The Value of Self Determination

In my classroom, I have a rule of encouraging fresh starts. What that means is for my students, what happened at an old school, last year, yesterday or even an hour ago. I encourage this for my coworkers too and how I speak of my students to future students. 

This belief was affirmed last year when I received a first grader, we will call him J. When this student came in he came with a behavior plan, emergency plan, and a one on one support. I talked to his past teacher to see what strategies were helpful.  I was astonished when all she told me was, “He was never in class. I am so glad he is not at our school anymore.”

When I met this student, his goals did not align with what I saw. We had a few bumps in the road, but from November to March (when the school closed), he had no escalations and was in class all day everyday. Behavior aside, his academic goals were well below what he could do.  Fast forward to now, and he is performing on grade level for reading and math, and is getting ready to exit social services. This is all within a year and a half. 

I continuously ask myself, what was the change? There are I am sure many different factors, but I think a big part was his own self determination and how it was encouraged. Wentzel and Brophy (2014) explained the self determination theory from Deci and Ryan emphasized the need for students to have autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Thinking about that theory made me reflect on some of the changes for J when he entered our school. 

Autonomy: I think the amount of autonomy he was able to have by March was surprising to him. We started the year setting up natural consequences and rewards (such as if he hurt someone at basketball, he would have to play in a different area at recess). However, towards the end of the year, if something happened we would often say, "well what do you think should happen," and he will usually say what he thinks and why. We would also try to ask questions about why things happened to see his thinking and guide him through problem solving. Finally, when he would be upset we had an area with various options for calming down and he would check in on the feelings chart and go over there and calm down in his way without an adult "telling" him how he should calm down. Overall, I think he was able to see how much of a power he had over his day based on his choices and his ability to have autonomy built at school was helpful for his self-determination at school.

Competence: Before coming to our school, J spent his entire kindergarten year (his first year of school) not experiencing success. As he went through 1st grade and was successful, I think there were a lot of aspects of school he realized he could do. He loved being at school, and was always upset when he had to leave and I believe a huge part of that was that he was able to feel like he could do things in school. He could do math, he was able to read, and he could make friends and be accepted by peers and teachers. 

Relatedness: I think that this was the most important one thing that encouraged his self determination. It was quite obvious he had a limited feeling of relatedness at his old school, but at our school he was able to find peers and teachers that accepted him and wanted him around. They way our school worked was that in the morning everyone started in the gym for morning assembly. For some students that is a very noisy and overwhelming environment. As a result J, myself and some other students started the day in my room doing puzzles and talking. This was a great opportunity for us to build a relationship and for him to build a relationship with peers. 

The overall message I want to send to all teacher is please do not judge your students by their pasts. Instead, create an environment that is supportive of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

 Wentzel, K. R., & Brophy, J. E. (2014). Motivating students to learn (4th ed.). New York:Routledge. ISBN 978-0415893527.