…is pain. This is important. When we see motivated students, what we’re seeing are human beings benefitting from the five key beliefs. On the flipside, when we see unmotivated or apathetic students, we’re seeing the dark sides of these five key beliefs. Think of them as the five key fears. These fears are: Anti-Credibility: I […]
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Thinking in Public: The Inquiry Path that Led to This Post
About eight years ago, I looked ahead to the coming summer and I realized that I would need a summer job if we were to support our growing family. At the time, our oldest was two, and our second child was on her way. I looked into lawn mowing and insurance selling. And then I […]
Simple Intervention: Bill Damon’s Approach to Helping Students Value School
Boring. Dumb. Pointless. Irrelevant. Annoying. Stupid. When students say words like these, they’re telling us this: I don’t value this kind of work. Value is one of five key beliefs beneath student motivation. Every individual arrives at value differently — but there are some interesting patterns in the research. For example, when a young person […]
Rules of Thumb When Giving Explanations
A key skill for the teacher is explaining things clearly. Here are a few tips for helping with that. 1) “Superfluous information creates confusion, muddies waters, and digs holes.” There is a man in my community whose career involved working with NASA on the Apollo program. We call him “Alabama” Bob Clingan. He’s a joy […]
Learning vs. Task-Completing
Many of my students, when pressed, struggle to say just what learning is. They can tell you about completing tasks, checking grades, keeping track of emergency passes, and so on. In other words, they are aware of schoolish behaviors. But they can’t tell you exactly what’s happening when they learn or how one goes about […]