TWO TEACHERS WITH CONTRASTING MOTIVATIONAL ORIENTATIONS

            Drs. Janet Anderson and Maren Schmidt both teach a required sophomore level literature class at a small Midwestern university. Enrollment limits sophomore literary genre, writing intensive classes to 25 students. No interest or academic level cohorts are defined.          

Both teachers are focused on addressing course content and goals and value interaction with students as critical for encouraging deep engagement with literature. Their classes generally run smoothly, with high levels of student engagement.  Both Janet and Maren are warm, friendly, and optimistic people who are devoted to their profession and well liked by their students. Each devotes considerable attention to student motivation in planning her classroom activities. However, the motivational principles that they emphasize are quite different. As you read about these two teachers, think about the motivational strategies they use and consider the probable effects of these strategies on their students’ motivation and learning.

Janet Anderson

            Janet knows that grades are important to students, so she strives to make sure that her students can achieve success if they invest reasonable effort. In her class, grades are determined by performance on daily journal assignments (25%), weekly quizzes (20%), unit tests (25%) and comprehensive final exam (30%). Janet prepares her students well for these assignments and tests by distributing study guides for tests and being explicit about requirements on assignments. Rubrics are uniformly applied to written journal assignments.

            When Janet begins her class lectures, she first displays goals for the class session and suggests that students monitor their own progress toward meeting them. She leads the class through a discussion of the assigned reading selections by moving through a sequence of thoughtfully prepared questions that will support students’ understanding of the literature in terms of the goals she has defined. She tries to involve each student in the discussion and is sensitive to nonverbal signals that indicate someone has an idea. She also asks those who do not volunteer responses to comment, since she believes that participation enhances learning. As a result, her students stay focused on class discussion and have learned to be prepared to answer unexpected questions.

            Although Discussion is her preferred mode of teaching literary genres, she also incorporates lecture into the discussion through explanations and insights from scholars and critics. She expects that students will use the voices of these experts to inform their understanding of the literature. Janet’s students know that these perspectives are likely to appear again in some form on the assignments, quizzes, and tests. When she has finished with the discussion/lecture she designed to meet class goals, Janet also invites and responds to students’ questions and comments about the material, but she makes sure that the discourse doesn’t stray too far from the key ideas she wants to emphasize.

            Following these text-based lessons, students are assigned to create a reflective essay that integrates the ideas they gained from reading and discussion of the selections as representative of a genre. She wants to be certain that each learner has worked individually with the ideas in the text to build their unique understanding, based on a legitimate representation of the text and the insights of experts.

            At the end of each class, Janet also distributes a concept guide to help student digest the next assigned reading.  These reading guides area carefully constructed so that students can find the most important ideas and support them using text material. Janet will use these reading guides to frame the discussion during the next class meeting. She holds monthly meetings after class to guide those learners who have difficulty with analyzing text.  She also prepares an extensive study guide to prepare students for the cumulative final exam.

            Prior to the final course examination, which is a combination of multiple choice questions about the literature under study, identification of quotes, and essay responses, Janet offers an evening review session for those who are interested. She has been surprised to find that her students prepare most thoroughly for these review sessions and enjoy participation more if she structures the sessions as elimination bees or games, framed by questions based on the study guide.  Janet also makes sure that none of the essay questions stray too far from the text or contain elements that students who have studied carefully would find surprising or unfair. She bases grades on percentage of content mastered, and makes sure students are aware of the cutoffs for earning each grade at the beginning of the semester.

            Janet also includes “safety nets” for students who struggle. First everyone is allowed to have one bad day: When Janet calculates total scores to use for grading, she disregards each student’s worst quiz, lowest reflective essay, and assignment score. Second, students can partially regain lost credit on quizzes (although not on unit or final tests), if they return the quizzes to her with correction of each mistake accompanied by a statement about why the original answer was incorrect, they will receive half credit for these items. Third, students can earn a few extra credit points during each unit by selecting from a menu of extra credit assignments and completing a maximum of three of these successfully.

Maren Schmidt

            Maren also realizes that grades are important to students and chooses to personalize the curriculum and engage students in collaborative learning to prepare them for assessments. She diagnosis their current knowledge with  a short test early in each unit as a way to make sure that all of her students can define and examples of key terms, and sometimes she includes a major unit test as a way to assess students accomplishment of unit goals. For the most part, however, her students’ grades are determined by their work on a variety of learning activities, assignments, and projects. Her feedback to them emphasizes qualitative critiques and suggestions for improvements rather than letter grades or numerical scores.

            She covers fewer literary selections than Janet does, does and spends more time on those she does cover. Rather than give a reading guide for each selection, Maren asks that her students read the selection and then create some kind of response to what they read. Most students initially choose to write personal essays that connect the selection to their own experiences, but Maren also encourages them to express their responses in drawings, music compositions, or whatever vehicles best represent their responses.  By the end of the semester fewer students respond in essays.

            When students come to class with their various responses to the text, Maren has them explain their responses and artifacts as they relate to the selection to one other person. She deliberately mixes the partner exchanges so that students get to know each other and feel comfortable exchanging ideas with different class members. During initial whole-class discussion that follows, Maren first focuses on the students’ aesthetic reactions and related questions and comments

            Next, Maren presents a broad question or two to probe the meaning of the text, including elements of genre and technique. These questions are initially discussed in pairs with that day’s partner. During follow up whole group discussions, Maren presents perspectives of literary critics and calls attention to elements that students may have missed—especially those that will enhance their understanding of the selection and its structure. She makes sure to highlight ways that the author used key techniques to construct the selection and ways in which the use of these techniques enhanced the work. One goal is to help students to understand the key features of the text or genre and recognize the authors’ use of characteristic techniques; a second, perhaps more important goal to Maren, is to help them appreciate what the selection has to offer them as readers and the ways that good applications of genre techniques enhance the power and enjoyment of the stories they read.  At the end of the large group follow up, she asks students to make connections between their initial responses to the selection and the new ideas that have as a result of listening to others, to jot down key areas of new insight, and to share those with their partners.

            Maren does not require every student to complete a formal assessment for every genre studied during the semester. Instead, students are required to select four of them and create a culminating projects. Further, they choose from two options for these projects, either of which, Maren believes, will demonstrate students’ understanding. 

First, they may choose to convert their experiences with readings into a paper that discusses both the genre and their own responses to relevant selections. They decide for themselves which selections they want to include, with flexible due dates depending on the timing of their choices. Maren supplies a list of questions that the students can use to guide their writing if they wish to use it; questions are intended as thought starters rather than as rubrics for evaluation. She encourages students to write in depth about aspects that they found especially interesting or meaningful because she wants to engage students in using writing as a way to formulate and record both their aesthetic responses to literature as readers and the key insights that they have constructed as students of the genre.

            As an alternative project, students may choose to compose an original example of the genre (e.g., a mystery story), incorporating the elements they have learned to associate with that genre, followed by a brief analysis of the elements in their story.   Both synthesis essays and original compositions may be co-authored by up to three individuals.  Some students have also submitted their stories to the campus literary magazine.

            Maren’s preference would be to eliminate letter grades entirely and to work with students to meet course goals in writing and understanding of literary genres until they are confident and competent in both. However, the university structure naturally requires grading, so Maren chooses to emphasize students’ performance on individual and group assignments, essays, and literary creations, and calculates grades based percentage of possible points.  She provides qualitative feedback on all major assignments and invites students to revise their work to earn full credit. Twice during the semester she holds a meeting with each student and/or working group and makes suggestions about the students’ general progress in the subject.