Terms of engagement

I’ve been doing more listening, and seeing some familiar patterns. Here are some related comments from the last few weeks (rephrased for speaker privacy):

Kids just want to know what’s on the test.

Students don’t want to think critically; they just want the answers.

When I give kids a chance to choose their projects, a lot of them cop out.

Even my “A” students need me to tell them what to do.

I just can’t seem to get them motivated.

(Similar concerns were expressed in a Ustream conversation with Will Richardson and Howard Rheingold last week.)

Does anyone else suspect that these comments aren’t really all about the students? To me, these concerns say much more about the adults in their lives. Who are we trying to kid, anyway? Students are walking, talking agenda detectors. They know that the assignments and the lessons and the educational structures aren’t really about their personally significant needs, interests or dreams. They’re about what adults (teachers, parents, school boards, politicians) want them to do, at adult convenience, and in an adult timeframe. No one asked them about any of it. Is it any wonder that motivation and engagement are conspicuously absent?

Motivation and engagement through inquiry?

Genuine options or pre-determined paths?

The magic pill for student motivation and engagement right now seems to be inquiry-based learning processes. But I will confess that the more exposure I get to some inquiry-based learning designs, the more skeptical I become. While intended to be student-centered and responsive, what is really the result of  ”starting with the end in mind” and pre-defined “essential questions?” Do we really think that students aren’t aware that in much of this learning there’s a Great Oz behind the curtain, jury-rigging events and processes so that their “discoveries” meet adult expectations and goals? Is it really that different than a top-down curriculum?

Contrarian that I am at the moment, I often find something ironic about wanting kids to think deeply and critically, but then telling them – requiring them – to think deeply about specific things defined by someone else. (Maybe this relates to the postmodern idea that worldviews/understandings based earlier on overarching narratives or themes are becoming fragmented.) Can we blame students if they don’t want to wander down the garden path of  “discovery” if they know they still have to go through the teacher’s gate?  If the learning isn’t a process of honest choices with honest results, it seems pretty easy to breed distrust and apathy.  (How about one pre-teen’s reaction to a teacher’s inquiry-related Socratic questioning: “Does he really think I’m going to learn something if he pretends he’s dumb?”) 

In mucking about in literature about motivation and inquiry, I recently stumbled across the idea that researchers recognize that learning and assessments deemed “authentic” actually have varying definitions, and that this concept may require closer investigation. (Schaffer and Resnick, 1999). I also encountered an observation by R. Keith Sawyer (“Schools of the Future” in Sawyer, 2006) that studies of authentic/inquiry learning are based on math and science education, and they have not yet been proven to apply to other processes or disciplines. This has been an important piece of information for me, since, as a cultural and historical field researcher and as an independent learner, I am aware of mismatches between my processes and those suggested by inquiry learning designs.

Are we engaged?

True, I don’t think many students articulate – or can articulate – a sense of being steered or mismatched. Instead, whether in inquiry-based environments or more traditional settings, many students are disengaged and apparently unmotivated … and looking for the most direct route to fulfilling adult expectations so they can go off and do the things they find important. I’d say the attitude is the message. Yeah, maybe some students really do have an “attitude problem.” And yeah, maybe some of these “important” things seem superficial and a waste of brainpower. (From the student perspective, the same claims about superficiality and a waste of brainpower can be said about a lot of required education.) But unless and until we understand personal contexts and are willing to engage respectfully and individually with learners, talking with them instead of planning for them, I think that we, as adults, need to be more cautious about shame and blame when it comes to motivation and engagement.

After all, by refusing to engage and learn or by being dismissive (sound familiar?), the adult world has often abdicated its facilitative/educational role as young (and not so young) people adopt(ed) the major game changers of social media and technology. What we may see as great leeway and an impressive range of learning choices looks a lot like the same old, same old to a lot of learners. We’ve got at least a generation of social media latchkey kids who, having figured out how to unlock their Pandora’s boxes and make their own tech-based sandwiches, certainly aren’t going to relinquish the keys…or let us take away or ration the very tasty peanut butter.

Sure, students who have good relationships with their teachers and are interested in pleasing them can do well in most learning situations. Many students accept the tacit social contract of  the educational process. And acknowledging the role and value of situational interest  in “structuring inquiry” seems a good meeting ground between developing students’ respect for adult requests and the adult desire to instill certain concepts and values. These experiences can indeed be motivating and engaging for students. I get it, it’s often the best current option, there’s the ocean of research and practice by great minds to back it up, etc. No need for hate mail.

I do, however, see a potential difference for motivation and engagement between some inquiry processes as they are packaged and parsed for the relatively static, contained, standards-based and batched processes of the American classroom, and the complex, messy, and personalized inquiry processes that are possible in an individualized and connective environment.

