Demotivating

Any English teacher in Japan can read the following quotations and identify with the ideas:

…during the years between elementary school and high school, many students disengage from English and don’t regain their interest—to the detriment of their later schooling, and even their adult careers…

…by [the end of the first year of middle school], the pupils described English as less valuable than they had [at the beginning of the year], and reported that they were investing less effort and persistence in the subject than they had before…

Except that these quotations were not taken from a study on student attitudes and motivations toward English in Japan, but rather math in Australia. I just lifted and altered the quotations from a recent Mind/Shift blog posting that introduced a large study done in Australia by a University of Sydney professor named Andrew Martin. He and his colleagues looked at 1601 learners in 200 math classrooms in 33 schools. The similarities to English in Japan are powerful, however.

The two graphs above are from a 2009 study done by Benesse in Japan. The top one shows the results of a question that asked when learners in jr high felt most positive/motivated to learn English. Look at the two first numbers, the second highest and the highest on the graph. The first one is “just before classes started in jr high 1st grade” and the second one is “right when classes started in jr high 1st grade”. By summer of first year, only three months after beginning formal English education (these learners did not have regular/formal English classes in elementary school), the course/curriculum/teachers/textbook had managed to obliterate more than 90% of the delicate innate motivation these learners were feeling. And they never got it back. Not even close.

The second graph may help to explain the first one a little. It shows the responses to the question, “Are you good or bad at English?” Only 8 % say they are really good  at English. 29.5% say they are sort of good at it. 32.5% say they are sort of bad at it. And a larger-than-should-be 29.3 % state theyare really bad at it. We should be getting something more bell-curvsey here, I think; instead we get a pile of academic corpses in our lower regions. Somebody is doing something wrong almost everyone agrees.

Perhaps Mr Martin et al can help. The number one factor they determined in getting kids interested in maths was facilitating self-efficacy, that magical, elusive feeling that one is competent and able to solve problems. They suggest fostering this by restructuring learning to offer opportunities for success. Success is motivating. I couldn’t agree more, but jr high schools in Japan are so much in the business of separating learners out along the continuum that they don’t offer enough of these opportunities. It seems rather that schools give large numbers of low scores deliberately, like  switches to the backs of  heads of meditating monks  losing concentration. It works sometimes, but with many learners it does not. Many learners can only take getting hit with low scores so often before they give up. It doesn’t have to be this way.  Language, unlike math, can be successful without being completely correct. But in most jr high schools, communicative success is not rewarded. Close on English test question answers,  unlike hand grenades and horseshoes, does not count. When the spelling is wrong, the answer is wrong. Wrong, period. No points. And when the answer is different from the one in the text book (Wrong: this is the train to Machida; Correct: this is the  train for Machida, for example) it’s WRONG. NO POINTS.

The Australian math motivation researchers also found positive effects for family and school cultures that intrinsically valued math. That is, the learners got a clear message that math was important and math learning was important. When we try to apply this finding to English in Japan, we find some differences. Kids and (probably especially) their parents are embedded in a culture where doing well at English (not necessarily learning English as a language) is seen as a way to get into a better high school. Doing well at school has become the rationale for learning the language. They (the parents) expect their kids to actually pick up English later in their academic careers, but in jr high, they want them to learn vocabulary, reading, and test-taking skills. I can understand this up to a point–getting into a high school is a super important event in someone’s life and academic career. But wouldn’t you want your kid to learn to swim if they took swimming lessons, instead of memorizing the size of the pool and the names of the muscles involved in the activity? Wouldn’t you want your kid to get in the water sometimes? As the parent of a recent jr high graduate in Japan, I have been witness to this sorry condition, though I am sort of lucky in that I never expected the school to teach my daughter English; she’s mostly bilingual, and as a native English speaker and an EFL teacher, I have resources. But I feel sorry for the other students in her classes. They get an endless stream of seemingly discreet particles of the language that they just have to process and remember accurately. They never make meaning. Mistakes are never forgiven. They never feel progress, except when they do well on that high school entrance exam. And then it’s on to the next level. They never get the chance to realize that learning a language offers opportunities for expanding your world, meeting people, and exploring yourself. They just come away with the message that English is hard and they are not good at it–though all that has really been proven at that point is that they are not good at memorizing which letters go in which order and which words go in which order in short meaningless sentences. Oh, and they learn what a painful and pedestrian slog workbooks and classes are, and how juku (cram school) can drill that crap into you if you give up your free time and your parents can part with a lot of cash.

