The Ideal of Intrinsic Motivation for All Learners

Here's a question we don't think about often enough. "What motivates students to be engaged at school?"  The answers to this vary dramatically and have a huge impact on each and every student.

Let's start with the obvious line of answers. "everyone goes to school," or "everyone needs an education in this day and age".  Though there is a certain amount of truth to these cliched responses I would posit two thoughts.  First, though yes, most jobs do now require at least a high school education or the equivalent, there are ever increasing ways to achieve "the equivalent" without spending days in the traditional bricks and mortar secondary school.  Second, and most importantly, if one of these "'cuz everyone does it" type of responses is the best reason a young person can present for going to school, it's no wonder these same kids do not engage and simply do school because school is the done thing.

Senior students often invoke the "I have to do well at school in order to get into university" mantra when asked about reasons for attending and doing well.  This can be a genuine motivational factor, especially around here where the familial and social expectation is academic and career success.  But again, is this the answer we really want when we pose that question?  Doing well simply to get to the next level is fine when playing video games, but it hardly seems inspirational as an educational goal for a secondary school student.

There are myriad other reasons students give for attending school, all of them valid.  As with any question around motivation, answers to this question can be divided into two categories: intrinsic reasons for attending school and extrinsic reasons.  By now many people will have read Dan Pink's book Drive or at least viewed the related TED Talk, so most people understand that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are not equal.  Intrinsic motivators have a profoundly greater effect on engagement, it's through intrinsic interests that people achieve great things, including great learning.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this phenomenon of total intrinsic engagement in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  The ideal class would have every student engaged in productive, stimulating and interesting work 100% of the time.  Of course that's purely an ideal, but ideals can act as guides and though I believe that with the BCEdplan we're headed in the right direction here in British Columbia, there are many education systems which still rely too heavily, and to an increasing degree, on extrinsic motivators to entice kids to engage in school.

Prevalent assessment practices are probably the most obvious example of how we rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators.  As long as we evaluate more than we assess and as long as we provide grades more often than we provide feedback, student motivation will come from the collection of this "currency" that we call marks.  Those richest in this currency will be afforded the best opportunities come the end of high school...an unfortunate but true fact of life as things stand.  We've all run across the students who are "mark sharks" these are the kids who focus solely on their grades, often to the detriment of true learning.  But they're simply the ones who have truly taken to heart our message that good grades, as opposed to quality learning, are the primary goal of our systems.

There are also more subtle ways in which our current paradigms hinder the incubation of intrinsic motivation.  Whether it's being forced to teach to standardized tests or being bound by overly prescriptive curricula, teachers are often restricted in what they do in the classroom.  Prescribing curricular content any more than absolutely necessary robs teachers, and students, of the freedom to choose material that truly engages and inspires them.  Rather than demanding that teachers "cover" material, to be of much relevance for the future our goals must be focused around higher order thinking outcomes, leaving as much of the choice of course material as possible to the teachers, and the students to decide for themselves.  This will facilitate far greater engagement and hence far greater intrinsic motivation amongst students.


Lack of motivation is the reason that any of us quit anything, school is no exception. Extrinsic motivation is far preferable to no motivation at all, we've all needed it to get us through one thing or another.  But extrinsic motivators don't get student truly engaged in their learning.  They make school analogous to a job...it's something that has to be done.  If we want our systems to be as strong as they can possibly be we need to talk about and explicitly foster an intrinsic motivation in each of our students.  Only students who are intrinsically motivated to be engaged in school will end up truly challenged, enriched, energized and ultimately fulfilled by their experience.  Yes it's an ideal, but it's worth keeping in mind.

The BCEdplan: I like what I've seen so far.

For the people of BC, particularly those in education, the existence of the BCEdplan is old news by now.  After getting off to a bit of a shaky start thanks to some unfortunate timing (the roll out coincided with teacher job action)  and the premature publication of some tentative and unrealistic timeline goals (which have since disappeared) the plan seems to be gaining genuine momentum.  Most tellingly, people and bodies who had initially been skeptical of the plan (many of them reflexively) have been increasingly silent as time has passed.  I can't help but take this as a sign that the open and collaborative approach being taken by the ministry is gaining converts.

The ministry has been actively seeking feedback using discussion forums on the web as well as hosting a series of feedback gathering sessions in numerous regions across the province.  Having helped organize the session in Richmond, and collate the feedback, I experienced first hand the genuine interest of our community in the directions that public education will be taking in the future.  All the feedback gathered so far has been summarized here.  Reading this report, I realized that the silence from those who had previously been naysayers in this process stems from the fact that the ideas expressed and the proposals being aired make sense.  In other words, there's been precious little to argue against.  I'm particularly heartened by this sentence from the "Next Steps" section;

"We recognize that transforming our education system involves more than just giving you a space to talk and then writing fancy reports. We must also act on what you’ve told us.  And we’re doing that."

