View Content #22216

Laura Sexton teaches Spanish and English at Gaston Early College High School in Dallas, NC and moderates for #LangChat, a weekly Twitter chat for language educators on Thursdays at 8pm and Saturdays at 10am. Read her latest blog posts at www.PBLintheTL.com.

Instant gratification matters to the adolescent brain, but gratification is more than candy or a cash prize. Sure, a sticker or a badge or a plastic trophy can make teenagers--or anyone--feel like their efforts have been noticed. But trinkets alone are not enough to keep anyone moving forward.

Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivate Us, cites mastery, autonomy, and purpose as the true motivators for those in the business world and beyond. I’ve seen evidence of their power in my own classes, especially in projects that scaffold student empowerment in language learning.This sort of scaffolding can shape your whole course or take the form of simple activities interspersed throughout to help students explore autonomy and their own ultimate purposes.

But what of the mastery? That’s where carefully structured tasks and input come in. Circled question and answer sessions with the whole class can be an effective way to provide vocabulary students need to communicate about their goals and progress. Following up with relevant texts rich with images, cognates, and other contextual clues also helps.

Self-improvement is one purpose that has proven motivating for my Spanish II students, especially when they were allowed to choose among three topics: exercise, time management, and money management.

In the Self-Improvement (or Mejor yo) unit, we started off with yes/no and either/or questions about what problems affected them most to decide where they wanted to focus. Students then formed groups according to their goals, and each maintained a weekly routine that involved

• Blogging daily about their progress toward their goal (even if only a simple sentence about what they didn’t do that day)
• Collecting resources like infographs and tutorial videos on a group Pinterest board then summarizing and reflecting on one resource a week
• And discussing what they have done toward their goals and what they can do next.

At the end of the unit, each student got to present what they learned with a motivational video based on what they found that worked for them.

It is a special joy to watch videos like that, because you get to witness where the autonomy and purpose led them, and to actually see the mastery--not only of the language, but of a life skill--in effect.

Spending more time structuring activities, units, and even courses that help students find their own purpose and manage autonomy keeps students on track for mastery, and for lifelong learning.

Reference Cited

Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.