Furthermore, now that’s my goal to start writing my blog and my son can response to it giggles in delight – the way I enjoy…….

Francis on Motivation

One question that has been frequently asked by teachers around the world is “How do I motivate my students to read?”  Teachers are particularly interested in finding ways to motivate their students to read because to a greater extend their academic success depend on their ability to read. Reading is the vehicle through which much of the content is transmitted to the students.  I feel no different than the teachers I am describing above. In fact, everyday in my classroom, I keep thinking of what I can do to motivate my students to read more.

In the article Seven Rules of Engagement, Linda Grambell offers some wonderful tips to motivate students to read more. She for instance says that students are more motivated to read if the tasks and activities are relevant to their lives. I definitely see how this can increase student motivation to read. However, I keep wondering how possible this is for all the texts that the students will read. I feel that some times, students may be reading texts that have nothing to do with their lives. How then do I proceed?

Having access to a wide range of reading materials is another tip to increase motivation. As a teacher, developing my own classroom library based on students’ interest is a good way to do this. I would even suggest asking students for their ideas in terms of what books they would like to have. In lower elementary, this can be a challenge but to the greatest extend possible, teachers should involve the students.

Teachers should also give ample time in class for their students to just read. Granted, many would argue that there isn’t enough time to cover all the content and still have time to read. Well, it is true that teachers don’t have enough time. But it is also true that if we value something, we can create time for it. Promoting literacy should be an important thing for all the teachers. Beyond the reading, reading is a way to create social interactions amongst students, as they generally like to talk about what they have read with their peers.

If we give our students the opportunity to make choices in terms of what books they want to read, their motivation to read is very likely to increase. I have heard some teachers say that this is not practical as they have many students who need help, as they cannot make good choices. For struggling readers for example, as teachers, we can choose a selection of books that are at the students’ reading level and then present the books to them and have them choose. We would have identified the right books for them but they still had the choice.

In the article Reading, Gender and Engagement, I found out that girls are generally more engaged in reading than boys. Finding ways to encourage the boys becomes an important undertaking. One thing I can do is to have a wide range of reading materials that include themes and topics that boys are generally interested in. I feel that I would have to be very careful as I do not want to promote some interests as belonging to only boys and others for girls as this would be solving one problem but creating another.

I would also consider running a book club after school activity for boys. While this would be a forum to bring the boys together to read, I would also use it as an opportunity to find out other ways of motivating them to read. This may mean having them lead book discussions in class, having reader buddies in the lower grades where they go and read to the younger students etc.

Marci on Motivation

Marci Wu

Jigsaw Response Blog on Motivation

July 4, 2015/7/4

I’ve decided to write in response to the topic of motivation because this is to me my biggest challenge as a teacher of Taiwanese high school students, especially in English Literature, a subject towards which the majority take a general disliking.  When it comes to their attitudes towards subjects like science, math, computers, or even music, most of them have a deeply rooted sense of intrinsic motivation simply because it bypasses their struggles with extreme shyness.  They are naturally drawn to content areas that don’t require much social interaction in English mainly due to the ever-present issue of losing face. They’re caught between the desire to be fluent and their reluctance to communicate for fear of making mistakes.  

I want to take an honest look at what I’m faced with and I welcome anyone’s suggestion on how to overcome this:  Because of their rigorous daily schedule, during any type of down time, the students either bury their faces into their ipads or they just tune out the world and sleep. Motivation just does not exist.   Therefore, reading English for pleasure, unless the student has a deep and personal interest, is the last thing on their minds.  So in this situation, the English teacher has a choice – to go against the grain and try to inspire a sense of interest in reading English texts for pleasure, or just distance him or herself from such lofty dreams and stick to the job description, and that is to simply get through the airtight syllabus.  Yes, I am aware that this is the idea of resistance that was mentioned on the first day, but it’s a real thing and it has its relevance.

