Students who are more self-determined, who feel more of a sense of agency in their lives, do better on many measures in the long run– so how do we start supporting self-determination in our classrooms?
The depressing reality is that discipline in our schools is not fair– Black and Indigenous students are massively overdisciplined. The good news is that there are many, many different research-based solutions out there. This post goes into a few!
This post is on the secret sauce of student learning– motivation– and what the research says on how to increase students’ motivation. The bottom line on motivation is that students don’t, for the most part, roll out of bed and think “Gee whiz, I really want to learn fractions today!” And if students aren’t motivated, if they just don’t care about what you are teaching, they have all sorts of fun ways to check out or subvert it (Levin, 2000). I mean, they are almost as bad as teachers at a PD they wish they could have skipped… So how do you get there?