In many ways, Mr Martin’s finding could be more easily put to work with English than with math. Letting learners experience success is much easier. It is easier for partial, or flawed, or broken communication to still be successful communication. But it will take a mindset shift, definitely. In Julie Dirksen’s book on instructional design called Design for How People Learn (click here for my review) she has one chapter on designing for knowledge and one on designing for skills. The approach to each is fundamentally different. Designing for skills acknowledges that it is much more of a process, and it requires more practice and more formative feedback. Jr high school teachers do not seem to be approaching English as a skill, but rather as knowledge. That is both the crux of the problem and the opportunity for change.

 

 

The Creativity Gap

Rick Martin, writing in the Tech In Asia blog, recently posted the result of a study done by Adobe about attitudes toward creativity. The results are summarized in the article and in the graphic below.

And the results are eyebrow-raising. Japan is seen by everyone as an incredibly creative place–except by the Japanese themselves! And an astonishingly large number of people in Japan (78%) said creativity is something reserved for people in the arts community. I don’t mean to sound alarmist (OK, actually I do), but this should set off the same  bells and buzzers and active responses that PISA results do. But as Mr Martin and some of the response posters to his blog article state, Japan is a fantastically creative place. In fact, perhaps it may be because Japan has such a high level of creativity in almost everything, that people have a different view of creativity in general. This needs to be considered further…

Garr Reynolds on Making Lectures More Engaging

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last month at TED  in Osaka, Garr Reynolds gave this presentation on how to make lectures (lessons) more engaging. The talk is only about 20 minutes long but it is full of wisdom and presentation wonderfulness. The themes of engaging visuals for presentation and interaction in learner activities are very nicely dealt with.

But here is the problem: teacher-centeredness. Most teachers (in Japan, the main source of examples for Mr Reynolds, but also in other places) can see a presentation guru up on stage at a TED or other event and draw a direct connection to their own situation. Adding more visuals, better coordinating your slides and your message: these are things that the type of teachers who attend this type of conference can transfer fairly easily to their own classroom situation. The harder part, the really really hard part, is making a shift toward a more learner-centered, creative learning environment. Mr Reynolds offers some nice ideas, chiefly making higher ed classes more similar to elementary school classes. That will work for college-level higher ed, but it seems to be a hard thing to transition into for jr. and sr. high school teachers for many reasons (time, tests, training, expectations, teaching culture, infrastructure, to name a few). In a previous post, I described the present norm as I see it in English language classes at high schools and some of the reasons why this norm is accepted when it should be unacceptable.

Making Teaching and Learning More Effective: Julie Dirksen’s Design For How People Learn

This wonderful book by Julie Dirksen (New Riders, 2012) manages to do something that is very difficult: it is compact yet comprehensive, and it takes some fairly difficult topics and makes them clear and memorable. It is aimed at online instructional designers, but only in the most general way. It is a book about human learning–goals, gaps, memory, attention, skills, motivation, and environmental considerations–and it organizes and explains those topics in a way that will entertain you, refresh your memory, and help you to put knowledge to effective use, whether you are going to apply that knowledge or explain it to others. It covers the basics, but I’m pretty confident in saying that it has just the right level of detail to appeal to almost any educator. Even seasoned instructional designers will find something for them in it. Different people will enjoy it for different but overlapping reasons: for it’s readability, for its “stickiness“, for its concise explanations.

