Teaching as Leadership: Making Students Love Learning

[fclbrokle]

With so much of my thought devoted to Learning Unlimited, I spend a great deal of time considering LU's fundamental question: how can you make students love learning?

The Teach for America book Teaching as Leadership answers that you cannot do it without also providing students with concrete, difficult goals that students must achieve. They quote

Comments

[fclbrokle]

I absolutely agree that seeing something because it's cool is a goal, but you were already turned onto learning by having been good at math. (Indeed, I've often had difficulty separating what it is that first got me excited about math, the content or the achievement.)

Separately, note that you did have a goal that you achieved: learning and understanding something cool. That itself is rewarding!

[ajawa_took]

Let me catalog common failures to heed this:

"Of course, you can do it: it's easy!" devalues success and magnifies the significance of failure.

"This is hard!" sets up an expectation of failure.

And, best of all, "most of you won't be able to do this, even though it's actually quite easy."

[fclbrokle]

I feel like you're actually replying to the wrong entry, but mostly I think these are examples of doing the goal-setting badly. Like anything, it can be done so that it hurts the students more than it helps them!

[ajawa_took]

of course, the two entries are related, but I was replying to this one.
teachers say these things all the time in an effort to provide an honest meanignful evaluation of the students' abilities.
we/they should be reminded early and often that this robs the students of the "feeling of achieving something hard and feeling the thrill of that achievement," and that that in turn has serious effects not only on the students' happiness, but also on their achievement.

[fclbrokle]

Ah, I see. Yes, totally agreed.

[arrowedumbrella]

Something you're pointing to is the distinction between appreciation and motivation. I think that that short programs like Splash, Julia Robinson Festival, and individual Math Circle sessions, are better for fostering appreciation than motivation. My personal suspicion is that sustained programs -- ones where there is either daily exposure and/or a realized expectation of practicing/homework, such as residential programs, piano lessons, Little League, are better at building motivation. My other personal suspicion is that intrinsic motivation and self-confidence are distinct features of a person's affect, but quite coupled and possibly linked through achievement.

[fclbrokle]

I agree to some extent. But I think that a program like Splash can also build motivation. My canonical example is something like a class on "intuitive quantum mechanics:" it presents enough of a taste of how the subject is amazing that students want to learn it, and it motivates other topics they might encounter along the way (such as calculus).

It's an interesting distinction, and one that is certainly important to keep in mind. That said, I really do believe that a short program can also build motivation when it does it right; since these things are variable, I think it's a good argument for the many different types of classes that Splash hits you with.

[arrowedumbrella]

That's interesting, I hadn't fully realized until this exchange that "motivation" refers to both disciplinary motivation and personal/intrinsic motivation. That is, "it presents enough of a taste of how the subject is amazing that students want to learn it, and it motivates other topics they might encounter along the way" can mean that "it provides a context for calculus, which they may or may not see as relevant" as well as "it gives them a desire to learn calculus, which they may or may not act upon. I think that it would be interesting to know not just whether the students "want" to learn more quantum mechanics, but what steps they may have taken to pursue this learning. (I "want" to learn many things, such as Russian and Python, but have never taken serious steps to do so.) Looking back at formative experiences in learning in my own life, I see how Mathcamp inspired me to take the theoretical versions of calc, etc., and AP Literature inspired me to concentrate in literature, but until graduate school, I did not really read

[fclbrokle]

There are certainly lots of things that I want to learn much like you do. I've always taken my inaction to do so as a sign that I don't actually want to do those things as much as I think I do!

As to the two kinds of motivation: could you elaborate the two ideas you're discussing? I'm not sure I understand what "disciplinary" means in this context.