One of the hardest parts of teaching English in a high-poverty urban middle school is getting the lowest performing students to buy into the idea of reading. This became crystal clear during the first weeks of my 7th grade Focus Reading class. Each of the 10 to 15 students had failed the reading section of the Oklahoma Core Curriculum […]
A Word About Motivation
I have a student who needs a lot of hand-holding when she’s doing independent assignments. She’s a perfectionist who wants to get the answers right, but doesn’t always trust herself to do this the first time. So today, I assigned the students two articles in our online reading comprehension program. I ask the students to […]
What If We Could Regain Our Motivation?
I think the problem in our schools these days is that we’ve lost our autonomy, mastery and purpose motives — and allowed the corporate profit motive to take over. Watch this video to see the latest research on what motivates people. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use this in our schools? Michelle WatersI […]
Motivating the Unmotivated
We all have one or more of these kids in our classrooms: They don’t want to be in school, but they’re here because they have to be. Their goal in life is to have fun — either by playing or making other people miserable. At the middle school age, they may only be semi-aware of […]