New Research Report:
Positive Classroom Climates and Relationships Most Influence Student
Motivation
Dear
Colleagues,
As a parent and a presenter, there are times
that I joke (??!!) about adolescence being “a period of genetic and hormonal
dysfunction.” Indeed, adolescent
behavior often intrigues, frustrates, perplexes, and irritates- - or more. On one hand, they are asking for (demanding???)
more responsibility and independence. On
the other hand, they are still just “kids” who don’t have a clue and have many
lessons to learn.
And so, the past two weeks have put my many experiences
with adolescents to the test. Indeed, two
weeks ago, I spent time in two Kentucky Appalachian schools, working with
middle and high school students who largely come from impoverished homes. . .
that do not value education. . . and who have difficulty seeing the relevance
of “college and career readiness.”
And then this past week, I was in Salinas,
California. . . one of the top ten most dangerous cities in our country. . .
working in a lock-down juvenile court facility with adolescent boys and girls
many with gang affiliations since elementary school. . . and some who have
killed peers to avoid being killed themselves.
While, on the surface, adolescence in
Appalachia versus Salinas differs, I would suggest that, as educators, 80%
of what we can do to help these students succeed as adults in both settings
is shared.
At the same time, if our 80%
“science-to-practice core” is not specifically tailored to address the 20% that
represents our students’ unique situations and circumstances, we probably will
not be successful at all.
_ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _
Building Responsible Adolescents: The 80% Solution
In order to help adolescents become
academically and behaviorally responsible, confident, independent, and
self-sufficient, they need to learn (and we need to teach them) social,
emotional, and behavioral self-management skills. While others working in this area use their
own constructs, lexicons, and idiosyncratic terms, I believe that the goal of
(and term) self-management is the most scientifically defensible and the most
functional in terms of describing what we want adolescents to learn, master,
and be able to apply.
Moreover, the underlying science and
practice resulting in student self-management outcomes has been
well-established (and discussed by me in numerous past Blog messages). The primary scientific components are:
* Staff,
Student, and Parent Relationships that establish Positive School and Classroom
Climates
* Explicit Classroom and Common School Area Expectations supported by Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skill/Self-Management Instruction (that are embedded in preschool through high school "Health, Mental Health, and Wellness" activities)
* School-wide and Classroom Behavioral Accountability systems that include Motivational Approaches that encourage and reinforce students’ "Good Choice" behavior
* Consistency- - in the classroom, across classrooms, and across staff, time, settings, and situations
* Applications of the above four components across all Settings in the school, and relative to Peer Group interactions (specifically targeting teasing, taunting, bullying, harassment, hazing, and physical aggression)
Critically, the components within this
“Blueprint” are interdependent.
Moreover, they interact in different ways for different students. . .
and in different ways relative to different academic versus social, emotional,
or behavioral outcomes (see below).
At the same time, this is the
science. The Self-Management
Blueprint is universal and indisputable.
Thus, educators need to use this scientific blueprint when “new” approaches
emerge- - either to validate their utility, or to reject them as unsound, not
worthy of our time, and potentially dangerous.
Said a different way, educators need to
objectively evaluate all new approaches within and against the Self-Management
Blueprint- - both to understand where these approaches (and their
strategies) fit into the self-management “puzzle,” and whether they are a valid
and useful part of the puzzle.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
A New Study: How Teachers Facilitate Adolescents’
Self-Management
Last week (October 27th), a new
study was released by the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard
University: The Influence of
Teaching- - Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency
(A Study of 16,000 Sixth through Ninth Grade Classrooms).
CLICK HERE for this Study
The study reports survey results from over
300,000 students in 490 schools across 26 districts in 14 states in every part
of the country during the 2013-2014 school year. The well-designed and validated survey
(called the Tripod) used in the study helped the researchers connect what they
called “Agency-related Factors”- - defined as student emotions,
motivations, mindsets, and behaviors- - with seven different teacher or
teaching characteristics.
Relative to Agency, the study’s
introduction noted that:
“Agency is the capacity and propensity to
take purposeful initiative- - the opposite of helplessness. Young people with high levels of agency do
not respond passively to their circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act
with purpose to achieve the conditions they desire in their own and others’
lives.”
Relative to the seven teacher
characteristics, student responses on the Tripod helped to measure the
following:
· Care—Teachers who care are
emotionally supportive and interested in students.
· Confer—Teachers who confer talk with
students as well as welcome and respect
student perspectives.
· Captivate—Teachers who captivate make
learning interesting and relevant.
provide informative feedback, and clear up confusion in
order to make lessons understandable.
· Consolidate—Teachers who consolidate
summarize and integrate learning.
to think rigorously and to persist when experiencing
difficulty.
entails developing a respectful, cooperative classroom
climate with on-task behavior.
_ _ _
_ _
Parenthetically, the authors’ use of the construct
and term “agency” provides an explicit example of the point above:
When researchers use global, abstract, or
nebulous (new) terms, they either make the results of their research (a) less interpretable,
meaningful, and useful to educators in the field; and/or (b) less likely to be
integrated into the already-existing research that these educators are applying
in practice.
