Choice, Motivation and Higher-Level Thinking

Tim Patterson
EPSY 1530
July 27, 2009
The Effects of Choice on Motivation and Higher Level Thinking
Introduction
The assumption that students cannot be given choice in the direction of their schoolwork is one that is widely accepted. To be sure there are advocates for offering students more choice, but the pendulum has swung far to the other extreme as policy makers and the public embraces standards and accountability. When pressed, educators will explain how they allow students to choice the topics of their papers or what book to read. In this age of high stakes testing and teacher proof curriculum, few educators have the time or freedom to offer choice. While schools of education (at least the one that I know best), write visions, missions and philosophies that reflect choice centered learning; they cannot or have not been able to effect the realities of student choice that most school settings present. This leaves educators in the position of abandoning student choice (if they ever sought to offer it) as their pay and jobs increasingly count on the performance of their students on standard tests.
It is my assertion that student choice is one of the key factors that we need to include in education to increase student motivation and to help them develop higher-level thinking. As I explore these issues in a select setting, I will look for aspects of choice that can be generalized from a high choice explorative summer school into an elementary classroom.
Lewis & Clark Summer Institute
The Lewis & Clark Summer Institute (LCSI) is a private summer that has offered classes to kindergarten through eight grade students to children of St. Louis for twenty-eight years. Throughout it's history, it's founder and director, Pat Dugan, has put choice at the center of the school. Teachers offer courses based on their special interests. Each student graduating the 3rd through 8th grade (the younger students participate in the Young Explorers program) chooses three 1.5-hour classes from an offering of twenty or more classes. If a chosen class is not available, Dugan works hard to find another class that the student is interested in. Dugan also works hard to help parents to understand that their child needs to make their own choices about what class to take. This choice is a key element in creating the explorative learning that Lewis & Clark's name implies.
When presented with the opportunity to teach at LCSI I proposed two course offerings. The first would be a beginning programming class. Initially I thought that I would base the class on two free programs, MIT's Scratch and Alice. Both of these programming environments offered graphic user interfaces that were designed with young users in mind. As the first day of class arrived it because clear that Alice would not be stable enough for students to work with, the frustration of the persistent bugs would not be outweighed by the power of 3D graphics that it offered where Scratch falls short with 2D. The second course, HTML, Blogs, and Wikis (I wish I had the insight to call it the more simple Web 2.0 when I wrote the course description), would engage students in the new web paradigm of collaboration through the use of email, chat, blogs, wikis, website builders and other tools that are part of the web movement from publisher as content controller to user as collaborator in providing web content. I picked up Creative Writing for the second session when another teacher could not teach it. While I feel that I am doing well with the course, I believe that the matching of teachers to courses that they did not design and choose is one place where the school falls short at times. With a choice centered model, it is important that teachers come to each course with a deep understanding of and passion for the subject. I knew that my passion for programming and web design would serve as a model for enjoyment for explorative learning that would not otherwise be present.
As this is my first summer at LCSI, I knew from the beginning that I would be learning and adjusting my teaching throughout the two three-week sessions. I knew that the traditional model for teaching would not work well in this environment, as students would not be receptive to direct instruction. Anything that I offered for students to work with would have to meet a simple criteria, “why should I want to do this rather than X other entertainment media?” While I would need teaching objectives and methods, these would not be means to “teach them” as direct targets of a set of specific information, rather the information would have to be “offered” to them. While I did not know this at the time, these ideas would later be reinforced by negative reports of students being bored with a class that were presented as lectures and another that did not offer enough interesting content for the full 1.5 hours.
It is important to explain the future plans of Pat Dugan and LCSI before I go much further. For a few years now LCI has been planning to start a charter school. It is our hopes that we can find a way to offer the unique learning environment found at LCI’s summer school in a general public school setting. As a founding teacher and a believer in explorative models, this research is prudent and practical, much more than a paper, assignment or grade.
My Teaching Model
As with most of my endeavors, my planning for these classes involved considering ideas and discussing them with others. Before any other element, I came up with ideas for bits of information that I picked up along the way in my own informal education. I saw these as “geek” skills, things that geeks understand about technology that applies in a wide range of situations to help solve problems. These include games, videos about technology and the opportunity to make a network cable. I would always have these ready to fill time as needed.
As I tried to find a balance between the chaos that critics point to in many constructivist environments and teacher focused, high structure classes that would drive students to boredom and stifle innovation (read: motivation and creativity), I remembered a workshop model that learned about in Reading and Writing as Cognitive Processes, taught by Dick Koblitz. I had the opportunity to visit Mr. Koblitz's multi-age classroom to see this model in practice as part of literacy time. Koblitz started with group time as he read a poem and pointed out language structures in the content of genuine text. Students joined in, sharing their ideas and insights about the poem. Then he let students work individually or with partners reading. He asked them one by one what they would be reading or writing and whom they would be working with before sending them on their way. When Koblitz discussed this in class at Webster, he made the point that he was intentional about how he did this, as it was both a social contract committing students to focus on specific work and an opportunity to match students with others in ways that he thought beneficial. During this work time, he would call students over to have one-on-one conferences with him. Self directed students would not need this as often, allowing him to spend more time with struggling students. After 30-45 minutes the class would meet together again, where students would share their insights on the work. This allows for reinforcement of desired behavior and skills as Koblitz commented on student work. This is the model I would attempt to use for my classes.