Motivation and engagement through personalized learning?

Personalized learning, individualized learning, self-directed learning,  personal learning environments, and motivation and engagement have somehow become conflated concepts in my mind as I attempt to understand the options for and potential of new learning opportunities. These will require further sorting out, and I’ve been hung up here for days. But I’ll make a huge, intuitive, and unsubstantiated leap for the sake of the rest of this discussion, and say that I believe that personalization and self-directed learning (enabled by connectivist practices in personal learning environments) are potential keys to student motivation and engagement.

Unfortunately, the transitional period for this vision looks like a pretty rough ride. Lack of engagement and motivation is a vicious cycle. And the isolated opportunities that genuinely support motivation and engagement through personalized learning right now are often a case of “too little, too late.”  So it’s also true that even when given the opportunities to pursue personal interests, students often want to be told what to do. And while supporting personal learning, unless everyone is on – and committed to – the same page, there’s room for, shall we say, weaseling by all players.

The development of personal motivation requires lots of breathing room

On the student side, if you’ve never had the chance to know yourself and understand your interests and motivations, you don’t know where to start. (A phrase like “engage me or enrage me” doesn’t help, since it suggests that it’s the teacher’s  job to ensure engagement, rather than a intrinsic issue.) In such cases, begging someone tell you what to do is easier than figuring it out yourself. On the teacher side, providing more direction keeps things streamlined, and there are usually just too many kids to persist otherwise. On the parent side… my kid is confused and isn’t doing anything and clearly, my son, you should have textbook, what can your teacher be thinking? (Another observation: where adults aren’t aligned and communicating, some kids are especially good at manipulating these dynamics.)

Interestingly, a report about a school in Minnesota with personalized learning notes that even students who have spent several years in the program will opt for their senior year in a traditional setting, rather than tackle a time-consuming capstone project. This phenomenon raises a lot of ethnographic-type curiosity in me; the dearth of detail here frees me to speculate based on my own observations of other personal learning. (I can’t speak for what happens in this school.) I have some general suspicions, and they come back to adults again.

If you are a student who is going to invest 300 hours in a final project, you are likely to have a lot of needs that can’t be met in a school setting, even a progressive one. The support and encouragement of trusted and trustworthy adults in terms of time, conversation, space, transportation and maybe even financing are factors in personalized project work. It has been my experience that there’s often no clear understanding of how these things are going to be accessible. Everyone does what they can, sure, but it takes a village, and social systems are not currently responsive to this. Beyond school walls, the popular community understanding is that “kids belong in school,” and that any possible learning needs will be met there. A new world of connective learning and individualized projects, whether in a physical environment or a more abstract “personal learning environment,” requires currently unfamiliar kinds of commitments and understandings from potential student supporters, whether “teacher” or “facilitator,” online “mentor,” or the larger community  -  including parents. Some students have this support, but many don’t. (Thus the specter of “personal learning inequality” is raised…) And so while small individualized projects seem “doable,” personal learning on a larger scale is often intimidating for learners… maybe even for learners of all ages.

I’m aware of the apparent contradiction here: am I saying, as above, that adults should back off, or, as suggested here, be more involved? I guess I’d call for a different kind of involvement, one that reflects a new understanding of how learning can be defined and supported for individual students, and a focus on shared nurture, rather than external goals and outcomes. A tall order, indeed.

Additionally, as a parent, I’d say it’s especially important to recognize in a transitional educational period that kids can’t do it all. They can’t regularly fulfill a slate of others’ “rigorous” and deadline-laden expectations, while at the same time understanding, shaping, and meeting their own, intrinsically-motivated learning needs. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. And self-learning, in both senses of the word, takes time. A report on the Visible  Knowledge Project  notes:

In fact, a key outcome of linking difficulty with a robust definition of expertise (and expert processes) is to call into question traditional notions of rigor, to privilege time and space for activity that initially looks decidedly non-expert.

Will personalized learning (or perhaps “personalized inquiry”) solve motivation and engagement problems across the board? Of course not. The consequences of poverty, physical and mental health issues and personal, family, and community dysfunctions are all ongoing issues in any vision of learning. And personalized learning takes practice and yes, the support of experts, albeit in sizes, shapes and colors rarely seen.

Additionally, in order for this kind of learning to be truly successful, we have to be willing to put a lot of assumptions and “musts” and personal ideologies (including the concept that we “allow” students to do things) on the bargaining table.  If motivation and engagement are what we want from and for our kids, we are going to have to be open to lots of role changes and a whole lot more personalized discussion and negotiation – among mentors/educators, parents, community members, and especially  students… the younger (and sooner) the better.