Those who know me understand that it's my nature to be, shall we say, "suspicious" of government initiatives, especially as they pertain to education.  With that on the table I do have to admit that I've been very impressed thus far with the openness and candour with which the Ministry of Education has approached this initiative.  And though I don't often use "the T word" the direction that the ministry is taking promises to be truly transformational for the education system and for future students in the province.

The wholly unofficial word on the street is that it will be at least another two years before this plan is presented as a cohesive whole, and that's a good thing.  Reimagining and transforming something as large as a public education system, particularly given the stubborn tenacity of some of our industrial age structures and paradigms, does not come quickly or easily.  There are still far more questions than there are answers, and given the ever changing nature of society's expectations of education, I don't imagine that we'll ever have all the answers.  But if the ministry remains dedicated to this process, as the quote above would seem to indicate, then whatever's coming promises to be challenging, exciting and, to some "traditionalists", a little worrying.

6 Common Misunderstandings About Assessment and Evaluation

Over the past two decades there has been a lot written, and much discussion, around the use effective use of assessment in the classroom.  Unfortunately many educators, particularly at the secondary school level, continue to cling tenaciously to “traditional” practices which are, at best ineffective and at worst, counterproductive to the goals of modern education.  Here are six common misconceptions about assessment and evaluation that we need to abolish.

1.    “Assessment and evaluation are the same.”  No they’re not! Too many people, particularly those not employed in the field of education, conflate these two and too often within the field we evaluate student work and tell ourselves that what we’ve done is assessment.  Assessment involves timely, detailed  feedback based around clearly defined learning outcomes.  Evaluation is “giving a grade” to a piece of work, usually based on normative criteria, but too often in comparison to the work of other students.

2.    “Most assessment is summative.”  Well, unfortunately that may still be true in many quarters, but it should not be.  As we’ve learned over the past two decades or so assessment can be a very powerful learning tool in and of itself.  As Dylan Wiliam has been saying for years, we need to constantly assess both student work and our own teaching, adjusting as we go, such that by the time we get to the end of a unit of study students have already had an opportunity to rethink and revise their work.  There are still far too many teachers who rely too heavily on one single summative assessment at the end of each unit and then move onto another topic no matter the outcomes.

3.    “Assessment is one way communication, the teacher gives feedback on student work”.  Well, yes that’s true, but the most productive assessment should be a dialogue.  In traditional assessment and evaluation models students complete a task, the teacher assesses the work and tells the student how they’ve done and, in formative cases, how to improve the work.  But when students engage with the teacher to discuss work, talk about what they’ve done and why, both student and teacher stand to gain far more from the experience.  Modern technology makes two way communication between teacher and student much easier and far more ubiquitous, let’s start using it more effectively.

4.    “Assessment is for grading purposes.”  This is one of the most pervasive and potentially damaging holdovers from bygone eras in education.  Yes, final grades should reflect some of what has gone on between student and teacher regarding assessment.  But the “collecting of marks” to arrive at the final grade is counterproductive in many ways, here are just two.  First, the collation marks too often includes work which was done before students had mastered the material.  As has been said by others, when we redo things like driving tests we don’t “average” the results, why do we do this with school work.  Secondly, every teacher, especially in secondary schools, is aware of how the pursuit of ‘marks’ often distracts students’ focus from the work at hand.  This is doubly damaging because neuroscience is telling us that brains under stress from external stimuli can have significantly diminished learning capacity.

5.    “Student work should be given a mark”.  In summative situations, or where marks are necessary, this assertion is true.  But too often we put a mark on student work when we’re hoping to use the work formatively, which is a mistake.  As soon as students see a grade on a piece of work, be it a letter or number grade, the focus is immediately taken off of any meaningful feedback and, in the student’s mind, that piece of work is complete.  It’s time to move on.  No matter what the teacher intends grades imply a finality that’s hard to overcome in students’ minds.

6.    “If assignments are late I deduct marks.”  There is no pedagogically defensible reason for doing this.  This is simply trying to modify behaviour using coercion through grades.  There is nothing wrong with having some consequence for late work, but the assignment of grades (when necessary) should reflect student learning, nothing more.  Put another way, if a student hands in work worthy of an A today, is that work somehow different if it were handed in tomorrow?

My experience has been that when teachers rethink and reform their views about what assessment is about, and what its primary purposes are, their feedback is invariably positive.  When we pry the “mark book” out of the collective hand of those in the teaching profession, and allow individual teachers the freedom to use assessment in more productive ways, we find that assessment becomes far more authentic and fruitful and far less about the drudgery (and judgment) of marking.

"B+, great work"...or Is There More to It?

