Transcript of Larry Ferlazzo - Helping Students Motivate Themselves

[Music] [Music] hi I'm Larry frazo and I teach uh English social studies and international baloria classes at uh Luther birbank High School in Sacramento California and today what I'd like to do is to talk about motivation years ago I spent a fair amount of time uh running soup kitchens and Emergency Shelters on a couple of skid row in California and one day it was my job to go into the front porch and sweep so I went out in the porch and was sweeping around many of the uh guys were passed out on the porch and while I was doing this a uh police cruiser came by and stopped in front of our of of our house officer got out started yelling at me justifiably about how we didn't really control what was going on there were lots of complaints from Neighbors and it was true we were well-meaning folks didn't really know a whole lot about what we were doing in the midst of This Ti raade one of the guys who had passed out pulled himself up on the banister and yelled out officer Officer Larry tries he tries real hard we just don't listen to him and that story has stayed with me for a long time and I think because it illustrates the issue of do we want to be right or do we want to be effective and um most of us feel like we're right most of the time particularly when want other people to do things you know our our kids should want to clean the their room because it's the right thing to do in the classroom our students should appreciate the fact that we spend a lot of time on a lesson that should be engaging and when we don't get the reaction that we expect uh we get often get frustrated and um The Challenge I think to me and I think to Educators is to figure out how as Ken Robinson says we can create the conditions in which students can bring the desire and passion to the classroom the same kind of desire and passion they bring to other aspects of their lives whether it's in sports teams whether it's caring for younger siblings um and so when we look at how we can do that I would suggest that uh one one common way that's done won't work and that's extrinsic motivation uh you know plenty of research from Edward Dei Daniel pink uh explains that uh extrinsic motiv motivation rewards incentives threats works for basic manual kind of tasks but is not affec Ive and is actually destructive towards higher level creative thinking nobody wants to be trated treated like a rat in the Maze so um of course sometimes we all use extrinsic motivation in a classroom sometimes I've got to do that to get one student um on task so I can get back to 30 other students but in that kind of situation we want to have an exit strategy a plan to talk afterwards and of course another uh aspect of this Daniel ping talks about it in terms of Baseline rewards that all of us needs need some kind of rewards um and if we don't some baseline things we won't get any motivation at all so for example in a classroom some baseline rewards would be a clean classroom you know a teacher who who spend some time in developing lesson plans who's somewhat relational that we all need to have those kind of basic uh elements in place or else there'll be no kind of motivation so if extensive motivation is going to work what will and I think the what we can do is to try to create the conditions where intrinsic motivation will flourish and plenty of researchers find that there are four elements of that one is autonomy where people have some power in determining how and why they uh how and what they do competence where people feel they have got a good odds of success at accomplishing uh the task the third aspect is relatedness that what they're doing will hopefully create some kind of closer relationship with people they care about whom they respect and the fourth quality um is relevance that what they're doing will help them achieve their Visions their goals or will connect to their interests so I'd like to spend a short period of time giving a couple a few examples for each of those uh for autonomy one thing that teachers can do is obviously choice and there are two types of choice procedural Choice which is you know where you're going to sit um uh what group do you want to be part of and then cognitive Choice which is what researchers have found to be a um more effective in cultivating intrinsic motivation so cognitive choices uh what would be useful homework for you what would uh in Project based learning or problem based learning what do you want to study an example in my classroom last week which is sort of a hybrid uh in my class of English language Learners we looked at there cell phone use had been getting a little out of control so I put two columns on the board uh good and bad and elicited from students what they thought would be appropriate and good use for cell phones in the classroom using Google translate dictionary and what would be inappropriate texting music and then in that kind of conversation also explored what would be reasonable consequences the second aspect of in motivation is the idea of competence a few things we can do you know Carol DW talks a lot about the importance of uh praise for effort as opposed to Natural intelligence praising John for spending an extra amount of time on developing a crafting a a very good conclusion to his essay as opposed to saying boy John you're such a great writer you know by encouraging effort um students are going to be more more likely to be willing to to work hard and to risk mistakes than if we are just praising natural intelligence where they will be less likely to want to risk risk their being appeared looking like Geniuses the second uh um way that we can promote confidence is by helping students see their own uh growth for example in a class in a unit I'll give a list of work words um and ask at the beginning of the unit and ask students you which list the words that you know at the end of the unit they'll look at the same list and compare the two and see how much they gained uh a third aspect related to competence is uh Noel prize winning um Richard fainman talked about this idea of I cannot what I cannot create I cannot understand the idea of students creating their own knowledge uh whether it is through uh teaching others in particular the jigsaw activity a lot of research has shown that students teaching other students uh really enhances student achievement or um um a number of other another number of other aspects inductive learning the idea of providing students uh examples and then students develop Concepts from those examples whether you're going to give students a bunch of material materials and and they have to see if it floats and out of that they can develop the concept of what the water what the density of water is then the idea of relatedness Robert bar Marzano talks about if the relationship is good between teacher and student everything else is better in the classroom I was a community organizer for 19 years and we call Community organizing just a different word for relationship building I think teaching is the same way by developing relationships um you know we can also help tailor our lessons in a way that is more relevant to student dreams and hopes one time in my English class students were writing a persuasive essay about what would be the worst natural disaster to experience one student who was very resistant wasn't interested in doing that and uh but I knew that he was interested in football and so I asked him well why don't you just write a persuasive essay about what the best NFL team is he said oh I can do that he wrote a great essay and was fact the first essay he'd written in two years uh the final aspect of intrinsic motivation is is this idea of relevance and researchers have found even having students write a short paragraph after a lesson about how they think they can apply what they just learned dramatically improve enhances student achievement this idea of transfer of knowledge which is in many ways the key element of Education we want students to be able to take what they learn and apply it to different situations we're not trying to raise people who are good at test taking you know all of this in some ways by some people could be viewed as teachers giving up power and in community organizing we talked a lot about how power is is not a finite piie that by um if someone gets some power it doesn't mean that we have less uh it means the whole pie gets bigger and the more opportunities are created uh Walter Isaacson his biography of Stephen Jobs said that jobs by when he came back to Apple the second time giving up by giving up power he gained more control so I think the the challenge to all of us teach our teachers is to recognize that by giving up a little more um Power we can create lots of additional possibilities for ourselves and for our students [Music] [Music]