The connections that surfaced after our group discussion on motivation showed the importance of teachers - 

a.  supplying access to a variety of age-appropriate and interest-related reading material

With this in mind, the expense would be solely my responsibility.  By this, I mean with the exception of supplying them with school library books that shouldn’t leave the classroom for fear of damage or loss, I’d have to foot the bill for anything bought.  Without a strict system of accountability in place, if I did create a classroom library, how could I trust them to treat the books with the respect they deserve?  How could I be sure that my investment would suddenly spark a deeper interest in reading?  It’s a leap of faith.  It’s an unfamiliar mindset of sharing tangible things with students.  Here’s another source of resistance:  due to their Asian cultural predisposition of ‘face’ coupled with their adolescent hyper-sensitivity, they are extremely conscious of image, so they would naturally avoid anything that would be deemed “uncool,” especially something so nerdy as taking teacher-recommended English reading material off the shelf for pleasure.  On the contrary, they would just use the excuse that they don’t have the time because first of all, they’re tired, and when it comes to any reading at all, their required reading takes precedence, which is true. 

b.  empowering students with a sense of choice in their reading

I’d say my students have an equivalent of an American 2^nd to 3^rd grade level of English, so the challenge is daunting, finding easy yet engaging books appropriately related to the interests of Taiwanese sixteen-year-olds.  Even if I had a variety of such material and they did have a choice, making the actual commitment to read a non-required English book with the purpose of full understanding would be like squeezing water from a stone. How can one inspire motivation from scratch? 

c.  giving feedback and task-related incentives in order to encourage their intrinsic motivation

Unfortunately, the only incentive that motivates my students is the value of the percentage written in red ink.  They correlate their score to their self esteem, so a 75% means “the teacher hates me.”  The essential problem lies in their interpretation of the number.  They don’t see it as a healthy, ongoing challenge to improve, but rather as a value judgment of themselves as individuals.  I suppose this is not cultural, but more of a misguided or underdeveloped sensitivity which needs time to mature as they grow.

I understand that the feedback is not only a score, but also comes in the form of specific and sincere praise of their progress or hard work.  Yet I must face the truth in that none of it matters as much when culturally all they’re trained to see is the number.

d.  fostering a healthy rapport with students

This I believe is crucial to success not only as a student, but also from the perspective of the teacher.  If there is no relationship, there is no trust on either part.  In that situation, learning cannot take place.  Rapport is an essential part of my teaching philosophy.  No matter the subject, learning comes much quicker and more naturally when the class atmosphere is supportive, relationships are healthy and trust is established.  This is the one area where I feel at least I have a foothold.

After our discussion today, I never felt more distant from a starting point in respect to inspiring in my students a deeper sense of intrinsic motivation when it comes to loving the activity of reading.  Part of me wants to wait for them like a sage on the mountaintop.  If they don’t develop a natural passion for reading on their own, then no harm, no foul.  If they do, I’m there ready with support.  Another part of me wants to reach out and draw their interest out of them at the risk of being rejected.  Either way, there is some basic tectonic shifting going on in my priorities as a teacher of Literature.

 

Francis Literacy History

Literacy History Blog Response

In any typical Kenyan household, at the time I was growing up and for the most part today, parents and caregivers did not read to their children. This is because they have other “responsibilities” that keep them busy hence do not have the time to read to their children.  My situation was no different. My parents did not read to me. However, they indeed played a significant role in helping me to read. They sent me to school, which at the time was a privilege that many did not have. I had teachers who read to me as well as the older students in my school. When I went back home everyday, I had to tell my parents what we had read and what I had learned and we talked about it.

My parents were my role models when it came to reading. They loved to read newspapers every morning while having breakfast. I therefore grew up believing that reading was for important people as only “important” people read in my community and that made me love it even more. While maybe it wasn’t true, it did motivate me to keep reading and to love reading. Seeing my parents read was also a motivating factor.

I remember when I came home from school when I was in third grade with a storybook I had been given in school. After lunch on this day, I took the book out and read it to my mother and my two siblings. My mother was so impressed by how I had read that she took me out for ice cream. She told me I had read very well and this is the point I realized I was literate. I was not only reading the words but I understood what they meant. I mostly enjoyed reading the African folk tales that had a moral lesson at the end. My mother bought me new African folk tales books once in a while.

