I’m in a somewhat administrative role now, mostly focusing on the education mission of my department, so I end up getting a lot of books related to teaching in some form or another (peer review of teaching, dynamic teaching, technology and teaching, re-energizing teachers who are burned out, etc.). One I looked at recently is called Motivating Students Who Don't Care: Successful Techniques for Educators, by Allen Mendler. It has some specific approaches for working with students who “aren't prepared, don't care, and won't work.” I recognize in the author’s suggestions many things that I have tried myself, but in a less-organized structure than presented here. The book is an inexpensive and short little read, but as one reviewer on Amazon.com put it, “It has some good ideas, and when you are an inner city teacher ANY new idea is worth the price of a paperback.”
Now, it’s certainly true that tuition at my university is lower than it is at many places, but it still isn’t cheap. I often see students who I know are paying tuition out of their own pockets who rarely attend class, who don’t try nearly as hard as they possibly could, and who – from my professorial perspective – don’t seem to care. What’s a dedicated professor to do? And so I turned to this little text, hoping to find some answers.
But as I read through the book, I found myself questioning some of the author’s assumptions about why students aren’t motivated in class. He focuses on students who are discouraged, or who have lost their enthusiasm for learning somewhere along the way. Bad teachers, parents and peers who diminish academic success, or who knows what else have led these students into self-fulfilling prophecies in which they see themselves as unlikely to do well or that it is unimportant to do well, leading to behaviors that ensure that they don’t do well. While I certainly see these students, as I think back over my challenging students I see some other types of unmotivated students, as well.
As a Graduate Teaching Assistant many years ago, when first encountered unmotivated students in my own classes, I just didn’t understand them. I felt like the managers at the Hawthorne works who felt that their employees were behaving irrationally when they didn’t strive for the available incentives, or like Skinner when his rats didn’t do what he expected – I remember reading his statement that he used to yell at the rats, saying “Damn you! Behave as you ought!”
Later on, I began to recognize, just as the managers at Hawthorne did and just as Skinner did, that in many cases, the students are behaving in entirely rational ways. One semester, while I was in the midst of asking myself “why are some of my students so irrational? Don’t they see that school has real potential benefits for them?”, I decided to gather some data. I asked one of my obviously intelligent and seemingly unmotivated students why he didn’t put in a little more effort, because it was clear that he could get an A if he wanted to do so. His reply surprised me. He said “D stands for diploma, man.” When I pushed for a little more detail, he said that he was close to being finished with school. He needed a degree – any kind of degree – because having one would make him eligible for a promotion into management at work. He was working full time while going to school, and the only reason his GPA mattered was to ensure it was high enough to allow him to graduate. All he needed from my class was a D, so that he got credit for the course on his transcript. Getting an A would cost him a lot of time and energy, and there was no payoff for him for doing so – none that mattered, anyway. So while I had been shaking my fist and thinking “Damn you! Behave as you ought!”, this student was doing exactly that. I’ve concluded that one group of students who are “unmotivated” is actually quite motivated – they just have different outcomes in mind than I do. They don’t attend class or put in a lot of effort because they have concluded that it is in their rational best interest to get a specific outcome for the least effort possible. I have to respect the decision they’ve made, and make it clear to them that they have to accept the outcomes they earn, even when they misjudge the level of effort required (i.e., shoot for a D and get an F). I believe that, for many of these students, the topics we cover in class would in fact be useful to them down the road, but that’s a decision they make for themselves.
I think that there is a second group of “unmotivated” students, and over time I’ve concluded that for these students, their behavior is rational but uninformed. By this I am referring to students who have potential but who have never before been required to put in a lot of effort to succeed. These may be students who are underprepared for college but are not yet aware that they are underprepared. They’ve succeeded in the past because not much has been required of them. They are not putting in effort because they have not learned that they need to do so, nor have they learned how to do so. They may be students who have been able to get by on intelligence alone, and are just now reaching the point where they have to apply effort in conjunction with that intelligence, but they don’t yet realize that. These are the students who will show up part-way through the semester, often confused and angry about their performance in class to date. These are students who I can help, but it is often not an easy process. They may have years of bad habits to unlearn, and a new mindset about the relationship between effort and outcome to learn. For these students, one-on-one conversations about their study habits and the expectations of time spent on class work outside of class, along with referrals to campus programs to help students build those skills, can make a tremendous difference.
And then there are the students that Allen Mendler is describing in his book – the student who has become discouraged, who is lacking in efficacy and/or esteem, and who does not see the connection between effort and outcome. For these students, some of Mendler’s five strategies (emphasizing effort, creating hope, respecting power, building relationships, and expressing enthusiasm) and specific suggestions (e.g., praising a student who is habitually late for class when they arrive “less late”, or praising a student who gets an F on a test but whose performance is better than it had been previously, etc.) have a chance to work. But just as we know that there are situational and cultural moderators to the effectiveness of particular leadership behaviors, it seems to me that there are moderators to the effectiveness of these strategies – specifically, what’s the source of the student’s “unmotivated” behavior?
As I look back now on how I’ve thought about and tried to address this “unmotivated student” issue over the years, I’m not terribly impressed with myself. I’ve tried a variety of things over the years, starting off with a simplistic approach that focused on class attendance. I’ve made class attendance mandatory, non-mandatory but rewarded with points, non-mandatory but helpful, and I’ve made attendance entirely optional. I’ve tried focusing on engagement rather than attendance – if I couldn’t make them attend, then perhaps I could make them want to attend. In the end, I’ve had to conclude that Taylor was wrong – on this issue, there is no “one best way” to motivate the seemingly unmotivated student. So I continue to wrestle with this – it is still hard for me to fully accept it when a smart student chooses not to invest time and energy in doing as well as he or she could do. But I am focusing on doing a better job of understanding why a student might not be behaving in the ways I think of as “motivated student” behaviors, and then tailoring my response accordingly.
What about you? How have you approached the challenge of seemingly unmotivated students? I’ve set up a blog to accompany this column, and it can be found at http://maxclassroomcapacity.blogspot.com/. I’ll post these columns there, and invite your feedback. When possible, I’ll cycle back through to a topic, and report here on SIOP members’ input. I hope that you’ll join in the conversation on teaching, moving us all closer to reaching our Max. Classroom Capacity.
