Motivating Students
In 2019, a study titled “Elementary School Pupils’ Aspirations for Higher Education: the Role of Status Attainment, Blocked Opportunities and School Context” was published in the journal Educational Studies. This study, carried out at the Centre for Educational Research and Development of the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Croatia, sought to find out what made students want to continue on to college after secondary school.
Quotes:
“the findings of the research looking at 1,000 pupils showed that school and class size, the grade point average of the school and property prices, had little influence on the desire to continue to higher education.”
“several factors related to parents and home life, such as parental educational aspirations, maternal academic support and having a desk to work on, did have an influence. As did gender, with girls more likely than boys to want to continue to higher education.”
Just one study, and surely from a different culture than what many of us know. But consider that class size and school quality were not as important as mentorship, aspirational parents, and a workspace. Let me go all over the place for a moment: Amanda Ybarra, a first-generation Mexican-American who earned a Bachelor’s Degree in in International Relations and Diplomacy from Dominican University while living at home, said in an interview posted to remezcla.com, she preferred the security of her home because “I’ve always been able to concentrate really well on my studies at home and I feel like pushing myself into an environment that was now going to be new would have been detrimental to me.” Tara Westover, in her memoir Educated, talks about having a quiet space to do her work while a student at BYU – if you read that book, you’ll know she escaped extreme poverty, violence, and parental discouragement to get a four-year degree from BYU and later a master’s and doctorate from Cambridge University. A doctoral student at the University of New Mexico named Amber Trujillo-McClure, who was interviewed in an article titled “Black Student Excellence Springs From Historic Inequalities,” said “Literally everything we were about as a family was framed by academia. There was no room for activities outside of higher education. It was the singular North Star that guided my childhood. Academic achievement was framed as the only way to rise above poverty, socio-economic challenges, and racial inequality.” Virginia Woolf, in her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” says “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
These sources all show running themes of parental support and/or time space to work.
What does a teacher do to ameliorate, or remedy, the conditions of a student who doesn’t have supportive parents, or aspirational parents, or educated parents? How to respond to students who have home lives that impede not facilitate their education, or who have come up through terrible educational systems, or who have to work full-time or take care of family members or are dealing with abuse or poverty? George Lipsitz in his 1998 book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics, writes, “no amount of good intentions, no mastery of teaching techniques, and no degree of effort by individual educators can alter meaningfully the fundamentally unequal distribution of resources and opportunities in this society.” In his 2015 book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future, Asao Inoue writes “no amount of good intentions can make up for a structurally racist society, institution or writing assessment ecology.”
So what can a teacher do? Let me begin with this: what the golden rule of teaching?
Be nice. If you ask me, that is. But not only me.
Vincent Tinto in his article “Through the Eyes of Students,” says “every interaction matters for even a single negative interaction can reverberate in ways that alter students’ sense of belonging.” Zaretta Hammond in Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students says students, in particular underserved students, all too often “cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration (emphasis mine).” A study titled “A Study into the Perceptions of Students of Color and Their Ninth-Grade Academic Experience” conducted by the National Council of Professionals of Educational Administration found that “Students of color identified the most effective teacher as one who was energetic, caring, well organized, and creative. Those teachers who possessed these attributes were the most beneficial…However, those teachers who lacked any of those quality attributes had the most difficult time teaching.” Christopher Emdin in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education, in a chapter titled “Chuuuuch” cites Pentecostal preachers’ methods of creating engagement in part through a sense of happiness and excitement that a gathering is taking place. The authors of Teaching Men of Color in the Community College write “Students must believe that faculty members authentically care about them, personally and academically” and that “regardless of how skillful faculty members may be in teaching content, men of color are not likely to be successful in their courses in the absence of relationships that are rooted in trust, mutual respect, and authentic care.”
You might wonder how to connect with your students. How to get them to like you and talk to you. If you’re nice, and students feel they can trust in your kindness and respect, and they see you putting in an effort to structure and run a good class, and that you’re trying to help them, you’ll do better. It helps that your personality doesn’t radically change when you “start teaching.” It also helps for them to see that you like to be in the room. A teacher who doesn’t sticks out like a sore thumb; you could be in a room of preschoolers and they’d know it.
I also tend to be generous on late work if the student is showing a commitment to doing it. I let them rewrite most of their papers. A lot of them truly have turbulent and tumultuous lives and I think the default should be to nurture the student who is showing that they are willing, and trying, to do the work.
In her book Hammond discusses achievement gaps, which start early and get worse; she claims that in one instance she perceived, “Despite coming to a school that had high quality teachers and instruction, the gaps in their knowledge and skill by fifth grade were too great for them to be independent learners without intense focus and support.” By fifth grade.
