This pandemic year has, broadly speaking, had a pretty significant impact on student motivation to learn, and particularly to complete assignments. When I check in with students, I often hear, “I’m just not motivated right now, Mr. Rolnick.” While finding the motivation to complete schoolwork has always been a challenge for some of my students, the loss of an in-person setting has meant that not only that schoolwork is very directly competing with video games or TikTok, but also that some of the habits of discipline established in-person are missing.
What does it mean to be motivated to do well in school? When I wrote about grades a couple of weeks ago, I touched briefly on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, arguing that ideally, students are intrinsically motivated to learn and complete schoolwork because it’s an opportunity to learn and grow. I am lucky to have plenty of students who are motivated by their curiosity and interest in learning. And, although it’s not my ideal, I have plenty of students motivated by a desire to do well in school.
However, that is not where all students are at in a normal year or in this pandemic year. Some students are not motivated by the opportunity to learn or by grades. What is to be done in those circumstances?
Ideally, schoolwork is relevant, responsive, or sustaining to students’ lives, so that they find it interesting or see value in engaging with it. When I plan, that is typically where I start: What will hook students into content or skills, such that they see why it is important and relevant, so that it sparks their curiosity or interest, or otherwise engages them in learning? Where can I build in student choice and autonomy so that students have the capacity to direct their learning where they are most interested? This generally works well in person for all but a few students that seem to generally lack motivation across all their classes.
Second, I think there is an important relational component to scholastic motivation. Students don’t necessarily need to like their teachers (although it does help), but students should feel respected and cared for by them. Indeed, in my experience, when a student feels respected and cared for, that typically translates to increased motivation for that class. Likewise, positive and encouraging feedback engenders not only feelings of competence in students but also motivates continued engagement. This has been a growth area for me, as I typically lead feedback with a positive, and then identify a few areas for improvement.
A couple of years ago, my school did a lot of work with Margery Ginsberg’s Excited to Learn Motivation and Culturally Responsive Teaching, and although I found some of the work we did with it a little frustrating, one of the elements she discusses in the “motivational framework” is inclusion or connectedness to peers and the classroom as a whole, which is definitely a useful frame that I hadn’t spent as much time considering. Although I generally feel good about my inclusion efforts remotely, the students who are least motivated tend also to be the ones who are least included. That is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy – if a student doesn’t participate in small groups with their peers for whatever reason, they will inevitably be less included.
All that said, it generally seems to be the case that when a student is truly unmotivated, they are unmotivated in all their classes and with all their teachers. In my experience, this is typically a result of issues at home or outside the school building, and often there is not a lot that teachers can do about it, except to try to connect with and motivate around one of the areas suggested above. However, in the end, we all have to find our own motivations in life, and part of growing up is developing the capacity to self-motivate around the things we identify as important for ourselves, regardless of whether we are inherently motivated to do them or not. Motivation, like hope, is a discipline.