When this occurs,
educators avoid connecting the new research to their existing practice (to see
if it “adds value”), or they reject the research outright as irrelevant to
their practice.
With all due respect to the esteemed Harvard
researchers who authored this Report, if their “agency-related factors”
are defined as student emotions, motivations, mindsets, and behaviors- - then they
are talking about students’ social, emotional, and behavioral self-management
and self-efficacy.
Moreover, the “mindsets” that they
are investigating, are no more or less than the positive or negative
cognitive beliefs, attitudes, expectations, attributions, and other
self-statements that students make to themselves that either facilitate or
debilitate their motivation and behavior.
Indeed, it is no surprise that the
well-regarded researcher Carol Dweck and her colleagues in the National Mindset
Collaborative are acknowledged in this Report’s Preface, and that her research
on students’ “growth mindset” is appropriately cited in the Report.
BUT. . . it is important to note that the
growth mindset construct (as immediately above) appears to be a “rebranding”
that combines the already-existing cognitive-behavioral and locus of control
research. Not that Dweck has not
extended this research in important ways. . . but why is there a need for the
rebranding?
I will expand this discussion in a future
Blog.
_ _ _
_ _
Back to the study. . .
The Harvard Report outlines a plethora of
important results. The most important teacher/teaching
suggestions include the following (Report, pgs. 10-12):
Care: Be attentive and sensitive, but
avoid coddling students in ways that hold them to lower standards for effort
and performance as this may undermine their self-management and efficacy. At the same time, express interest in
students’ lives, activities, and aspirations so that they will feel known and
inspired to follow your example.
Captivate: Strive to make lessons
stimulating and relevant so that they reinforce students’ self-management and
self-initiation. If some students seem unresponsive, do not assume too quickly
that they are disinterested. Some students—and especially those who
struggle—purposefully hide their interest and their effort.
Challenge by Requiring Rigor: Press
students to think deeply instead of superficially about their lessons. Set and
enforce learning goals that require students to use reasoning and exercise
self-management in solving problems. Expect some pushback from students who
might prefer a less stressful approach. Try increasing captivation and care in
combination with rigor in order to help mitigate the tension and make the
experience more enjoyable.
Challenge by Requiring Persistence:
Consistently require students to keep trying and searching for ways to succeed
even when work is difficult. Emphasize the importance of giving their best effort
to produce their best work as a matter of routine. Be confident that few things
could be more important for helping your students to develop their
self-management and self-efficacy skills.
Classroom Management: Strive to
achieve respectful, orderly, on task student behavior in your class by teaching
in ways that clarify, captivate, and challenge instead of merely controlling
students through intimidation or coercion.
_ _ _ _ _
Beyond these results, the Report
summarized previous research with the Tripod that found that the two
Challenge areas and the Classroom Management area above most strongly predict
students’ annual achievement gains on standardized tests. As noted by the Report:
“The component for challenge, with its
subcomponents that require rigor and require persistence, asks students to
think hard and work hard. The component for classroom management asks students
to behave themselves and stay on task.
Thinking rigorously, sustaining effort, and staying on task may be
sufficient to produce substantial learning gains, even if the teacher-student
relationship is not what it should be and the interest and relevance of the
material is relatively low.
This outcome was contrasted with a result
from the present study that found that the Caring and Captivating areas
above most strongly predict students’ love of learning, desire to be life-long
learners, and aspirations to go to college.
The Report noted:
“The point is not that there is a trade-off
between annual learning gains and higher aspirations. Instead, the point is
that the most important agency (i.e., self-management) boosters for each are
different. A balanced approach to
instructional improvement will prioritize care and captivate to bolster
aspirations, and challenge and classroom management to strengthen the skills
that standardized tests measure. Certainly, without the skills that tests
measure, college aspirations might be futile. But in turn, without college
aspirations, the payoffs to those skills may be limited.”
_ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Adding Value: Facilitating Classroom Caring and Motivation
Returning to
the Self-Management Blueprint: In order to motivate students, teachers and
students need to consciously create consistently positive, trusting,
supportive, and collaborative classroom climates. At the foundation of a positive classroom
climate - - consistent with the Harvard Report- - is a teacher who is caring and
supportive, who also presents classroom materials in captivating ways.
But how do
teachers demonstrate caring and support?
Below, are the most effective approaches for secondary-level teachers:
Listen to students with your full attention.
Students need to
feel that they are the “most important” thing in your life when you are
interacting with them. If you are not
modeling listening with your full attention, then you really cannot expect them
to learn or demonstrate the same courtesy with you and others.
_ _ _ _ _
Acknowledge and label students’ feelings,
while teaching and reinforcing their emotional control skills. Help students to recognize how emotions link
to interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict prevention and resolution,
and emotional coping skills.