With a model and some extras worked out, I decided that I would present the core tools of each class as they became relevant to the student's projects.
Much of this would be ordered intuitively with one skill needed before another could be presented in a meaningful way. This became the fuzzy area that I have struggled with as I will explain later.
Data and Observation Methods
As I had access to students throughout the two three-week sessions, I have extensive informal data with a variety of students in three classes. Additionally with the two initial classes I would be able to make adjustments and see how they lead to different results. Through continuous discussions with students, I found that most students chose my classes because they had an interest in technology in general. Many of them took at least one other technology class, either my other class or an animation class offered by another teacher. Over the two sessions, three students transferred out, one of which reported that his mother made his class choices. An additional three students transferred into my course, with mixed results, I believe due to limited choice or a greater desire to leave another class than to choose mine.
The formal data that I collected was far from ideal. I surveyed fewer than half of my students with questions designed to be accurately self-reported by students while offering insight into student choice and technology background. I did not have a control group of students who did not choose my class or the means for truly getting at the extent to which each student made choices vs. parent directed choices. I wonder whether students understand course descriptions enough to understand what a each course is about. I also would like to measure the student's exposure to choice and explorative learning models as I notice that many students don't know how to act responsibly when given choice.
My measurements of outcomes, while informally adequate, could benefit from a more formal rubric. My informal means for measuring motivation is time focused on task. While this means for measuring motivation could be skewed by learning style, student disability, or any number of things including the factors that I would like to measure formally (mentioned above), I believe that the workshop model addresses student differences by allowing for additional one-on-one time with select students. Higher-level thinking can be measured by examining the range and depth of tools used in each student project. Higher levels would be defined by the ability to combine a number of tools together to solve complex student-defined problems. My evidence in these areas is purely anectdotal, and outside observation or video recording classes to review later then applying a rubric would greatly improve the quality of my data.
Insights and Adjustments
For the most part the insights and adjustments that I made over the course of the two sessions fall into the categories of content and structural issues. During the planning of my classes I knew that students would have to bring their ideas to offer as content for their projects. This was a challenge that I did not always handle well. I often found that students did not know that they wanted to do after I presented new tools. For the web design class I came to understand that writing skills had a lot to do with this content challenge. If students did not have practice in writing or if I did not find a way to help them to find a voice, they would not have meaningful content to put on their websites. One of the first adjustments I made was to have students sit with paper, pencil and clipboards away from their computers while they brainstormed lists of topics that they were interested in. Often the focus would not last long and I tried to include more refocusings as often as it was bearable. Fortunately in a general school environment other curricular areas will often provide content for sites and projects. Any science topic could become a multi-page wiki entry for a class to split up and author.
Content for programming was not as difficult to come by, but was troubling in different ways. As a gamer myself, my perspective on how to tap the full potential of MIT’s Scratch was in game development. In the first session this single-minded focus that left out the five other explicate areas defined by MIT: animation, simulation, music, slide show, and movie, led to far too many minutes of “research” time spent playing browser games. The second session yielded a wider range of projects as I ban the playing of browser games in the daily free time at the end of class and exposed students to a wider range of projects in all six of the areas. While the skills used to make Scratch projects is not as generally applied, I believe that it can find a place in future classrooms where it can be used as an interactive multi-media presentation tool that allows students to present their knowledge of a topic in many ways.
Even as I made adjustments as I went and between sessions, I feel that structure is still an area that I need to work on. This is where the critiques of constructivism ring true. While I understand the workshop model and I think it works, I often failed to follow through. While I still think that I should be ready to adjust teaching daily, I need to have a clear plan for assessing what instruction students need on a given day. I failed to follow through with the check in and group discussion parts of the workshop model. These elements help students to focus their choice in a way that leads to successful projects. Successful projects in turn feed motivation to try more challenging projects. While the idea of offering tools as they became relevant to students needed a bit of adjusting. I think that addressing the individual’s inquiry as they faced the problem is the most important thing to do, and I that is what I most often did. To capture the energy, I think that I should have had the student discuss the solution that we developed and the tools used in the group time following work time.
One piece of structure that I did successfully add was a bulletin board to track ideas and items in a chronological fission. Each board had a column on the bulletin board that included the fixed events during the class; workshop time, work time, cleanup time and free time. Then as students or myself came up with ideas to focus on we put them on a piece of paper and tacked them up at the bottom of the board. As I planned for each class I took these ideas along with areas that I knew I wanted to cover and arranged them within the schedule. As each student saw that his or her idea was addressed, they understand that their interests and problems are important to me. I think that this concept can be central to the way I run a general classroom as it shows the student’s place in choosing the direction of the class.
Conclusion
While many have not been able to find a place for choice in the current educational environment, I am determined and perhaps uniquely positioned to explore the possibilities. The LCSI model starts with choice and adds academics. Few teachers have a chance to consider teaching in an environment like this. Contrary to critics, I have find that my students choose academics when presented with structure and content in mind. I do not have a definitive solution, for making this kind of choice work in general public classrooms, but I am certainly on the way.