In school however, I remember feeling frustrated by my teacher. She believed that I was a good reader but her ways of encouraging me to read more were frustrating to me. After reading a text, she had so many questions about that text that led me to not want to read anymore. For me, reading had just become something I enjoyed doing. When I felt it had become more work for me, I became frustrated and begun to avoid it.

As a foreign language teacher, I find myself being influenced by the experiences I describe above. To this effect, just as I was encouraged to read by my mother, I encourage my students to read by availing books that are of interest to them. However, I fear making the same mistake my teacher made namely, over teaching and making reading to feel like a burden more than something that my students actually enjoy. Having the older students in my school read to me was something I enjoyed. In my teaching, I have incorporated this where I work with the middle and high school Spanish teachers so that my elementary students can have “reader buddies” to read to them.

Nate's Literacy History

Literacy History Blog Response- Nate Ovelar

I can’t remember back to the days I first learned to read and write but, I do remember my connection to books as a child. I remember that I used to be punished when I was 8-9 years old by having to read entire novels in one week’s time. I still remember the books: Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, White Fang, The Jungle Book, Huck Finn, and Tom Sawyer. I got the general idea of what the books were about but I never really took in what I was reading. The books were old and smelled like the 60s, it was distracting to me. Later, I ended up liking all of those stories when I was in middle school (mostly because I had then see them as films). I also remember taking part in this school summer reading program in 5^th grade. We had to log 100 reading hours over the summer and we would get a free ticket to Six Flags. I remember being really excited about that at the time.

Prior to this course, I always considered literacy as being able to read and write a language in the most general sense. When looking at literacy from that perspective, I feel I became very literate once I got in my mid 20’s. At this time, I had already taken many linguistics classes and I had learned to speak, read, and write in 5 languages. I then was able to see how the languages all linked up and meanings to words I had always just repeated, I could actually see the root and hidden context of where it came from. I felt everything I thought I knew about language was changing. Now seeing words like “understand” gained heavy meaning, and it was like seeing society from above. I try to encourage others to learn as many languages as possible; some things go right over our heads because no language alone is deep enough to explain the human experience. The thing I take away from my upbringing is that the more perspectives you have, the more angles you have to think about, then the more well-rounded and literate you will be. When I teach, I try to get my students to look at everything from as many perspectives as they can and to play devil’s advocate with themselves to pull out the truth in their reasoning. Chess is another thing that I believe helps increase literacy, in the sense of understanding concepts more abstractly. Analyzing patterns, anticipating new structures, and running through all the different approaches can really strengthen the mind in all ways related to learning. Learning to play chess well is something that can apply to so many disciplines of education and occurrences in life. I think it should be introduced at the elementary level, where it could greatly expand the children’s ability to see and understand their vision.

Matt's Literacy History

Matt Balaban

Literacy History

     My memory of the beginnings of my literacy is very faded. I have seen a piece of my work from kindergarten recently where I explained that I wanted to visit the ocean to see animals. I misspelled most of the words, but the effort was sincere and that’s why I’m proud of it. I remember writing a story in first grade called “The Big Shark” that was wildly successful in my class and impressed my teacher and my parents. It made me feel really accomplished. I remember in second grade being taught how to write in cursive. I remember practicing letters and the teacher explaining how the page should be tilted at a certain angle, but I didn’t quite understand why. It wasn’t long before I switched back to printing; probably sometime in middle school. In third grade we had a program where reading a certain number of books merited some sort of prize from pizza hut. It either had something to do with Star Wars: Episode One collectable items, pizza at reduced cost, or both. Probably it was both. I remember asking my teacher if I could read Barenstein Bear books because they were my favorite, but I remember her saying that we “don’t read Barenstein Bear books in third grade” and it made me feel embarrassed, especially because I had just moved into that class from another district. In third grade I also was introduced the presentation, which was something new for me at my new school, and I found the expectation that I’d stand up in front of the whole class to present something somewhat confusing. I did an oral book report on Grizzly Adams, and I remember the yellow cover of the book, exactly where I found it in the library, and my brown paper bag costume that I dressed up in. I was incredibly nervous. I remember doing another book report that year that I struggled quite a bit with because maybe I couldn’t understand it fully, but for sure I was nervous to present, and insecure with my memorization of the details to cover, so I tried to make notes taped on the back of the book as I presented, but I think the class took that as cheating. I remember many individual presentations that I delivered in my school days, probably because they made me so nervous and afraid of messing up and being judged.