Students are always learning about different
emotions and how to handle them. At the
elementary level, we teach student how to recognize different emotions, how
they feel- - physiologically- - under different emotional conditions, and how
to control mild to moderate emotional situations. At the secondary level, the focus is on
teaching students how to control more extreme emotional situations, and how to analyze
and solve their own social and interpersonal problems.
_ _ _ _ _
Talk with your
students using a problem-solving approach, and teach and model effective
problem-solving in different situations.
When talking with students during actual or
potential conflict situations, teachers can strategically model the language
and process that we use in our Stop & Think Social Skills process:
“Let’s Stop and Think about this
together. We need to make a good choice
and think about what is happening here, and what we want to happen next. What choices or steps do we have or need to
resolve this situation? Let’s get ready
to follow these steps, and. . . just do it!
How did it go? . . . Can we reinforce ourselves for a good job?”
_ _ _ _ _
Talk with
students using an appropriate volume, tone of voice, and level of respect—even
under “emotional” conditions.
Remember, even when students are not
demonstrating appropriate behavior, you need to model your own social,
emotional, and behavioral control. For
example, if you are irritated with your students and talk with them in an
excessively angry, critical, demeaning, or loud voice, your students might
react negatively to the emotionality or disrespect in your voice, refuse to
listen to you (now and in the future), and “write you off” as someone who
“talks the talk, but does not walk the walk.”
Even though it is challenging, it is
important to maintain an appropriate volume, tone of voice, and level of
respect when talking and interacting with students in all situations. If you “blow” it, step back, let the air
clear, and come back later to discuss the situation with your students and even
(gasp!) apologize if your behavior was inappropriate.
_
_ _ _ _
Give students
time to process their feelings, thoughts, issues, and responses. In other words, when needed, be patient,
don’t talk too much, and give your students a chance to work things out on
their own.
When students approach you with a problem,
give them the time, place, structure, and guidance to process it on their
own. Indeed, once you have taught
students the problem solving process, every problem solving opportunity become
a “teachable moment” where students learn how to apply the original
instruction.
While you may need to provide more help—from
a skill perspective—to younger students during these teachable moments, you may
also need to provide more help—on an emotional level—to older students who are
sometimes confronted by some highly emotional situations and dilemmas.
_
_ _ _ _
Remember to
reinforce your students for Good Choices, while teaching and prompting them to
self-management and self-reinforce themselves.
From kindergarten through middle school and
high school, students increase their self-awareness, and learn how to depend on
themselves as they plan, implement, monitor, evaluate, correct, and reinforce
their own emotions, thoughts, and behavior.
All of these processes increase students’ self-confidence,
self-management, as well as their self-accountability. Self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and
self-reinforcement are particularly important parts of students’ developing self-management
skill sets, because students are often too dependent on what others’ think
about, believe, or respond to in different situations.
_
_ _ _ _
Finally, give
students hope.
Students need encouragement for their
growth, progress, and effort—even if they are not always “perfect.” Help them expect and belief that they can
improve and succeed over time. Give them
opportunities to see different situations in different ways. Critically: give them a chance to see themselves
as positive, productive, valued, and valuable individuals.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Summary
For some, the Self-Management Blueprint is
“too complex.” But, as a psychologist,
we need to recognize that human behavior (especially during adolescence) is
complex, and the “whole is typically greater than the sum of its parts.”
Indeed, note the results of the Harvard
study. While three factors
contributed most to students’ standardized test performance, two different
factors contributed to students’ love of learning and aspirations to go to
college.
While the Report recommends that teachers balance
all of the factors in their classrooms, let’s remember that our schools have
(over-)emphasized test scores and academic proficiency during the past
decade. Perhaps, this has made our
classrooms less caring and supportive, and our students less motivated to be
lifelong learners?
_ _ _ _ _
While many proficient and wise researchers
and practitioners have contributed to and helped us understand different facets
of adolescent behavior, it is only when their work is integrated into the
Self-Management Blueprint that their true contributions are apparent.
Indeed, if we do not embrace the
Self-Management Blueprint discussed earlier, we run the risk of
over-generalizing some research or practice contributions. Critically, as demonstrated by the Harvard
research study, there is no “one size fits all” pathway to “the truth.”
The reality is that there are many factors
that contribute in different ways and with different intensities to explain
adolescent behavior. While the
Self-Management Blueprint needs to be “flexed” differently for my Appalachia
versus Salinas adolescents, it is this clinical use of the Blueprint that will
result in sensitive, meaningful, and useful analyses, interventions, and
outcomes.
And so, while the Blueprint is a constant. .
. it needs to be flexibly applied in different contexts.
_ _ _ _ _
Meanwhile,
I appreciate everyone who takes some of their professional and personal time to
read and reflect on my thoughts. My goal
in writing this Blog is to critically analyze current research, practice, and
implementation in our districts, schools, and classrooms, while using a “common
sense” empirical and experiential approach to help make them meaningful.
I also appreciate everything that you do as educational
leaders in our country. And I always look
forward to YOUR thoughts and comments.
Feel free to contact me at any time. Let me know how I can help your state,
regional cooperative, district, or school to move to the next level of
excellence.
Best,
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