What to do? How to keep those students?
Make class easy?
Kind of, at least at the start. I look at it as a video game. Level 1 is easy. Early on you tell them you want to make clear what the class is about, what the expectations are, what the building blocks are. FYI – I have worksheet for learning pacts, “six success factors,”, and dependent versus independent learners.
Studies show working with what they are familiar with then building out is a good way to keep them engaged on the front end. In my classes I give diagnostics, with very little instruction, in the opening sessions and tell them in the most positive way possible how they need to improve to be successful in writing-intensive college courses. Students need a sense of what we’re here to do, what they need to work on. I tell them where they are doing well and where they need to improve. My mentor at the University of Houston, James Zebroski, did the opposite of this: he’d assign a short essay to students in the first week and shred it up, as if to say, if you’re not hardcore about improving get out now. Maybe at a strong four-year school this has merit, but at the two-year level, or I’d argue in most first-year classes, you’re going to make them dread coming to school, or worse, think college is something beyond them. But there’s no doubt that if they desire to transfer to a university or enter a writing-intensive profession or major (or both), the expectations are such that they’re going to need to be able to handle a certain amount of rigor. Again, this butts up against the white-language-as-the-norm argument – but if a teacher considers themselves tasked with giving the student what they need to get up the educational ladder, a writing-intensive major at a university is going to require certain proficiencies. Until that’s not the case, I argue you’re more or less bound to help students acquire them, which is what you needed and still do by the way, while using your advocacy and visibility to press for systemic change (is it realistic that a student could get any degree from any college in any discipline without these proficiencies? Because if that’s not the goal, then you’re kind of saying, well, some stuff we have to keep linguistically white. That said, it’s hard to imagine a norm in higher education in which a student could, theoretically, get a PhD in Literature from Harvard without proficiency in standard, aka white, English, and decentering it from K-12’s standardized testing is a huge task – meanwhile the college teacher is a liaison figure between K-12 and a university degree).
To prevent students from getting discouraged or overwhelmed I tell students we all have literacies, and surely they have ones that I do not. I communicate that they are here to build a certain skill set that will prepare them for future college-level writing classes, but also that they will learn to access their inner resources to invest fully in their talents, and work. Emphasize writing as a skill, not an ability they either have or they don’t, a referendum on their innate intelligence.
Studies have shown that people who are praised for being hard-working respond better to hardship than people who get praised for being smart; the first person is more likely to assess and criticize their work effort, while the second might say “I’m too dumb” or “I’m not good enough” (see “Growth Versus Fixed Mindset”). Ever have students say “Writing is just not something I’m good at”? When they say that, they write it off (no pun intended) as something that’s just not one of their talents and cease to see it as a skill they can develop. This is known as positionality, the idea that students can see things as capable of being changed, not eternal qualities that are just the way things are. Ever heard the Zen koan Goose in the Bottle? How do you get the goose out of the bottle? You say in my version of the story the goose was never in the bottle. The point being one doesn’t necessarily need to accept the arbitrary rules and limitations others, or society, asks us to.
One reason why is that students hate school, because frankly a lot of it has been terrible, and they bring resentment over bad experiences into the room. It’s important to be clear-eyed about this: you’ll put all of yourself into prepping, delivering, being responsive, being thoughtful in your feedback, having compassion and empathy, and feel hardly anyone cares, or is listening to you. Even in the best of times, you get tired. You get stressed. It’s hard to be “on” for people, and there’s always a bad day lurking. A bad session. You absorb a lot of negativity – the nature of compulsory education. Administrative protocol often mandates assessment measures that kill the fun of learning, that make a points-reward system what justifies grades, what measures achievement, what turns them off. Students have been subject to this for years.
It is demoralizing to prepare and prepare and expend so much energy running a class, and look out and see hardly anyone giving a shit. You find yourself wondering how much to invest in the students who don’t want to be there. How accurate you are in your assessments of them. Why you can’t get more discussion, engagement. And you read books and articles, and listen to lectures and panel discussions about how the reason they’re disengaged is because you suck.
You might ask, what does the institution want me to do? Publish? Participate in department service? Not bring problems to their doorstep? What are the professional pressures? What’s incentivized? You might ascertain that if you want to keep problems from finding their way to your bosses, the incentive is to be super nice, and super easy. Then your bosses will say, I never hear about anything coming out of those classes. I could use a hundred teachers like that – that’s someone I don’t have to worry about. In exchange, they will leave you the hell alone. But the thing is, this might make your teaching worse. You might find that your bosses just want to hear that you’re running the classes and neither you nor the students are lodging complaints.
