One of the big things we discovered during the COVID closures of spring 2020 is that many of our students are presently motivated by carrots and sticks: credit or no credit, GPA boosts or GPA reductions, prizes or penalties, incentives or consequences. Most educators did not find this surprising. This “play the game” mentality is […]
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Teachers Need Time to Learn about Using Time
Teachers Need Time to Learn about Using Time Well In the first year of my teaching career, like so many of my peers around the nation, I was proud of how many hours I worked. I didn’t count them, of course — I just noted with grim satisfaction when mine was the first car in […]
Debunking Relevance as *the* Key to Student Motivation
I’m seeing a lot on the webwaves these days about how whatever fall looks like, it needs to be relevant. If we’re going to expect students to learn something, we had better make sure it’s relevant — otherwise they won’t do it and there’s no value in them doing it. This is common thinking, and […]
What Has the Spring of 2020 Taught Us about Student Motivation?
Hey there, One of the central questions of my work has become this: how do we make schools both more productive and more humane? It’s a total copy of management thinker Peter Drucker’s career question. Since the beginning, I’ve started every one of my professional development sessions with a slide that says, “More learning, less […]
The Spectre of Moral Disengagement: What It Is, Why It Matters
In a recent paper presented at the NCAPSA American Politics Meeting, researchers Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason shared findings from a nationally representative survey: 40-60% of Americans express moral disengagement with members of the political party opposed to their own. Let’s break that down. Moral disengagement is a phenomenon defined by Al Bandura and colleagues […]