By Ray Truby, English Language Lecturer and Learning Innovator, City of Wolverhampton College
As the title suggests, motivation is the oxygen that fuels the fire of learning – but what exactly does that mean? And, how does it apply to the GCSE English Language resit class?
The resit experience across a typical academic year in FE has its inevitable ups and downs. Typically, the nervous trepidation in combination with the frustrated anxiety of having to enrol onto a course that may not necessarily be the students’ cup of tea, means that the whole experience can potentially start off on the wrong foot. This can be overcome in the first few weeks by conveying the message that this is a fresh start, a new beginning, a clean slate. Whatever has happened previously, well, let’s draw a line under that and start afresh. What I’m getting at looks very similar to a growth-mindset approach to kickstarting the year.
More specifically, I usually start the year by getting the learners to reflect on what works for them in the classroom and to think about where they want to be in a year’s time. The whole-class discussion, and the resultant personal reflective piece of free writing, helps to focus the students’ thinking on what they want to get out of the year ahead. This approach implicitly integrates two facets of motivation: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. By highlighting any intrinsic motivators [aspects of English Language GCSE that they might like, if only a little bit] and extrinsic motivators [what passing the course will enable students to do in the future] early on in the course, it sets the tone for the year.
Maintaining motivation throughout the year is tricky, but essential. Well, one approach could be to maintain the freshness of the first week throughout the year. If the course is punctuated by a series of mini units, these function as mini fresh starts. These units reflect skill sets that learners ultimately need to pass the final exam, e.g. two weeks on analysing texts; two weeks on evaluating; two weeks on comparing. Each ‘unit’ would culminate in a ‘waypoint’. This effectively is an opportunity to gather thoughts, reflect on learning or even put the skills to the test via a ‘progress check’. Importantly, progress checks early on in the year should be formative in nature and scaffolded in such a way that every student can access them and get something out of them – thereby fulfilling their motivational purpose.
These ‘waypoints’ should generate targets, which students work towards. Ideally, targets themselves should be motivational, but this only works if students have some ‘buy-in’ when setting the targets. That way, the targets have meaning and purpose – and, let’s face it, meaning and purpose are the foundations of motivation. Targets will always be primarily work-focused, but when targets are discussed in terms of how they will be achieved, ‘effort’ will always be somewhere in the mix. There is also a close correlation between levels of effort and motivation. Effort is certainly a symptom if not a cause of motivation, so where effort is present, acknowledge it! As teachers, we are often on the look-out for reasons to boost confidence in the students. Noticing effort is just one of those ways. It may not produce results straight away, but it can certainly boost confidence and a have-a-go attitude, which is crucial in resit classes.
Motivation is one of those abstract nouns which are difficult to pin down and even more difficult to gauge or monitor. We know what it is when we see it, and we feel the benefits of its presence and the consequences of its absence. Entire careers can be built around ways of nurturing and maintaining motivation. We can theorise about the drivers of motivation and come up with strategies which are contingent on those theories, but, at the end of the day, the lived experience of what has and hasn’t worked for us is probably as good a guide as any. In this blog, I have tried to show how motivation lights the way along the learner journey by giving some insights based on my own experience. I haven’t covered everything, and some of my suggestions might not work in some situations, so in one respect the biggest takeaway is to use motivational strategies that work for you and your students in your specific setting.
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