The mudsill of school is motivation. As a teacher, you’ll often get the feeling that there are two types of students – those who are motivated by the idea that education, for all its pluses and minuses, is worth enduring as a means of getting on in the world, and those who are not. What makes one different from the other? Background? Innate talent? Attitude? What about confidence, and a sense of worthiness? In “Through the Eyes of Students,” Tinto states that “Students have to want to persist and expand the effort to do so even when faced with the challenges they sometimes encounter” and “Students who perceive themselves as belonging are more likely to persist because it leads not only to enhanced motivation but also a willingness to engage others in ways that further persistence.” Remember the Croatia study about children with supportive, aspirational parents who had experience in education? Hammond says “students must believe they can succeed at learning tasks and have the motivation to persevere through challenging work.” I sometimes have trouble squaring this with a quote from Mike Rose, a professor in UCLA’s School of Education: “Students will float to the mark you set.” It’s about telling them they can do it, and at the same time instilling rigorous standards, proactivity, and perseverance. Can you do it? Can you do it in a mandatory writing class in students’ first year of college when you have them 2 ½ to 3 hours a week for sixteen weeks and they have a million other things going on in their lives?
When I went to college, my motivation was that the campus of UC Santa Barbara was a prestigious place full of splendid human achievement and I didn’t want to be outed as unworthy. People in my family made a big deal of me getting in and I didn’t want to go home a failure. I also saw it as a continuation of school, which to me was, teachers put work in front of you and you do it, because that’s what you do. I didn’t know what I wanted to major in, or pursue professionally. Would it have motivated me to have teachers tell me how important a degree is? Probably not. My motivation came from family, peer groups, the largeness of the institution, and not underachieving. I was always told I was smart, and capable, so what would it mean for me to flunk out of school?
But what about the students who don’t get these things? Who don’t have those motivations? Who don’t have quiet in the home, or parents who help further their education? Let me ask more questions. When I went to school, I lived in a student community called Isla Vista that was adjacent to the campus. Most of us would just walk or bike to class. What about students who are coming from miles away? Who struggle to get a ride, who take the bus (conferencing can be tricky – I’ve had students tell me they traveled an hour each way to have a 15-minute conference with me)? What about students who are at schools so small that the courses they need are only offered once a year and the time is incompatible with a job they can’t afford to lose? What if the campus is a dump, and doesn’t impress them the way mine did? What if the teachers don’t seem all that engaged, or interested in them?
More questions: what about the student who knows what they want to do and gets tunnel vision, caring about their track/major and everything else is a nuisance? What about the community college student getting training in a nonacademic trade who has to take your writing class? How much should you punish them for being nonacademic?
What does it mean to hold up your end of the bargain? The Reading Apprenticeship Framework says to start with the familiar. Research shows students learn new vocabulary when reading about familiar situations, for instance, and are more engaged when comprehending texts that matter to them personally. In the beginning, you can focus on subjects that are familiar, immediate, and local.
But why do we read? For escapism/fun, because something personal is being communicated to us, because we’re seeking out information on a subject that interests us. Most of the time, we read fast, and for information. One challenge is to slow your students down, and consider the meaning of a text, the ideas behind it, why it was written, the Joycean ethic of “from how deep a well does it spring?”
When we read, many things are activated inside of us: the social (how does this connect me to others?), the personal (how does this inform or speak to my identity and my values, how is it reflective of what I like and do not like?), the cognitive (how do I become better informed about a subject?), and the global (how does this influence how I comprehend the world?). What are our emotional responses? What does that say about us? One concept to repeatedly emphasize is schema – bringing reading into existing knowledge and experiences. What did I find of personal use? What speaks to my interests? How does this fire up my imagination, my creativity, my hopes and dreams? How does it make me feel?
Did you have reading models? Do you now? Do your students? My uncle was a reading model. When I was young I thought of books as homework and things for little kids. He got me to see them as things adults read to better themselves, to become more enlightened, because reading good books was something intelligent people do. He showed me books about the Dodgers, Babe Ruth. The Beatles. Later, profane poetry by Charles Bukowski. He told me my Uncle Tony was a poet in Venice Beach, part of a movement called the Beatniks. These things made me think reading and writing were cool – until my middle and high school teachers ruined that, by giving me archaic materials I couldn’t relate to and making reading feel like homework again. They also made me feel like I’d be judged on the correctitude of what I had to say about what I’d read. But then my college professors made reading cool again, made me see what the people went through in stories, what the authors went through, what other times in history had going on that I could relate to, and couldn’t (author Milan Kundera calls the enduring appeal of the novel a combination of historical circumstance, existential dilemma, and personality type). Then grad school would make me worry about what I had to say, and reading didn’t become something that belonged to me, but to the institutional protocol. Sometimes I’d go to book clubs, but often you get that same old competition of who did the best job comprehending what we’d read.
