Dear colleague,
I don’t know if it’s possible to exaggerate four things about the classroom context:
- How important it is to cultivate student motivation and, therefore, student mastery
- How complex the classroom context is
- How little control we have over it
- How nonetheless massively powerful our small slice of control is
In The Will to Learn’s first chapter, I argue that students are souls — hypercomplex amalgamations of five distinct parts of being. I know, I know — for a lot of you, that's not exactly a sales pitch for the book, but I promise it's an indispensable thinking tool for our work with students.
So if students are, in fact, these once-in-infinity combinations of mind and emotion and relationships and body and will, and you multiply that by every person in the class, and then take that and multiply it by every experience any of these people have ever had, you start to get an idea of your classroom’s motivational context.
It’s kind of like what happened when scientists pointed the Hubble Telescope at the same spot in the sky for fifty days in a row. If you held your thumb at arm’s length to cover the moon, the patch imaged by the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field was approximately the size of a pinhead.
So what happened? It was crazy. Previously dark portions of sky turned out to be littered with not planets, not stars, but galaxies. There were thousands of them. (Image below.)
Galaxies have about one hundred billion stars in them apiece. One hundred billion of our suns, multiplied by thousands, multiplied by all the rest of the night sky beyond the pinhead-sized spot Hubble looked at. Some scientists — scientists — even go so far as to say that the number of stars in the universe may be infinite. Stupefyingly grandiose is a fair summary of our cosmological context.
And that’s what the classroom context is like. The more you learn about teaching and people and your discipline and yourself, the more you think, Oooookay. There is a lot happening here. And all of this context is influencing student motivation all of the time. Each experience, bias, and attribute of every student individually and of each student in relation to every other student has an effect on the degree to which students find us credible, find the work valuable, find Effort worthwhile, find success possible (Efficacy), or find they belong in our rooms doing the work of our disciplines.
All the details are in play, all the time. So, faced with such scale, I see two potential responses:
Option 1: “Wow. I’m existentially horrified right now.”
Option 2: The Five Key Beliefs give us a methodology for finding signals within that noise; we have a lens filter that helps us to see the layer of motivation and intervene intelligently. The Five Key Beliefs help us turn chaos into concept and therein find agency when faced with the difficulty of student demotivation.
To Put It Briefly
The classroom context is complicated, but instead of lamenting this, we ought to roll up our sleeves and get to work understanding the parts of it we can best influence. Beliefs are largely context-dependent, especially in secondary students. How we shape the school or classroom context is enormously predictive of the degree to which students will pursue mastery with care. And we shape that context every day, during every encounter.
Why It’s Important to Know This in a Classroom
You only control so much in a room — a sliver of the total context — but what you do control is massively influential. Be sure you know the difference between what you do and don’t control in your context.*
Try This
Think of Five Key Beliefs work as the sending of signals.** Amidst the complexity of a classroom, we want to be consistently producing signals — through our words and our actions, our lessons and our assignments, and our policies and procedures — that we’re credible, the work is valuable, each student belongs here, and smart Effort can yield growth and success and the success of growth (Efficacy). I like this image of the radio tower because folks who work at radio towers don’t control whether or not their signal is received, but they have complete control over whether or not the signal is sent. This must be the teacher’s mindset.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
*P.S. Now, I have been told, many times, something like this: “But Dave, that stuff I don’t control is super important. We’ve got to fix these massive systemic problems.” And hey, I’m probably with you on that. But I’ve yet to find a school where the elements within that school’s control are being optimally leveraged for the long-term flourishing of students. For the sake of students in classrooms today, I recommend attending to this riper fruit first.
**P.P.S. For specific strategies focused on signal-sending, see moments of genuine connection (through this guide or p. 47ff in The Will to Learn) and Mini-Sermons from an Apologist Winsome and Sure (through this guide or p. 91ff in the same book).***
***P.P.P.S. The above article was excerpted from my 2023 book The Will to Learn, pp. 26-29.
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