I teach EFL teachers, or at least I try to, and I often find myself trying to distill research findings in such manner that our session participants can “see” it. That is, I want the teachers who come to our sessions to understand the concepts and recognize how they work in a class. Ms. Dirksen’s book does that brilliantly well. She has a genius–yes, genius–for explaining things and I am going to borrow some of her metaphors for upcoming training sessions this year. At the end of each chapter there is a Summary section, as there is with other books. But here, instead of working my way through the list trying to recall the various points, I found myself jumping from point to point–check, got it, check, check, check, got’em. I could mentally have written the points myself, that’s how well they had stuck with me. There is a lot of Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users blog) in this book and in Ms. Dirksen’s approach, something that she clearly acknowledges, and that is not a criticism. (If you like her blog posts, you’re pretty likely to enjoy this book. And if you have never visited her blog, go take a look).

If I ran the circus, I would make this book mandatory for all teachers. At this point in time, I do believe there is not a better summary of current understanding of the psychology of learning as it applies to teaching situations. Do yourself a favor and get this book. I promise you won’t be sorry. Ms. Dirksen’s blog is also very good, and she is a very dependable Twitterer. In the world of educational design, she’s a good person to have in your corner.

Playful and Powerful: Stephen Anderson Makes You Think About Seductive Interaction Design

I found Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences (New Riders, 2011) through a post on Julie Dirkson’s blog, where she introduced a set of cards that Mr. Anderson had developed to help designers in a pinch. Each card contains a design feature (he calls them Mental Notes) you can use to influence users. You flip a card over and think about whether you can incorporate that feature into your design. Perhaps piquing curiosity will help, one card suggests. Or maybe the bystander effect could help you. I went to Mr Anderson’s website to find out more and saw this book. Assuming that the cards would be contained in the book–they aren’t, though you do get an introduction and a few examples, and if you shake the content of the book up and reorganize it, you can probably replicate the content of the cards–I ordered the book. And even though I didn’t get the cards, I’m really glad I ordered the book.

The metaphor used to organize the content is a relationship–a couple at the beginning of a relationship flirting and playing as they try to get to know each other better. There is a dollop of uncertainty and a dash of excitement. It is a social process and a psychological process. It is a process of discovery played out with heightened attention to detail. It is a two-way process and each side has goals and needs and is trying to influence and motivate the other to do something. If we remove the sexual part of the metaphor–and Mr Anderson carefully does in the first unit–it is a good metaphor for advertisers attempting to influence buyers, web designers trying to influence clickers, and teachers trying to influence learners. It also highlights the focus in the book on those first few critical stages in engagement with content. The first interaction with a website is Mr. Anderson’s particular area of expertise, but much of what he says can be applied to any interaction with something new, particularly in educational settings. Indeed, he begins his book with a design feature that got people to use the stairs more at a train station in Sweden.

The book is primarily aimed at web interaction designers, but there is enough educational psychology here to keep any language teacher busy in the 25 chapters arranged in 4 sections. Teachers are not used to thinking of our (mostly) captive learners as needing to be “seduced” into doing what they need to do to learn a language, but the reality is that learners in classrooms vote with their attentional resources and behaviors as much as fickle web surfers do with their mouse clicks. This book will help you to make lessons more fun and effective, with an emphasis on fun because lessons will not be so effective if they are not fun first.

This book is not going to give you an overview of how to construct a complete user/learner experience (for that see my review of Julie Dirksen’s book). It is more about tweaking the details–though they are often fundamental details–to make things more attractive and effective. But it is a very thorough look at the details, with thought-provoking ideas. His section on gamification is particularly good, for example, and you will come away with a more complete understanding of the concept, I’m sure. In many other parts of the book, he deals pretty much with particulars that he has found important, using lots of examples and drawing on his rich experience.

It’s a fun ride, brilliant in many places, and my mind lit up with ideas as I read it. I just wish it had a deck of those cards attached to the back cover…