Dear all,
Hope you are all having a good weekend. This weekend you will receive two bulk emails from me, this one my food for thought and one regarding our in-service PD day on October 11th.
This morning’s Stingray breakfast was another great event bringing together all corners of our community, so a big thanks to the PTO, Bob, Connie, Rick and everyone else involved.
Last week I certainly felt a step up in spirit and buzz around the School, so thanks to you all for your contributions and getting involved. I strongly believe that if students see school as the “best party in town” (a quote attributed to Peter Kline) it makes it easier and easier for us to engage and motivate them as learners in our classrooms. The following list of 6 ways to motivate students also fits nicely with the 5 Pillars for a Culture of Achievement, IB pedagogy and our Professional Learning Community, all of which was talked about during orientation and we will be gradually built upon over the next few years.
Key links that I noticed from the brief article were:
Good IB pedagogy ” start with the question, not the answer” essential for all teachers encouraging higher order thinking and creativity in their student’s learning
For Pillar 4, Never too late to learn, “upping the difficulty as they improve” relates to our need as teachers to constantly be building upon student competencies and moving all our students forward.
For Pillar 5, The Best
School in the Universe, “encouraging students
to compete against themselves” where we want everyone in our community to be the best that
they can be with our students setting goals that challenge them and push them
to higher levels.
Teaching generation Y students , “analyze and make sense of situations involving real people and real stakes” because if we don’t they will either ask why are we learning this or drift off into their own world of thought.
By making it social we are building collaborative learners and skills of team work and communication that will be important for their futures. Collaboration is also an essential criteria of a successful Professional Learning Community and an area that we still have lots of work to do at ISHCMC.
And the last point links well with Daniel Pink’s work on motivation and provides a useful strategy to utilize one of Pink’s three elements of motivation ‘mastery’ in our lesson planning.
Six Ways To Motivate Students To Learn
Scientific research has provided us with a number of ways to get the learning juices flowing, none of which involve paying money for good grades. And most smart teachers know this, even without scientific proof.
1. Fine-tune the challenge. We’re most motivated to learn when the task before us is matched to our level of skill: not so easy as to be boring, and not so hard as to be frustrating. Deliberately fashion the learning exercise so that students are working at the very edge of your abilities, and keep upping the difficulty as they improve.
2. Start with the question, not the answer. Memorizing information is boring. Discovering the solution to a puzzle is invigorating. Present material to be learned not as a fait accompli, but as a live question begging to be explored.
3. Encourage students to beat their personal best. Some learning tasks, like memorizing the multiplication table or a list of names or facts, are simply not interesting in themselves. Generate motivation by encouraging students to compete against themselves: run through the material once to establish a baseline, then keep track of how much they improve (in speed, in accuracy) each time.
4. Connect abstract learning to concrete situations. Adopt the case-study method that has proven so effective for business, medical and law school students: apply abstract theories and concepts to a real-world scenario, using these formulations to analyze and make sense of situations involving real people and real stakes.
5. Make it social. Put together a learning group, or have students find learning partners with whom they can share their moments of discovery and points of confusion. Divide the learning task into parts, and take turns being teacher and pupil. The simple act of explaining what they’re learning out loud will help them understand and remember it better.
6. Go deep. Almost any subject is interesting once you get inside it. Assign the task of becoming the world’s expert on one small aspect of the material they have to learn—then extend their new expertise outward by exploring how the piece they know so well connects to all the other pieces they need to know about.
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If you have read this far I also wanted to share this 2
minute Youtube video on the consequences of the troubles in Syria that you
might want to share with students in homerooms. Instead of focusing on the
fighting or US discussions about bombing it highlights the enormity of the
refugee problem for the survivors and the neighbouring countries. It uses
simple graphics to make its point. It is not visually disturbing so could
easily be used by upper primary through to Grade 12 homerooms to provoke
discussion and deeper thinking about the consequences of war and broaden our
student’s understanding of their world.
Yours,
Adrian
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