Motivation Research

Ah-hah! This is the first time I've seen results of motivation research. For rote tasks, use the carrot-and-stick approach. For complex tasks, pay enough to take money off the table as an issue, then promote autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

How does this translate to education? Here's how I translate it...

For trainers: Link compensation to trainee performance on a paced, standardized curriculum.

For trainees: Link compensation to good output measured against quotas.

For teachers: Unlink compensation from student performance on a paced, standardized curriculum, then promote teacher autonomy in the classroom, self-directed development of mastery for teachers, and autonomous, self-directed learners as the goal of teaching.

For students: Provide enough success to take grades off the table as an issue, then promote autonomy in learning, self-directed development in the student's desired area of mastery, and learning to learn as the goal.

It's no wonder we're not seeing the results we want from education reform. We've set up the incentives to motivate rote learning and to reward drudgery, not to develop lifelong learners.

Ignited and Burning Bright

Some snippets of conversations with a student... (I've embellished it a little bit for readability, but otherwise the dialogue is true to life.)

A couple months ago...

Student: Quantum mechanics is awesome. I've been reading about it. Strange things happen.

Teacher: Yes, quantum mechanics explains and predicts many strange effects. Physicists call it "quantum weirdness."

Student: Dr. Buckner, is there a such thing as a quantum physicist?

Teacher: Yes, there is. Quantum effects are being used more and more in devices. There will be a need for quantum physicists during your lifetime.

Student: How would I become a quantum physicist?

Teacher: Get as much math as you can in high school. Make sure you're strong in it. Major in physics in college. Then go to a graduate school with a strong program in quantum physics and pick a research project that fascinates you.

Student: That's what I want to do. I want to be a quantum physicist.

A couple weeks ago...

Student: Dr. Buckner, would a bowl of cereal with milk be a solid, or a liquid, or a broth?

Teacher: Well, it definitely would not be a broth — a broth is made from meat. (English is this student's second language.) Technically it would be a mixture — but it's just a bowl of cereal. (smiling) I believe you're overthinking it. Why do you want to know this?

Student: I ate a bowl of cereal this morning and I wondered how it would be classified. It had liquid in it, but it was not a liquid. It had solids in it, but it was not a solid. So I wondered if it must be a broth since it is both solid and liquid.

Teacher: The kind of thinking you are doing is important in science. Great scientists can look at the same things everybody else looks at day to day, but they see something new and different from what anybody else has seen before. When I was in graduate school, I was in a meeting with Nevill Mott, a Nobel Prize winner. A student asked him what he got the Nobel Prize for. Mott said, "I created a new field of science." The student asked how he did that. Mott said, "I was looking through a window, thinking of the atomic structure of the glass, and I realized that everything I knew about solid state physics says that this atomic structure should be opaque, not transparent. I set out to understand why glass is transparent instead of opaque, and it led to a new field of science."

Student: (grinning) I'm going to win a Nobel Prize!

Last week...

Student: Dr. Buckner, if you had a beam of light and shined it into a box made of mirrors, could you keep the beam of light forever?

Teacher: Well, if the mirrors were perfect reflectors I suppose you could. But if you had it, how would you ever look at it?

Student: What do you mean?

Teacher: If you made a window in the box to look at the beam of light, wouldn't it escape?

Student: (puzzled) Yeah, I never thought of that.

A few days ago...

Student: Dr. Buckner, if you use a solar panel to power a light, and you shine the light back onto the solar panel, would the light stay on forever?

Teacher: All real systems have losses. Every time the light goes back into the solar panel some of its energy is lost. Every time the electric power goes back into the light some energy is lost. So it would not stay on forever.

Student: How long would it last?

Teacher: A small fraction of a second. It would go too fast to watch it fade.

Student: (Sat down, deep in thought.)

Last class period...

Student: Dr. Buckner, if you put a huge mirror out in space 10 light years away, and looked at it through a powerful telescope, could you look back in time to 20 years ago?

Teacher: Hmmmm. This is something I've never thought of. Let me think about it a minute. (brief pause) Well, of course there would be practical difficulties of ever actually setting a large enough mirror 10 light years away, and of having a powerful enough telescope to see the reflected image, but in principle I don't see any reason why you are not correct. Fascinating. This is a new thought for me. Do you like science fiction? You could write a great science fiction story with this.