Like many schools across North America, especially here in BC, our school is wrestling with assessment and evaluation.  The differences between the two and how each is best used seem to be the general theme of many of our conversations.  As school staffs go ours is fairly well versed and quite open minded about discussing, rethinking and restructuring our practices to make assessment more useful and more meaningful for students.    Our teachers are starting to genuinely understand the differences between assessment and evaluation and, more importantly, are beginning to use more authentic forms of assessment, and evaluating only when necessary.  Given what research has told us over the past three decades about learning and motivation, "Assessment for Learning" and "Assessment as Learning" need to become our primary focus when assessing, with evaluation best left for when it's time for something more summative.

There's some exciting stuff going on here at Steveston-London.  Our science department has been relying primarily on formative assessment based around their 7 "Essential Learning Outcomes" for science 8-10 for some years now.  It's only when the students move onto the more content heavy and more closely prescribed curricula of the senior sciences that our teachers move to more "traditional" grading practices (i.e. actual grading rather than more meaningful feedback).  Our English Department is moving in this direction as is our ESL department (which I've written about before), who are trying to get away from "grades" at the lower levels altogether.  We've also recently received some money from our district to allow interested departments some release time to revise their thinking and implement authentic assessment models of their own design.  Our Social Studies teachers are keen to get started with this, and fingers crossed, they'll have developed an authentic assessment model of their own in time for implementation next school year.

We all have our idealized model of assessment and evaluation in mind, and for most of us it's a long way from where we are now.  There are many more discussions to be had and a lot more thinking that must go into this vital topic.  For instance, one thing I believe that needs to be addressed is the possibility and the flexibility of having completely different models and grading schema to better account for the differences between subject areas.  There's nothing wrong with a 7/10 on a mathematics assignment where a student clearly had 7 correct answers and 3 incorrect, but 7/10 is essentially meaningless feedback for a piece of writing.  All around me people are having truly meaningful discussions and rethinking their own concepts of "assessment" and "feedback".  Let's encourage this and help keep things moving in the right direction.

“A majority of students are telling us they are nervous or anxious all the time,”

The title is a quote from Maria Yau, research coordinator for a study that was recently released by the Toronto District School Board.  The study asked 103,000 students questions about various aspects of their lives, including their daily levels of stress and anxiety.  However, stress and anxiety were merely one aspect of the comprehensive census, the results of which are summarized here in a powerpoint.  Now, I would agree that it's rather disquieting (though not necessarily shocking) that today's teens are as stressed out as they are, and I will get back to more thoughts about that later.  But looking at all the findings of the study, I was struck by the irony inherent in how the results were presented in the media.  Virtually every news story about the census focused almost exclusively on the 'stress and anxiety' findings, but a visit to the TDSB site reveals these other findings;

• 92% of students feel safe at school
• There's been a 10% increase in students eating a proper lunch, thanks in part to school food programs put in place because of the 2006 survey
• There been a 14% increase in attendance at parent teacher interviews
• Over 90% of students feel that their background is respected by adults in the school

So where's the irony?  Does focusing solely on stress and anxiety, while completely ignoring positive findings from the same survey not increase the level of stress and anxiety?  Given the full scope of the survey results, it's more than just a little disingenuous for the various news people to go all "chicken little" over this narrow band of findings.  Yes it's worrisome that stress levels are so high, but would it not serve the public interest better to also include some information about what schools, and students, in the 21st century are doing better at than they've ever done in the past?  Let's celebrate kids' (and schools') successes, and let's be aware of elevated anxiety levels, but let's not exacerbate anxiety issues in the service of selling papers.

So teenagers are stressed, that in itself is not necessarily a good or bad state, it depends on the source of the stress.  Findings in neuroscience indicate that stress can have either a positive effect or a negative effect on learning, it seems to depend on the source of the stress.  Generally speaking, a brain that's stressed by the material at hand (i.e. a kid worrying about the content on a test or a difficult assignment) has its learning capacity slightly enhanced by the anxiety.  But a brain under stress from external sources (i.e. a kid worrying about her home situation or worrying about grades rather than the material at hand) will have diminished learning capacity.  This last point makes intuitive sense, we've all experienced trying to learn while being distracted by negative forces in our lives, it tends not to go very well.  Unfortunately, the overall results of this census would seem to indicate that it's the external stressors that are affecting young people today.  Indeed, the census indicates that students seem to be pretty happy with the way things are going at school.  It's the rest of the world that's having the deleterious effects on student anxiety levels.  The chart below has some thought provoking numbers.

There's no doubt that we live in a stressful world, but surely we can do better than to create a culture where learning is disrupted by the level of anxiety in young people's lives?  That external anxiety is anathema to learning is not a new idea, Csikszentmihalyi, Vygotsky and many others have come to the same conclusion. We need to start using this knowledge to design educational systems that do everything within their power to reduce stresses on students.  Worrying about "marks" is one area in which we could make improvements, and at our school we're tackling that (slowly).  Post secondary direction is another area in which we should do more to alleviate worries.  We need to convince more kids that it's okay to not be a "white collar" professional.  (In fact, it's very arguable that skilled trades are some of the few professions that simply cannot be outsourced).  Of course there are external pressures on today's teenagers that we can do precious little to change.  But we need to always be mindful that the more external stress we put on young brains, the less learning we can expect them to achieve.

