Category Archives: intrinsic motivation

Giving Students New Identities

Last year I made my goal “to love my students.” I think focus point is probably a better term than goal because it is not really something that you measure or accomplish. This year I will be looping with the same students (along with a few new students to our school). So we are not starting from scratch but already know each other. I think this year will be so powerful because my students already understand the PBL process, my style, and most importantly I already have relationships with all of them.

So my focus for this year comes from Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Not word for word but based on the ideas in chapter 3 about identity. Gee goes into great detail about the different identities a player takes on in a role playing video game and then compares those identities to learning in any context. So every student who comes into the classroom already has an identity in relationship to school or maybe even a separate one for your class. Students see themselves as successful, bored, a failure, a clown, or able to get by. These identities are based on their past experiences, culture, and beliefs.

by Esellee

I am primarily concerned with struggling students. Gee says, “To repair damaged learners in any domain, there must be some such story (i.e. a level of success to motivate continued effort), though the stories will be as various as the learners.” So basically as a teacher I need to motivate students by helping them create an identity of success in my class. Gee does not see motivation as external such as points or badges in the gamification movement but rather as intrinsic as a student creating an identity of success as a learner. He sees the real motivation in video games as pride in identifying with your character as something that you created.   The trick to students having an identity of success in school is that it works differently for every single student.

Gee goes on to give examples in the science classroom of students seeing themselves as scientists. I got to thinking what identity would I ideally like students to have in my class. The obvious answer is historian. I should want students to think, research, analyze, and write like historians with primary documents and from multiple perspectives. Of course I do want students to learn these skills in the domain of history, but very few of my students will be historians or even work in a historical field. So I don’t think this will be an intrinsic motivation for most of my students.

I have decided that a better identity for most students is an active, engaged citizen of the world. A citizen who cares about people, human rights, justice, and making earth better for all. This is an identity that is appealing to students and is unique because each student can personalize what citizenship means and what issues are most important in their life. With this focus they can then study both history and current events to become a critical thinking citizen of the world.

So my focus for this year is to build upon my existing relationships to push every one of my students to be a critical thinking citizen. I also want to connect with each students passions to motivate them to have an identity of success in my classroom. For some students this will be natural and easy, but for others it will take a consistent effort to grow relationships and re-build negative school identities that they have of themselves.

So just like last year I ask you what are your goals for this year?

Warning: The grade you have received may not reflect your actual level of learning in this class.

As some of you know this is my first year teaching math. I am currently teaching one section of 6th grade math. The rest of my assignment is 6th, 7th, and 8th grade technology which I have taught for six years. This new math class is the source of my focus on grades and grading. In my district we have standards-based report cards and in math we have district tests for our required assessments. For this post I will focus on my technology class and assessment (I will save math for the next post).

My Technology class flies under the radar. We have standards that reflect what the class was like five years ago but not what it is today. I and my fellow middle school technology teachers use project-based learning and computers to challenge kids with fun and relevant learning. I truly have more freedom than almost any other teacher in my district to teach whatever I want however I want. I am accountable to my principals who are happy to see children “doing” creative things. We build pop bottle rockets, balsa towers, hot air balloons, pneumatic devices, and egg drop vehicles. We use Lego Robotics and some math software games. Starting last year students blogged and use Google Docs. This year we are using programs such as Google Sketchup, Pivot, and Scratch.

I grade of course in Technology because I have to but my grades are either a rubric of checklists or once in a while based on reaching certain levels. So many of my grades reflect effort of students to complete the projects rather than measure learning. I am ok with that I guess.

For example some excellent students attempted some unique balsa tower designs (the picture is one of them) that totally failed when tested. By the way, most of the class voted their towers to be the strongest before we broke them. They did not receive an A but I would argue that they learned and taught the rest of the class more about good design that anyone else. Why, because they took a creative risk and tried something the rest of the class was unwilling to do. We do not have time or $ for materials to have students build multiple towers to improve their designs which would be the best way to show their level of learning.

Even more difficult for me was when my students made their own Pivots, Sketchup, and Scratch program. We created rubrics together as a class and then I made a grading form in Google that the students embedded on their blogs.

How does one grade creativity? What makes my opinion more valid than anyone else’s?

Therefore I was just going to count the students’ assessments of each other. This did not work out as planned as too many of them did not grade each others’ projects because some were completed late and some did not take the rating seriously. Basically I question the whole point of this grading as a waste of my time.

My ideal system would be to share these tools and projects with students and have them complete them as creatively as possible to the best of their ability. Their “reward” would be the learning that they experienced as a class. Would they all learn the same things or even the same amount? No, just like now they would learn based on the amount of thought and effort they put into their work. If they slacked off then they would learn less; if they worked hard then they would learn more.

I really don’t know how I can accurately measure their actual learning anyway. Grading feels like a game to me and some of the greatest projects like this and this happened for no grade or extra credit. I fail to see how the “grades” that I assign to them contribute to their learning experience and oftentimes do not adequately reflect their actual learning. I also know that grades do not motivate my at risk kids at all, and they motivate the “top” students just to perform for me not to actually learn.

The ultimate thing that matters to me is that students are challenged, given a chance to be creative, and explore in a hands-on way math, science, and technology. The rewards are internal for the students who give their best. Those who just go through the motions miss out no matter what their report card says.

Next post I will explain the conflict I feel comparing this class and grading to my math class.