I don't know Dave. Yeah, I'm no scholar in psychology, even if it was one of my college minors, but I do have 45 years of being a boots-on-the-ground classroom grunt, and as a consequence I just no longer go blindly for Skinner's rat-like attitude towards people with a "do this and you'll get that." I mean if we see around us, all this Taylorist "factory-ization" of education, both k-12 and higher, all this fixation on grades, test scores, GPAs has created a clash between hope and fear, fear so often wins out. The result is a fearful, feel bad, joyless, boring educational experience, which is far more rote than creative, that promotes more of an "I hate school" attitude than a love of learning. I know, from reading student faces and body language, from reading daily student journals that it ain't that simple, as you know, because each student has a story, and the chapters of that story are playing on her or him, and to the extent we don't know or want to know or feel it's not our job to learn how those stories are playing on a particular student's emotions, attitudes, and performance, on their "self-theories," we so often fall off the precipice into the abyss of attribution error. I'm prone to believe Rogers, Deci, Dweck, et al are right more often than not when they assert that external rewards do motivate people; they, at best, motivated them to get rewards. Those external motivators almost--maybe not almost--fall into the categories of bribes and threats. And, if we are honest, even those so often don't work, and so we skew the results. We can beg, bribe, and threaten students until we're blue in the face, and so many still won't do what we want or expect them to do. So, we tamper, that is, if they can't find the cheese at the end of the labyrinth, we either hand it to them or change the course of the labyrinth: curving grades, dropping lowest grade, doubling highest grade, offering extra work, adding points for non-academic activities, etc, etc, etc So, those external motivators we call grades motivate students to get the grades by any means necessary--cheating, cutting corners, cramming, to see that the material which is important is only that which will be on the test, to ask "why do you want." And, we make believe that the grade correlates to learning, not temporarily immediate learning, but to lasting learning. And, if learning, deep learning, lasting learning, life-long love of learning occurs, it's almost an occasional corollary. I guess that's why the likes of Rogers, Deci, Amabile, Dweck, Gilbert, Maslow, Kohn, Seligman, Csilszentimihaly say they cannot teach or motivate, but they can create an inspiring and self-motivating environment. Of course, the difficulty with intrinsic motivation is that our students have been taught and trained, and have learned, to be Taylor factory workers and Skinner lab rats--as have we--and most of us continue to reinforce Taylorism and Skinnerism, knowingly or otherwise, and, therefore, we have to battle to untrain and unlearn both the students and us.
And, of course, none of this talks about that elephant in the room, that is, most of us professors have been trained to be future research scholars, not future classroom teachers. But, that's for page 2. Make it a good day -Louis- Louis Schmier http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org<http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org/> Department of History http://www.therandomthoughts.com<http://www.therandomthoughts.com/> Valdosta State University Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ (O) 229-333-5947 /^\\/ \/ \ /\/\__ / \ / \ (C) 229-630-0821 / \/ \_ \/ / \/ /\/ / \ /\ \ //\/\/ /\ \__/__/_/\_\/ \_/__\ \ /\"If you want to climb mountains,\ /\ _ / \ don't practice on mole hills" - / \_ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=17827 or send a blank email to leave-17827-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