     I remember being more confident in sixth grade with my oral book report on Holes, and my teacher was so sweet, caring, and understanding. I felt more confident in that class. I remember drilling vocabulary and reading Greek mythology in seventh grade; that vocabulary I remember mostly because of rehearsal methods we were doing in class. By methods I just basically mean traditional rehearsal and fill-in -the-blank exercises. I remember similar vocabulary endeavors in eighth grade, but mostly the poem by Robert Frost that I needed to memorize, which was the first time I was asked to explicitly memorize in a rote way. I also remember all of the comma rules we went over and loved it for its comprehensiveness. In ninth grade, I was in honors English for the first time, which I found intimidating. I was also intimidated by my other classmates who seemed to find the class easy and got the understanding they were supposed to from the Merchant of Venice. Honors English in tenth had world literature, which I enjoyed, but still found myself in this uncomfortable space in class where I had more questions than the class seemed to be interested in addressing. I say the class because even though it was the teacher who would answer them, and even if we had the time for it, many other classmates of mine seemed to find my questions annoying and time-consuming. I remember becoming incredibly frustrated by this, being made to feel like my questions were unimportant. I remember the class being particularly frustrated with my question about why it had been the apple that was the gift at the mythological wedding instead of something else. “Who cares?” the class sighed in exasperation. I remember being really frustrated also with understanding Omar Khayaam’s poetry, even through I really wanted to. Once I was riding in the car with my Mom with my fat literature textbook in hand and got so fed up with how the messages were so unclear. She asked me simply to read a stanza, and I remember her offering a few straightforward ideas about what it could mean, and instantly my face stopped looking so twisted when I realized that it didn’t have to be so hard - that meaningful interpretations didn’t need to be as locked away as I felt they were. In 11th grade I remember more vocabulary drills, which the rest of the class seemed to simply stomach rather than appreciate, but I didn’t mind. I also remember a teacher I became good friends with - this was probably in part because she smiled and her eyes got excited whenever I asked questions. None of my fellow students seemed to ask anything. I remember in twelfth grade having a devil’s-advocate-type question that asked everyone to consider how the antagonist felt in Grendel and why it might feel that it needed to act in an evil way. I felt really proud about by ability to bring about a new perspective that wouldn’t normally be considered.

 

      When I reflect on my literacy-related learning experiences, no particular person stands out in my mind as being incredibly influential in my literacy skill development; there are mainly just fragmented memories of significant moments. It was the case throughout most of school that I understood myself as less capable in English, as well as less interested. I baffled myself about becoming an English teacher right out of college in Bangladesh, and I take pride in how unexpected that was. It was when I started teaching English that I found a connection to it and an appreciation for it. It seems that being in school as a student didn’t really cultivate my literacy and competency as much as being involved as an educator. That’s one of the things that made me turn to education in a longer-term way as a teacher.

     From having recalled my past experiences, I’m imaging that certain tendencies in my teaching emerged from my experience as a student. I don’t like giving group work because I myself don’t like it much, probably because of how I felt different with my unconventional questions and slow reading. I hesitate to find creative ways to teach vocabulary, because I found rehearsal and discussion to be effective and efficient for me as a learner. I’m also hesitant to give too many individual presentations and oral book reports because of how nervous they made me feel. So, aside from these deep-dark-secret-traditionally-minded biases, a more decidedly positive outcome of my educational background is the sincere motivation to address literacy-related endeavors rather than straight content. I love discussing reading strategies, looking at word roots and connections, investigating how the sentence and paragraph structure is designed in a writing, theorizing about why authors chose certain words or literary devices, and asking out-of-the-box questions that contribute to gleaning the most understanding from text. For the most part, I also value all the questions that students bring up in class as well, because I certainly remember how it felt to have them as a student. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good thing that I’m inclined to teach in a way that fits how I was as a student, but at least I can acknowledge that it has provided me with a profile of certain pedagogical motivations that are quite genuine.