Steve’s Corner
QUEST
by Steve Tattum

For Motivation

Quality education in kid’s picture

Understanding relationship and personalize instruction

Expectations high, praise, and response cost

Social reinforcement

Tangible reinforcement

Although teachers would hope that all of their students would be at the highest level of motivation, i.e. education is in their picture of a quality world, the author has found that this is often not the case. An important way of arriving at the highest level of motivation is where teachers develop an understanding relationship with their students, and personalize the instruction through one-on-one conferences. This has been found to be effective over a thirty-year period of time with inner city students. However, some students are just actively or passively resisting instruction. For these students, we want to have high expectations and use specific praise for areas in which students do well, as well as utilizing response cost, where students have a consequence for resisting the workload. This may involve “power lunch” or after school demerit hall. The next level is social reinforcement, an approach (when students finish their work correctly) where they may work in a whisper with a partner on computer games and board games, such as checkers or chess. The lowest level of motivation is to give tangible rewards that students earn through a point system. Teachers will use an inventory to assess what rewards the student would like to earn. Usually these systems will be effective for 2-4 weeks before needing to be changed (see The Tough Kid Tool Box , ISBN 1-57035-000-0) Teachers need to keep in mind that they are constantly striving to move students to the highest level of motivation (see Educating for Character , ISBN 0-553-37052-9).

The author has found that there are three steps to augmenting this process. One is to meet the students basic needs such as security, belonging, power through growth in academic skills, freedom by having kids choose multiple intelligence projects as a form of evaluation, as well as students contracting for the grades they’d like to achieve, and finally, having fun through academic games. The second phase is for the teacher to be a part of the students’ quality world through personal interactions and having a dialogue through interactive journaling. The last phase is where teachers are excited about the content and communicate this excitement to students, as well as demonstrate how this is relevant to the students’ life. The author has found that students initially begin with only one domain in their quality world, and through a skilled teacher, are able expand this to multiple academic domains.

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