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| Self-Determination Theory Chart |
Last year, I was excited and wrote a blogpost about a new endeavor as it related to motivating students. Exactly a year ago, my colleague Paul Oswald and I conducted a survey of students at Joliet West to see what motivated them, what didn't, and what we could do to bridge that gap of intrinsic motivation.
We met with an education professor at St. Francis University, Lisa White-McNulty, and she directed us to read up on Self-Determination Theory, originally developed by Deci and Ryan. I asked teachers in the English Department to distribute a survey Paul and I developed, accounting for the three components of SDT: Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence. What choices did they have? Why is it important? How difficult or easy will it be for me to complete this task? The survey appears below.
We heard from more than 800 students, or roughly 25% or our school population. This was a pretty astounding number for a Google Survey we asked teachers to distribute, but many of them did, and it led to a number of professional development opportunities and opportunities for kids to be taught in ways that may ultimately lead to better experiences in the classroom.
The original post talked about a website, or interviews, or a movie...we were ambitious. It didn't lead to those (yet), but it did lead us to share our results with staff.
It turns out, students don't enjoy packets of worksheets, they want to be respected, they want to understand what they are doing, they want to be interested, they want pizza (the joy of open-ended questions), and they want choice. It wasn't the threat of a bad grade, or the danger of athletic eligibility that motivated them. The tenets of SDT were reflected in their responses.
We were encouraged by the results, and because Paul and I are instructional coaches (we teach 2 classes and work on curriculum, PD, and mentoring the rest of the day), we were asked to create a PD opportunity of our choosing. We developed a 15-hour course on SDT, working with a group of 10 teachers to understand SDT and try to apply what they learned to a unit during the second semester. We asked teachers to create pre- and post-assessment surveys to see how kids wanted to learn first, and then how they liked the way the unit went at the end. Teachers are blogging about their experiences, sharing survey results, and are, ideally, making the experience better for their students.
In addition to the 15-hour version, we did a 90-minute version for more than 30 teachers on an institute day, and we explained the concepts, showed how to make a Google survey, and even explained how this theory can be used by coaches. As a cross country coach myself, I thought about giving the runners a choice in the routes we run (autonomy); about how much harder I can push some of them (competence); about why we need to celebrate improvement more so the workouts are worth it (relatedness).
I have been a participant in this as well, as this year I started doing Genius Hour with my students (read more here or here if you are interested). This totally accounts for Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence, and my survey for the class reflects this. I was able to go weeks into this project without students asking about how it's graded. They loved the choice, and they came up with better ideas for projects than I ever could, but that's a post for another day.
As always, it's encouraging to learn something new and see how it can improve not only our experiences but our students' experiences as well.
