This and other questions such as “Does this count towards anything?” are no doubt all too familiar to any practitioner working with youth. I think these are very smart and prudent queries and ones which we all find ourselves asking as our lives become increasingly busy and complex.
Unless we can identify the worth of a task in relation to our responsibilities and/ or goals… Then why do it?
The question has been asked: “Did the students visit the wiki voluntarily between the weekly classes, or did you have to provide some sort of “motivation”?
A great question and hopefully one any teacher would contemplate before designing a learning tool or task! What motivation is there, or could there be, for students to do this??
For the Byron Community Campus (BCC) blog, primarily used as a tool for students to engage in public debate, there was a very obvious motivating factor. It counted towards meeting the performance criteria for units in which they were enrolled.
However for using this, and also the Get Skilled blog, the motivators were not so concrete…. moving more towards the abstract… A mirror of the journey the adolescent brain is embarking on itself.
Growth towards metacognition.
The motivation came from us – together as teachers and students - understanding the blogging platform as a useful metacognitive tool – to assist us in monitoring and regulating not only our thinking, but also our behavioural processes.
Online blogging provided an immediacy and answerability quite powerful, yet comfortable for the young people. (I do think this had a lot to do with most of the students’ regular use of MySpace – their commenting and blogging through this platform).
However, given what is researched and understood about brain development and the other changes taking place in the young adolescent, it has been shown that teachers can improve student learning by doing the following things:
1. Present limited amounts of new information, to accommodate the short-term memory.
2. Provide opportunities for students to process and reinforce the new information and to connect the new information with previous learning. (Encourage students to talk with their classmates about the new information; have them debate or write about it; create small group discussions.)
3. Provide lessons that are varied, with lots of involvement and hands-on activities. Brain stimulus and pathways are created and made stronger and with less resistance if they are reinforced with a variety of stimuli. (Create projects; use art, music, and visual resources; bring guest visitors into the classroom.)
4. Provide lessons and activities that require problem solving and critical thinking. Brain growth is enhanced and strengthened through practice and exercise.
(Taken from Brain Development in Young Adolescents -Good News for Middle School Teachers)
Blogs do all of this – so clearly there’s more than one motivating factor!