Motivation in Education

  Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as a teacher, it was interesting to see the aspects of education that changed, and the aspects that did not. One thing that did not change that I continuously struggled with was the use of rater scales used by school psychologists to qualify students for social-emotional special education services. In special education, when students are considered for social emotional services, a rater scale is to be filled out by parents and teachers, and then the student’s rating on this is compared to kids the student’s age. During the school year, this method is effective enough, but some of the measures had become very unreliable with the situation the COVID school closure put us in, and it leaves many parents and teachers in a pickle.  At the end of the year, it was time for one of my kindergarteners to be reevaluated for his special education services. Though he had not previously qualified for social emotional services, he was on the autism ...

  As an elementary special education teacher, a belief that I firmly hold is that moral (or character) education is very important from a young age. I also had recently listened to a great TED talk that really stuck with me on why moral education is important for younger student.   I am almost positive that all teachers have worked with students that have experienced trauma.  For me what really opened my eyes to the effect of trauma was when I moved to the school I am currently at.  The school houses the special education program for students with more significant social-emotional disabilities.  What really took me by surprise was that all of these students had experienced some sort of abuse as a child. For reference, these were all kindergarten through second graders. Another thing that really stood out to me was something their teacher told me: many of these students act out in violent or inappropriate ways because that is the only thing they have ever...

  Reliability is a very important, though often overlooked aspect of teaching. Reliability ensures that when students are given assignments, the assignments are accurate- meaning free from bias and able to be replicated. Strong reliability also helps assessment reliability. An example of the importance of reliability comes from one of my favorite movies- Freaky Friday. In that movie, Anna’s teacher, Mr. Bates, is seen as unfair, which we later find out is because of her mom not going out with him in high school.   However, his unfair teaching and grading practices indicate that at the core, his assessments are unreliable.   There are many signs of his unreliable assessments throughout the movie.  First (and again, a very overlooked aspect of reliability), is the fact that he is the only scorer for his students. Yes, he is the teacher, but it is obvious that him being the only person to rate his students’ performance leads to bias in his grading. For example, w...

Since the start of my teaching career, the debate between discovery learning and direct instruction has been very present. In my undergrad, we were taught about direct instruction solely as a way to instruct students with disabilities. It was not until I started using direct instruction programs myself that I started to see the holes in using direct instruction only. Though it was very effective in filling gaps, it did not allow students to think critically or connect it to their everyday lives. As a result, my overall opinion of the discovery learning versus direct instruction debate is that discovery learning can not be left out of teaching students with learning disabilities.  The last two years of teaching with a direct instruction curriculum, I have seen a lot of boredom when it comes to my students’ learning. However, that is not the biggest issue that I have seen when it comes to implementing direct instruction.  There were many times when students were repeating ba...

  One of my favorite shows to help me unwind is Modern Family.   I recently started rewatching it, but this time as I watched it I could not help but see all of the connections to the goal-orientations and motivation strategies learned in class. When watching Modern Family, there was one character in particular who stood out because of her performance-approach orientation. Alex Dunphy is considered the brains of her family. However, to achieve and maintain this reputation, she displays many patterns that show her performance-approach goals.   Alex’s goal orientation is shown in many ways, but especially the way that she looks towards school. For example, “adopting performance-approach goals means committing oneself to striving for hight levels of achievement” (Wentzel & Brophy, 2014, p.25-26). For her, she does not just want to have an A in her classes, but she wants to be the best. This is shown when she does not get excited when she gets an A, because she did n...

  In the last few months or so, our district has been working on getting students back in school. With that has come a lot of planning meetings, for both the district and union, that have brought up a lot of reflective questions. However, one in particular that was asked by our union about a month ago really took me back and has had me thinking about it for a while now. That question was: “What would you like the public to know?” With that question a lot of things come to mind. It is hard to go on social media and see the criticism, and the overall false assumptions that have come from one bad remote learning incident. But really, what I have wanted the public to know is that for some students, especially those with performance-avoidance goals, remote learning has worked.   With this in mind, I do not want to undermine the experiences that many students and families have. There are students who struggle to complete work and home, technology that interferes with academics, ...