Motivation Post (Jigsaw #1)

As we completed our Jigsaw activity in class, I left feeling that I had gained some useful, hands-on information on how to motivate students.  The article that I was an "expert" on was titled Texts That Matter and the main idea was that   "Instead of focusing on how to get students to remember what they read, our best bet is simply to provide texts that are more memorable."

I think that this is great advice, but what really made the jigsaw activity useful was being exposed to the reoccurring themes that surfaced in all the articles.  According to the class interpretations of the articles, it seems that the role of motivation in literacy hinges on a student centred approach to instruction.  Student motivation and buy in requires that there is a certain amount of intrinsic motivation stemming from the active involvement of the students in the selection of the medium of instruction. To put in more simply, the kids should be able to choose a way to approach the given subject matter.  Therefore, the teacher needs to provide a VARIETY of QUALITY material. This idea of student selection seemed central to every article.

My school pays for me to attend one educational conference each year and the best conference that I have attended is The Brain Conference, which took place in Geneva a couple of years ago.  The conference is put on annually and the location is always changing.  One of my favorite speakers from the conference was Judy Willis, who is a neurologist turned teacher.  Judy's main focus is pinning educational pedagogy to current brain research and one area that she discusses is motivation.  Not surprisingly, she hits on some of the main topics that we have been discussing in our small groups in class, such as, student buy-in (intrinsic motivation).  Judy presents her ideas about motivation through a framework that she calls the video game model.  The video link that I have posted below is not really as much about video games as it is about the specifics of what is happening neurologically in regard to motivation.  I found this video fascinating and very applicable to the classroom.  If you do not want to watch the whole 24 minutes, you can start it at about 11 minutes and still get the main idea.  Just click on the link below (for some techie reason, the blog would not let me imbed the video directly on the page).

 

Judy Willis, Neurologist and Teacher, on Motivation