Ask around your own school to see which teachers have a level of success in the area of motivation and pick their brains to see how/if you can use/modify their strategies to experience success yourself.

I find the idea that “today’s youth” are “unmotivated” is bizarre. When teenagers are “hooked” one topic or activity, they are darn near unstoppable.

Good word. I moved this quote into the main post.

Good teachers know this. That is why the veteran teachers that I have worked with first gauge a new teaching ideas or tools by how much they think their students will buy-in and engage.

Though I am a strong fan of using technology with my students, I learned long ago that technology itself is not a motivator for long, and if students are expected to use technology in the same way day after day (e.g. Rocketship warehousing) , they will balk. In my opinion, the same should prove true for much of the naive “blending” and “flipping” that is in vogue these days. We’ll see.

You and he may be saying the same thing: de-motivation is exactly the problem. The current school system isn’t motivating students, and apparently ed-tech isn’t doing it either.

Anyone have a contextualized version of the quotation? Or is the context here just Mr. Gates’ other efforts in education?

posted by http://achievethecore.org/ and was struck by the JOY of the students while working toward making their discovery. As a K-8 Math Specialist I have seen firsthand how bored, unmotivated students come alive when they can pick their heads up from textbooks and worksheets and step-by-step procedures and work on interesting challenges. I have also seen students working with products like Khan Academy who were bored to tears and just wanted to copy the hints from the last problem to get their “right answer” to the next.

IMHO, education funding needs to go to two places: first to educate parents and caregivers of pre-school children on how to instill a love of learning – waiting until children begin even Pre-K is too late and the importance of early numeracy is both well documented and easy to accomplish with young, naturally curious and motivated children. Second, to improving teaching. To helping teachers understand math deeply, know how to choose and facilitate meaningful tasks and discourse, and offer helpful feedback that supports learning. Funders are beginning to notice that investing in teaching is the only way to create real institutional change.

I imagine kids/adults who are extrinsically motivated to complete some assignment would have different learning outcomes than those who are intrinsically motivated. Extrinsic would seem to get you through some of the lower level thinking skills and teachers have a lot of control over this. Intrinsic seems to be necessary to reach higher level thinking skills, and hence is more valuable, but requires perhaps a less direct but more skillful role on the part of the teacher.

For ed people with that attitude I think there’s some Country Envy involved here. If only the students were like {insert country X here where the students all sit quietly and take notes and have no behavioral issues} then everything would be perfect.

Nevermind people in those countries aren’t happy either — for example:

“What the Chinese are very good at doing is achieving short-term goals,” says Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Peking University High School, affiliated with Beijing’s Peking University, known as the “Harvard” of China. “They’re good at copying things, not creating them.”