Attention-Deficit Educators
Recently, in a discussion amongst educators, someone asked the group the following question:
What can you do as a teacher in your own classroom to help facilitate a love for language and literacy?
Clearly, I’m hanging out with a very hip crowd.
This was not a rhetorical question. But for those interested enough in engaging the topic—hey, don’t stop reading yet!—the difficulty in reaching consensus on how to get kids to dig Chaucer or salivate over the newest Krakauer novel meant it might as well have been rhetorical. There’s just no easy answer for how to foster a love of books.
The conversation wound its way around the subject of literature, touching on ideas from learning latin roots for words to engaging diverse learning styles in a single lesson. All wonderful stuff, but all equally pretty boring. And it wasn’t soon before someone pointed that out.
Yup, that was totally me. I’m the attention-deficit intellectual in the room.
As if to respect my routable faux pas, the conversation began to shift. We started to talk about the value of developing “a coolness" around learning new words and phrases, fostering a classroom climate that nurtures learning opportunities as a shared experience enjoyable for everyone. This was significantly less boring. I’ve always thought that adults so often get caught up in the content and achievement of a thing, losing an enjoyment for the beauty of the process. Or at least that’s how I tried to justify hitting my classmates with spitballs in calculus class.
In the spirit of this conversation, someone pulled out her laptop (she brings it everywhere, that one) and pulled up a website she had recently come across. The site was from a local professor, and it provided some guidelines for optimizing a love for learning, particularly learning through literature.* On the website are 9 critical methods for motivating students, and it settled the debate pretty quickly. I thought I’d share them with you here:
1. Explain. Some recent research shows that many students do poorly on assignments or in participation because they do not understand what to do or why they should do it.
2. Reward. Students who do not yet have powerful intrinsic motivation to learn can be helped by extrinsic motivators in the form of rewards.
3. Care. Students respond with interest and motivation to teachers who appear to be human and caring.
4. Have students participate. One of the major keys to motivation is the active involvement of students in their own learning.
5. Teach Inductively. It has been said that presenting conclusions first and then providing examples robs students of the joy of discovery.
6. Satisfy students' needs. Attending to need satisfaction is a primary method of keeping students interested and happy.
7. Make learning visual. Even before young people were reared in a video environment, it was recognized that memory is often connected to visual images.
8. Use positive emotions to enhance learning and motivation. Strong and lasting memory is connected with the emotional state and experience of the learner.
9. Remember that energy sells. Being energetic in your teaching is a motivating factor in itself; adding energy to the ideas you want to convey will further enhance learning and commitment to the ideas.
That’s a list even an attention-deficit educator could embrace.
 
* Robert Harris, on his site Virtual Salt, a website full of educational resources: http://www.virtualsalt.com/motivate.htm.

Matt Devine,
BookEnds SmartyPants Director of Programs
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