“The most routine abstract thought very often struck him with an uncommon force and would stir him up remarkably. . . . A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness.” — from Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky, […]
The Four Academic Mindsets: How 25 Words Decimated the 1000s I’ve Written on Student Motivation
Recently, I proved to Alexis that her ability and competence could improve with effort. On her first world history test, she did poorly on the map portion and, during our first practice session in study hall following the test, did not improve much even when I walked her through a basic retrieval practice technique. (In other words, […]
The Consortium Framework in 400 Words
What follows is my abbreviated summary of the central structure of Camille Farrington et al.’s Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners. The report is over 80 pages long, so really, this is super abbreviated, probably past what is prudent. My hope with this post is to give you enough of a look at the Consortium Framework to realize the […]
Predicting Success: Dialing Long-Term Flourishing Back into Things We Might Affect This Year
If our ultimate goal is less than the long-term flourishing of kids, student motivation doesn’t matter much. English teachers want kids to become lifelong readers because we want them to flourish; science teachers aim at teaching a methodical way of thinking and viewing the world because such thinking is instrumental to a flourishing life; physical education exists […]
Why Does Student Motivation Matter? And Whose Job Is It, Anyway?
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing the results of a “Research Sprint” that I conducted in August 2016. I wrote a fairly detailed account of the sprint in my last post, but the gist is that I read three books and 15 references within those books for a single element of the Non-Freaked Out Framework […]