Student: (smiling with pride) Yeah!

Sometime in the near future...

This student's scientific curiosity is ignited and burning bright. He is going to bring in some scenario I won't be able to answer. What will I do as his teacher? I will have discourse with him about it, showing him how a scientist might approach and explore an unanswered problem. Together we'll come up with some hypotheses and some testable predictions. He'll experience what it's like to weigh one hypothesis against another on a real unanswered scientific question. He'll sense the eagerness and the drive scientists feel to test their hypotheses by experiment. Most importantly, he will no longer come to me to get an authoritative answer to accept as-is — he'll come to me as a resource from whom he can get information to formulate his own answer.

Seating Charts

At the beginning of this school year, I kept strict seating charts in my classes. Now I don't. Here's what I used to do, and what I do now.

To keep strict seating charts, I built a spreadsheet to automatically label a chart for each class using information in my rosters, with seniors highlighted. The "Print" tab shows the chart from the teacher's perspective, for taking daily attendance. The other tabs show the charts from the students' perspective, for them to find their seats while looking at a screen display of the chart. I built in a randomize function that allows me to shuffle seats on the spot. I've used this, for example, to shuffle seats for a test. If you like, you may copy the spreadsheet and modify it for your own use. Leave a comment with your contact information so that I can tell you how to access the undocumented functionality. (For example, student ID's can be turned off by deleting the content of cell H1 in the "Print" spreadsheet.)

As my teaching style has evolved from mostly lecture to mostly group work, I no longer keep a strict seating chart. I allow students to self-select into learning groups, which works pretty well in my classroom environment. They enjoy sitting and working together in clumps, instead of in neatly arranged rows all facing forward.

To support the "mostly group work" teaching and learning style, I now use seating charts built from photographs of each learning group, with seniors highlighted in bold. This allows me to take attendance quickly while supporting the "clumpy" sitting arrangements preferred by the students. I can still use the spreadsheet if I need to shuffle students for a test.

Lecture: Optional

I've been trying an experiment in my physics classes, making lecture optional. Students who want the lecture on a topic come up to the front of the classroom, and students who would rather learn the material from the textbook read and study it together in groups in the back of the room while I am lecturing up front.

Lecture gets a bad rap, but results in my classroom are clear: lecture is effective compared to unguided learning from the textbook in small groups. The optional-lecture experiment was one piece of a comprehensive lesson plan that also included guided inquiry, active learning, scaffolded problem-solving, and repetition. Within that context, lecture was effective.

Conclusion: Lecture can be enjoyed in moderation as one part of a healthy, balanced diet of learning strategies.

A Cloudy Vision

I have a not-yet-well-formulated vision that standardized testing could be transformed into an SBAR process. Specific skills would be tested, and reporting would consist of a list of specific skills for which a student has demonstrated mastery.

Instead of subject-based tests where the student is judged "not proficient," "proficient," or "advanced" in a subject, standardized tests would assess mastery of cross-curricular skills. The variety of subject-based tests we administer now would be collapsed into a single test of cross-curricular student skills.

As I stated, my vision of this is not well-formulated, but if it can be well-formulated and implemented it would change the focus of education from content delivery to student development. In the current system, students are receptacles for content. Standards of Learning are written as lists of content to be mastered, and end-of-course tests are written to sample the content.

In the reform I envision, student development becomes the focus. Content becomes a means of  achieving student development. Standards of Learning would be written as lists of student skills to be mastered, and standardized tests would be written to assess student skills.

Suddenly, it would become much less important to push a student through a lesson on Le Châtelier's Principle, for example, and much more important to develop the ability of a student to comprehend how manipulation of one variable in apparent isolation can result in complex system-wide changes. Le Châtelier's Principle provides content for developing this comprehension in the student of chemistry, but ecosystem ecology does also in biology, as well as parametric equations in mathematics, historical narratives in social studies, free-body diagrams in physics, and even poetry in English. In fact, the very act of specifying that students must learn Le Châtelier's Principle in chemistry isolates the concept as something peculiar to chemistry without parallel or application in other subjects, something to be remembered for a test and then forgotten.

On standardized tests, a student would be able to demonstrate cross-curricular skills in any of the specific content areas that include the skill, or in several content areas that include the skill. Each year, students would accumulate a longer list of mastered skills in their testing report. A simple pie-chart showing number of skills mastered by content area would indicate student strength by subject.

