Understanding Children's Motivation

Book Discussion 1

This week Kaila was our facilitator since Angela was absent.

We read the first 26 pages of "Understanding How Young Children Learn" by Wendy Ostroff outside of PLC and were prepared to discuss the book during our meeting. Here were some highlights from our discussion:

We discussed how students are motivated in different ways to learn and how we as teachers can make learning a more fun experience for the students. In the book, Ostroff emphasizes the fact that school can become all about routine and habit for students and the novelty of learning wears off. This can cause students to become disinterested, distracted, or off task. As teachers, we need to try new things and surprise the students with new ways of introducing topics. If we are excited about the learning in the classroom, then the students will most likely become excited as well. 

We each gave examples in our own classrooms of situations where we got the students more engaged or excited about a topic, even if it was not particularly interesting to us. For example, Kaila shared how she used motions and word connections to explain what a trapezoid was to her students. Shape naming is not her favourite thing to teach, but the students quickly caught on and enjoyed the activity. Joyce mentioned that the students love making flashcards because she introduced it as something "fun" and "different". Often, it is how we approach learning that affects students' attitude about it.

We also discussed how confidence plays a huge role in the process of learning in children. Helping students to visualize their success and encouraging confidence, even overconfidence, plays an important role in a student's learning. As teachers, overconfidence among students can be frustrating; however, according to the book it can be a good quality because it encourages students to try, even if they fail at accomplishing a task.

We answered discussion questions such as, "What classroom practices are done simply out of tradition? How can we empower children and enable them instead of acting like they are helpless or powerless? Why does the desire to learn often decrease as a child gets older? What are some ways we can engage them and make them excited?". We were reminded that as teachers, we need to put ourselves in the children's shoes and try to see life as they see it in order to more effectively teach. We also agreed that school should be about the children's learning and not about our teaching. Our focus should be on our students and in order to teach them more effectively, we must know them better in regards to their motivations, behaviours, brain structures, intelligences, etc. 

We are enjoying reading this book and especially appreciate the practical applications that the author includes for teachers to use in their classrooms. Hopefully, we will start to incorporate more of these ideas in our own classrooms and be open to learning more effective strategies to implement in the future. 

DPDP Discussion

This week at PLC we discussed our DPDP's, what we want this year's PLC to accomplish, and we reflected on the day. Joyce was unable to make it to due to illness.

At the beginning of the meeting, we each shared our DPDP's and how we are planning to accomplish them.
 - Kaila stated that she is working on encouraging the students to find real world applications to the things they are learning. For example, she will try to ask the students at the end of the day what they learned. She wants to use effective strategies to instruct her students properly since her group of students is very energetic and talkative this year. She is hoping that the book we read will give her effective strategies for improving her practice of teaching.
- Bekah shared that she wants to focus on monitoring the students better, motivating the students to take ownership of their own learning, and reflecting on a regular basis on one negative and one positive take away from the day. She wants to focus on assessing the students regularly through different methods and have successful follow through with the students in their learning.
- Angela shared that she is focusing on assessment this year. Since JK is doing grading differently this year, she thought she would spend more time and effort on how to assess the students in different ways academically. She is going to try to write down anecdotal notes more often.

We also shared our positives and negatives from the day. This helped us process the day and and reflect on what we can do better and what is effective for our students.

In the end, we all agreed that through this PLC, we want learn how to "work smarter" not "work harder". We all have many things we need to get done; however, we all desire to improve in our practice through implementation of more effective strategies. We look forward to reading the book about how young learners learn in order to improve as professionals.