Week 10 Free Post: Motivation in Schooling

Okay, so I have been struggling with what to write about for my last free post for the last week.  I took a trip to Chicago with the Urban Education Cohort Program here at Michigan State and had the opportunity to visit some Chicago Public Schools and an Urban Prep Academy and thought for a while about writing about that experience.  I have also been talking about some motivation strategies in one of my classes and thought that might be useful for new teachers too.  However, I couldn't find a large enough purpose for either of these topics, so I went searching on the web.  I revisited a playlist of Ted talks that I started earlier in this blog experience, and there I found the perfect video to tie everything together.  It is called The Key to Success? Grit.  I would strongly encourage you to watch it.

Angela left a job in management consulting to teach 7th grade math in the New York Public Schools.  While she was there, she realized that there was not a direct correlation between IQ and her best students.  So, she left her job teaching several years later to go to graduate school for psychology.  In her study she asked "who is successful here and why?".  She tried to predict which students would advance furthest in a spelling bee, which teachers would be most successful in urban districts, and several other settings.  She realized that the most prominent indicator was grit.  Grit is long term motivation for a goal.  A person with grit will work really hard to make their dream future a reality.

Angela studied grit in Chicago Public Schools and concluded that the grittier students were more likely to graduate.  This was a more likely predictor than several other factors like family income and how safe kids feel while at school.  I would like to pause from the video for a moment to reflect on my own experience in Chicago, specifically at the Urban Prep Academy.  This charter school prides itself on 100% acceptance rate into a four year college for all of it's students.  That is certainly a lot to be proud of, especially in Chicago where several students in public education are dropping out.  How do they do it?  Well, I'll let you make your own conclusion based on information I learned while I was there.

• I learned that admission to this schools is based on a lottery system, meaning that the number of students that apply is over the carrying capacity of the school and students that get in are randomly selected.  
• I know that the public school system isn't great, so students that apply for the Urban Prep Academy are more motivated and want a better education.  
• Urban Prep is a 100% African-American male school
• Teachers are required to be available 24/7 by cell phones, provided to each student and teacher when they enter the school. 
•  On average, students are at school from 8-5:30 each day because they are required to be involved in 2 extra-curricular activities.  
• Each student is a part of a pride which is a group of students led by a teacher that meets daily to provide mentoring, support, and encouragement.  
• Students are treated with respect and are referred to by their last name ("Mr. Leeforth")

So returning to the video, the question then becomes, how can we make our students more gritty?  How can we motivate them long term?  Angela says she doesn't know the full answer to this question, but the best partial answer comes from the incremental motivation theory, which is something we have been learning about in one of my classes.  Incremental motivation is essentially believing that abilities can be developed and learned with effort.  Angela suggests that when kids learn about how the brain grows and develops as you learn, they are more likely to persevere when they fail, because failure isn't permanent condition.

So, all that being said, the incremental growth system is a great start to building grit, but that's not enough.  What do you think can we do to build more grit?




Citations
Duckworth, Angela Lee. "Angela Lee Duckworth:The Key to Success? Grit." Ted.com. Ted Conferences, Apr. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.
"Urban Prep Academies." Urbanprep.org. Urban Prep Academies, n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.