Engagement, Teaching and Bias

“The cure for cynicism is simply to engage honestly. “ (Jeremy Paxman)

It is interesting how a single tweet can spark such controversy over a single word: “engagement”. Soon after I tweeted

“That is why I am suspicious of people who dismiss “engagement” in relation to school. That is part of your responsibility as a teacher. Students won’t learn just *because* you are an expert in your subject. Period. “

an avalanche of tweets, replies and threads of discussion – from my original point (“engagement”) to further related concepts (“expertise”) followed. People taking sides and soon being labeled as “traditional” or “progressive”, misapprehension of the word itself in relation to the school setting and gut-reactions based on personal experiences.

Two clarifications before I embark on the debate – they will come back in my post. I dislike intellectual laziness, and generalizations based on anecdotal evidence or teacher beliefs should be subject to scrutiny at all times, whatever the label you were given on social media.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..     A. Causation is NOT correlation.

Not a single element in the teaching domain *causes* learning per se in disjunction with others.

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Student Motivation – Part 2

I continue the previous post with the other three theories on motivation that have relevance in the field of education.

4. Motives as attributions

Attributions are perceptions about the causes of success and failure. Students cannot escape this dimension of motivation: they do assign the result of a learning experience, wrongly or otherwise, to certain factors. Let’s assume the student fails a test: s/he may develop different attributions to explain this failure – maybe s/he did not put enough effort into the task, maybe the task was too difficult, or maybe s/he is not intelligent enough.

Not only these attributions (self-constructed explanations) may be completely wrong, but they are somewhat out of the teacher’s reach as

“they reflect (students’) personal beliefs about the sources or causes of success and failure.”

Seifert, however, recommends that teachers influence these attributions through their own feedback. This should never be framed around uncontrollable factors (such as intelligence) and gives two examples of reactions to success and failure: 

Student Motivation (part 1)

Student motivation is perhaps one of the most interesting topics in education as it has blurry intersections with psychology, cognition theories, and learning theories. Whether one chooses to ignore it or not, motivation is critical for effective learning – especially in a setting (school) where students are expected to learn.

What prompted me to reread Educational Psychology by Kelvin Seifert is the ambiguous nature of motivation. I often found that the hidden curriculum (i.e. the social structures of the classroom, the teacher’s authority and use of language, disciplinary measures, timetables etc.) as well as other psychological aspects of our profession can have a greater impact than we assume. Also, I chose to blog about it as I keep reading about student “interests” on Twitter and it seems to me that many teachers who support this view do not fully understand the complexities of motivation.