Intrinsic Motivation is Key to Student Achievement – But Schools Can Crush It (Tara Garcia Mathewson)
Tara Mathewson wrote this for The Hechinger Report. It appeared March 27,2019.
Mathewson describes how “traditional” schools “crush” motivation. The age-graded organization–a mid-19th century innovation in organizing public schools (recall the “traditional” one-room school that it replaced)–is the quarry she targets. She describes students who do poorly in such schools.
Mathewson then compares another kind of organization that has arisen in some high schools across the country where teachers and administrators alter significantly the key structures of age-graded schooling. She profiles a Big Picture school called The Met (Providence, RI). I have been describing another Big Picture school in Oakland Unified School District (CA) called MetWest in a series of posts over the past month.
When Destiny Reyes started elementary school, she felt highly motivated. Like most young children, she liked learning new things, and she excelled at school. She got good grades and reveled in her success, thriving in an environment that, at least implicitly, set her up in competition with her peers. She was at the top of her class, and she proved herself further by testing into a competitive, private middle school. But there, among Providence’s brightest, it wasn’t as easy to be at the top of the class, and her excitement about school – and learning – subsided. Eventually, she says, nothing motivated her. She went to school because she had to.
Destiny, 18, is like most students in the United States. Surveys reveal a steady CONTINUE READING: Intrinsic Motivation is Key to Student Achievement – But Schools Can Crush It (Tara Garcia Mathewson) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