In adolescence I got into horror novels; I remember my mother telling me I couldn’t read The Exorcist so I went to the library after school and found it on the shelf, took it to a desk, and read it (hee hee). I read Stephen King, whose writing was violent, shocking, otherworldly to an eleven year-old. I began to see books as powerful, forbidden, intense, scary. Not boring. Not homework. Not something full of cute pictures my mother or grandmother would read to me before bedtime.
Model reading for your students. Try to make it cool, fun, part of being a global citizen. Not just a “good student.” Discuss the texts and the issues they raise in ways that bring them to life. Lewis Lapham, in his essay “Time Lines,” argues that history classes are almost wholly dependent on the ability of an instructor to bring the material to life. I think the same thing’s true in first-year writing and most English courses. Can you make the act of reading cool? Can you make the issues matter? If so, it will go a long way toward the buy-in of your students. They, deep down, want to be smart, to be knowledgeable, to be improving. Showing them that reading can help them get there has to power to be, dare I say, inspirational. And don’t be an ass to them if what they have to say doesn’t strike you as all that profound, or accurate. I have one, two, three slide shows that provide reading strategies. I tell students when you’re reading for a teacher in a class, you’re kind of doing a performance, showing them you did a good job finding key points, good research topics, points of comparison with other texts, rhetorical maneuvers, etc. You want to talk about the key point / strategy / maneuver in and of itself, locate it in the text, and say what we learn about the text by applying it strategy.
Ask them, what is their voice? What and how do they want to write? Surely in a way that helps them pass your class, but what else? What can you get across to them in the time you have? I’d argue, again, in many ways we’re teaching values as much, or more, than skills. In other words, getting them to value research or integrating cited material into their writing is more important than how much better they get at doing it in the four months or so they have with you.
What about the logistics of getting writing done? CCCC’s mission statement advises you to have students “address the constraints they encounter as they write.” You might look at this as the rule-bound limitations of the medium(s) they are working in, or obstacles such as noise in the house or life obligations that interfere with available time and space to work; it might also mean limitations of capability (quote incorporation, vocabulary, syntactical command, organization, unity, etc). As I’ve said, it’s hard to work with them on what goes on outside of school. Students, being human, do things to avoid social exclusion. The authors of Teaching Men of Color in the Community College write “boys and young men enact strategic efforts to put their ‘coolness’ on display for male peers, and even going so far as to outright reject behaviors and pursuits that position them for academic success” (7). Social forces are powerful – and many abhor academia, school, the classroom. What if a peer group takes a student away from school? What if a family does? I’ve had several students say their parents don’t like that they’re going into debt, that they’re unavailable to help with family obligations, that they’re not working. I recall an old sports adage: great players make bad coaches. You might fall into the “great students make bad teachers” trap, losing empathy for the unmotivated, not-confident, school-hating student, the one who slacks off because that’s what everyone else does, the one who doesn’t value education, doesn’t want to do it. Who has had bad classroom experiences for years and years, who has an unsupportive family, whose peers mock their efforts. Once I asked a class why they think our school’s graduation rate is so low, and one student said, “Some people just don’t like school.” Most of that’s not your fault. How to change their mind? How to handle a failure to do that?
There are problems at all levels of teaching (students not showing up, showing up late, not doing the work, talking too much, complaining, “that’s not what my last teacher said,” asking for extensions, making excuses, the quiet class that doesn’t participate). In one of the last classes I took at graduate school, I saw my professor dealing with these things. Even at a well-regarded research university among students earning PhDs and taking classes more or less in their specialty, a teacher experiences the stress that comes with teaching “compelled” students. Expect it. Emdin in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too has a chapter titled “Chuuuuch” in which he encourages teachers to look to preachers in black churches (what he calls “Pentecostal Pedagogy”) for strategies to inspire engagement – things like call and response, establishing a sense of family, and eliciting emotional reactions. One problem with this analogy, in my opinion, is that the group comes into church with preexisting buy-in. In other words, they have chosen to come, and they, more or less, “believe” in the mission, the purpose, of the church, of the “curriculum.” What if church attendance were compulsory, and everyone in the community had to attend, even atheists, agnostics, and people who believed in other religions? I’d argue the preacher would have a lot more difficulty doing these things. In other words, how to generate buy-in when they have to be there and much of the time don’t want to seems to be a skill required of a teacher. A lot of books I read leapfrog the question of motivation or presuppose it or tell you if you do what I say they will be motivated. For a lot of teachers, it’s never that simple, and sometimes you try everything you can think of and nothing works. Learn from it, but don’t beat yourself up. Teaching is fricking hard.