Will Narcism Soar or Will Self Consciousness Win Out?

Ask anyone I know and they'll tell you that I think technology is, by and large, pretty cool. One topic that's gaining more interest, and which will require much more research, is the effect(s) that modern technology has on our brain.  For instance, research has been under way for a number of years with a particular emphasis on memory and I don't think it will surprise anyone that we tend not to remember phone numbers anymore.  The effects of the explosion of technology use on our brains leaves literally thousands of avenues to be explored, but one that I find fascinating will be playing itself out over the next ten to fifteen years and the results may be interesting.

Advances in technology have brought huge advances in the ability to personalize products and digitize personal information, images and sound in particular.  Kids born recently will be the first generation to grow up with these "ubiquity of self" capabilities.  How will this affect them?  What effect will seeing literally thousands of images of themselves before they enter school have on how they see themselves in relation to the rest of the world?  Humans  evolved in a world where images other than crude cave paintings didn't exist, and it wasn't until the past 200 years or so that anyone other than the rich could afford the luxury of seeing (much less worrying about!) what they looked like.  When I was growing up families had a handful of pictures around the house commemorating special events, with a few more tucked safely into albums.  Today in our house, again thanks to technology, our walls are adorned with scores of pictures of our two young kids doing wonderful things and looking impossibly cute.  And given modern digital storage capabilities, that's just the tip of the iceberg for images of our kids.  How will this play out as the current (and future) generations of young people grow up bombarded with images of themselves?  Will we see an increase in self assuredness or will it morph into self absorption and narcism?  Adolescent anxiety is on the rise, is there a connection?

We've also seen an explosion in the ability to "personalize" virtually anything.  From Christmas videos from Santa to toddlers having their early writing attempts published for free in hard bound books, where the 20th century was about mass production of gazillions of identical items, the 21st century is all about using technology to make each and every kid feel special about every thing they do.  Again, I wouldn't miss the look of awe on my daughter's face as Santa was addressing her personally for the world, but I can't help but wonder about the effect of having so many of her experiences personalized and so much of what she does recorded forever.

We're starting to get a glimpse of some of the pitfalls of a society where everyone is "connected" and everything is saved on someone's server.  People like Jesse Miller are making lucrative careers out of warning kids about the hazards they face thanks to their net personae.  From being incontrovertibly caught rioting, to losing jobs and coveted university entrance offers, young people are learning some hard lessons about how the ubiquity of their images can affect their lives.  In other words, we're seeing in clear terms how technology is affecting the relationships between kids and the external world,  I would be very surprised if these same phenomena weren't also somehow affecting how their brains develop and function.  Only time will tell.

Improving ESL Engagement

As I look at the numerous things our ESL Department is doing to improve student engagement I can't help but think that we're on the right track in getting reticent ESL students to "buy in" to their own learning.  As I've stated in previous posts, our ESL department has adopted a Learning Outcomes based assessment format, using rubrics to show each student where he or she lies on their journey to becoming fluent in English.  But the changes have gone further than that and what I'm seeing in our ESL 1 and 2 classes is exciting in that it incorporates three of my favourite professional development interests, assessment for learning, technology integration and the general "rethinking" of how we do things (okay, that last one is kind of broad!); here's what's happening.

Students in Ms. Sullivan's class were assigned a project that was very different from past years.  In the past consciously or not, the focus of ESL Social Studies classes has been on telling 'our' story (i.e. the story of Canada) to the students and hoping that through this the students would learn English, and learn about their new country.  But teachers were finding that this approach didn't appeal to many new immigrants, particularly young men, who were ambivalent at best about being brought to a new country with a completely foreign culture.  So, rather than tell them our story, Ms. Sullivan has asked them to tell us their stories, in the form of a project about their hometowns.  Some are doing posters, but most are using either Prezi or Glogster to showcase the stories of where they've come from.  All the students seem interested, engaged and even excited about sharing a part of their 'old' lives with their 'new' classmates.  I've been invited to sit in on their final presentations next week (I look forward to it) but in the meantime, the students have presented draft versions of their projects to students in other ESL classes and have been incorporating suggestions from their peers' feedback into the final product.

My feeling is that if we truly want students to engage, then where practicable we have to give them as much opportunity as possible to choose their own topic/material/curriculum.  Of course this isn't news to anyone who has been following research into education and learning for the past decade, but this story provides just one small example of how rethinking delivery and letting go of little control can make a huge difference in student engagement.