Diplomas could be individualized, as, for example, "John Doe, graduated 2012, having mastered 567 standards of learning, with a concentration in science and math."

Even test-based teacher evaluation might work under this system: "On average, Jane Doe's chemistry students add 15% more demonstrated science skills to their testing record after taking her course." Reporting new skills added as a percentage of previously acquired skills in a subject would normalize for incoming student ability. A teacher of low-performing students could still demonstrate solid teaching ability through the percentage gain. If her students were grossly behind in their skills and not ready for the rigors of her course, she could engage them to learn the skills they are ready for and still show good teaching performance. The system we have now forces her to do the opposite — to push students through content they are not ready for in hopes that they will retain enough to pass the test.

In our current system, where standardized tests are content-based, "teaching to the test" is a frustrating experience for teacher and students, when students come into a course ill prepared to comprehend the material at the pace required to cover standardized content, as is often the case. In our current system, "not teaching to the test" is also a frustrating experience for teacher and students, because the test does not illuminate the fact that her students have actually made good progress.

In a system of standardized tests based on student skills, "teaching to the test" is exactly what the teacher ought to do. She makes strategic selections from the wealth of content she has at her disposal to address the skills her students are ready to develop. She has the freedom to keep her students in Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, where learning is most efficient.

I invite everybody, everywhere, to help me develop these ideas. Please poke holes in it, and let's see if we can plug them.

The Write Idea

I have a son in Godwin High School taking a course with challenging writing assignments. Like most colleges nowadays, this high school has a writing center, a resource for students to use to improve their writing. In addition to a final draft, my son is also required to turn in a first draft that has been marked up by the writing center.

What a great idea! Everybody wins:

• My son gets the benefit of another set of eyes looking at his writing. When he writes, he knows he must write so that another real person — not just a teacher — can understand what he has written. The mark-ups give him authentic feedback for improvement.
• The student in the writing center who marks up my son's paper gets a much deeper understanding of the writing process. The best way to learn is to teach. The student likely also gets service hours.
• The teacher gets papers that have already been screened and corrected of the most egregious errors, so that she can focus on higher-level structure and effectiveness of the writing. The writing center also probably enables more cycles of learning, since the teacher can use her limited time for grading final drafts rather than first drafts.
• The school gets a better performance record because it feeds more sophisticated students into the standardized testing process.

My own students could benefit from this approach. I need to give some thought as to how I can incorporate screening and rewrites into the writing they turn in to me.

First MOP Team Assessment

A couple weeks ago I started a program in my physics classes called MO Physics for students who want to move faster than the class pace. Today I assessed the first MOP team to move ahead of their class.

The MO B.A. Physics team pictured here did a marvelous job. They signed up on my online form to come in at lunchtime today to demonstrate mastery of the physics skill Acceleration.

When they came in, I told them with a genuine smile on my face, "My job is to make you nervous. You'd better be certain of what you say to me. You might be saying the most profound thing imaginable, but you won't see any sign of it on my poker face. And if you're uncertain of something, you won't find the answer in my face. In fact, I may give you a blank stare that makes you think you're saying something stupid. It won't be easy, but if you can get past me, you can do this for anybody." Since we have an excellent rapport, they know the friendly, supporting spirit in which these true-but-not-threatening remarks were given. I also told them the worst possible thing that could happen is that I would ask them to come in again to elaborate on something that was lacking the first time.

Part of the MO Physics program is for the team to determine how they will demonstrate mastery of a skill to their teacher in such a way that it would be apparent that each individual had mastered the material. I was curious to see how they would do it. The team of four had prepared four white boards demonstrating their mastery of each of the specific skills listed in my lesson plan, using drawn images, equations, and text. They presented individually and together, acted out a demonstration of deceleration together, and answered all of my impromptu questions to my complete satisfaction.

I have enjoyed watching the team work together in class. Rarely have I seen such diligence and focus. I was eager to see if they could pull off a good demonstration of mastery, and they did! In fact, I'm convinced they comprehend the material better than if they had studied to pass my test on it (which they are exempt from now).

I can say the performance of this team has been the highlight of my teaching career so far, and I am delighted with their success today. May they be the first of many yet to come.