How do you Motivate Young Learners?

A thought experiment:  Imagine you are a post-graduate student. This is the first session of the first day of your Masters’ course. So the Professor walks in and says ‘OK guys, listen up! This course isn’t like the others; by the time you get your Masters, you will have all but finished your Thesis and you’ll be ready for your PhD! From now on in any communication between us I want you to refer to yourselves as ‘Doctoral Candidate + your name’! I am sure this would have got your attention… 🙂  From time to time we hear about exceptional teachers – teachers like Mr Keating in ‘The Dead Poets’ Society’ or Miss Brodie… Such teachers do exist and this is a story about one of them…

Case Study – C. Jones’ story:  Crystal Jones was a primary school teacher with a difference. She was ambitious! Upon taking command of her class of 1st graders she set them a target: ‘By the end of the year, you are going to be 3rd graders!!’ She duly informed her charges that they were no ordinary pupils, but ‘scholars’ – and she taught them what that meant. Not only that, she also encouraged them to use the title when talking to each other. When someone happened to visit the class and asked why the pupils addressed each other in this way, the whole class responded in chorus that ‘A scholar is someone who lives to learn and who is good at it!’ – so clearly such a title was appropriate for them… 🙂 The ‘scholars’ were encouraged to share with their family what they had learned at school.

When spring came, tests showed that the class had reached the level required for 2nd grade, so Jones threw a graduation party. From that point on, the students were to think of themselves as ‘2nd graders’ and the kids enjoyed immensely referring to themselves as such for the rest of the year. By June, Jones had reached her objective: in terms of scholastic achievement, 90% of her class were at 3rd grade level or higher! (Heath & Heath 2011)

Applications in the field of ELT:  Crystal Jones is one of those amazing teachers that make an impression on you; she is the sort of teacher you will talk to your spouse about – the sort of teacher we all aspire to be. So what can we learn from her approach?

Framing: Is going to school a drag or a treat? We know that most of our learners would answer it is the former – yet the way Jones ‘framed’ the whole experience to them made it very different! We are told that kids even felt sorry (!!) for their classmates when they missed a lesson for some reason! (Heath & Heath 2011) Now it is true that in most of our teaching situations these attitudes have almost fossilized, but there are so many other things which are nevertheless new (cf a brilliant ‘framing’ experiment in Ariely 2008 – p. 40); perhaps a project or a drama activity or the opportunity for students to teach their classmates! If we ‘sell’ the new experience to them as something they should be pleased for, then we have almost won the battle for their hearts and minds!

Meaningful goals: If Jones had told her pupils that by the end of the year they would have covered say ‘fractions’ and ‘decimals’ that would have meant nothing to them. Instead, she chose a goal that would resonate with little kids: ‘I’m going to be a 3rd grader!! WOW! Just like my sister – and she is a year older than I am! I’m going to be bigger, smarter, cooler!’ Knowing that something is ‘beneficial’ in some abstract way, cuts little ice with busy adults and even less with younger learners. To motivate them we have to look at what they want! That could mean showing business people a video and telling them that in, say, 6 months’ time they will be able to socialize as smoothly as the characters in it; it could also mean showing our teenage learners an effective ‘chatting up scene’ in the L2 and telling them that they could be just as successful by the end of the year… 🙂

Labelling: It is incredible how often labels act as self-fulfilling prophecies! (Aronson 1999) We have all heard horror stories about teachers who labeled students as ‘stupid’ or ‘lazy’ (and ended up exacerbating whatever problem already existed!) but the same is true of positive labeling! Notice how Jones insisted that her pupils call each other ‘scholar’ and how they would explain the word at every opportunity! Each of these occasions reinforced this perception they had of themselves! Labelling does not need to apply to the whole class; you may give different labels to different students depending on the direction you want them to move in (… ‘Kate is so helpful’ – ‘Mark is so organised’…) Spreading (positive) rumours about a person I have also found to be extremely effective, as is asking students to justify the label! (‘You are such a perfectionist! Are your parents like that too?’ 🙂 ) Incredibly, even if you tell them later you did it deliberately, the ‘label’ is still effective!! (Sutherland 1992)

Active revision: It is one thing to study something, but it is quite another to be able to explain it to someone else. One of the big problems with our learners is that (if they revise at all!) they revise passively (Oxford in Richards & Renandya 2002). If they had to explain to someone how a particular tense works for example, not only would they have to recall what they did in class, they would have to sequence everything in a coherent way (and they would spot any gaps in their knowledge in the process!) Peer teaching practices are excellent in this respect, yet how often do we use this idea in class? As an added bonus, every time such a thing happens, the learner breaks away from the stereotype of the bored learner who cannot be bothered with school. Instead, the learner casts him/herself in a new role – perhaps that of the teacher (or the ‘scholar’!)

Milestones: It is very useful for students to have a ‘destination postcard’ (Heath & Heath 2011) – ‘This is our ultimate objective – this is where we want to go!’ However, this destination may be distant. Research shows that when it comes to motivating people, it is short-term goals that work best (Baumeister & Tierney 2012). The younger the learners, the nearer these short-term goals should be (cf the 2nd grade benchmark!) And if milestones are still far away, we need to look for ‘inch-pebbles’!! (Heath & Heath 2011) Reaching these intermediate targets gives students an invaluable sense of progress – ‘Yes, I am getting there!’. For instance, if our students want to get to B2 level, we can give them an A2 and a B1 test to take themselves so they can see that they are in fact getting better. Similarly, graded readers are excellent as students can see that they have moved from Level 1 to Level 3.

Celebrating Success: Notice how when the children did reach the intermediary goal (2nd grade) there was a graduation ceremony (the party!). The lesson is unambiguous: ‘Take time to celebrate success’ (Dornyei 2001). Once again this ‘frames’ the experience as important. OK, so the pupils knew that reaching 2nd grade level was significant – but just how significant? The greater the celebration, the higher the boost to the learner’s confidence! Notice how proud the children were to call themselves ‘2nd graders’ afterwards! This is something we rarely do, but we should. Little presents to the kids (with a dedication congratulating them and labeling them as successful learners!) can be invaluable. Involving the parents for some unexpected treat at home is another idea; it can kill many birds with the same stone (for one thing, the parents will know that you employ psychological weapons too!)

 

The role of Confidence:  There is yet another element which is not immediately apparent from the story – capital C Confidence! (cf Dutton 2010) I am prepared to bet good money that Jones’ manner conveyed both her conviction in the way she taught and her belief that the goal was ultimately attainable. And research shows that self-assurance works! Confident speakers may not know more than more diffident ones, but they get believed more! (Levine 2006) Think back to Miss Brodie… Could you walk into a classroom and say ‘I’m in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders and all my students are ‘Le crème de la crème’! Give me a child at an impressionable age and they are mine for life!!’ Wow! Not everyone can pull this off… 🙂

References

Ariely, D. “Predictably Irrational” HarperCollins 2008

Aronson, E. “The Social Animal”  Worth – Freeman, 1999

Baumeister, R. & Tierney, J. “Willpower” Allen Lane 2012

Dornyei, Z. “Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom” Cambridge 2001

Dutton, K. “Flipnosis” Random House 2010

Heath, C. & Heath, D. “Switch” Random House 2011

Levine, R. “The Power of Persuasion” Oneworld 2006

Richards, J. & Renandya, W. “Methodology in Language Teaching” Cambridge 2002

Sutherland, S. “Irrationality” Constable and Company 1992

The Forer Effect

‘Let me tell you who you really are’

Three Men in a Boat:  Has this ever happened to you? You find yourself waiting outside the doctor’s surgery and you are idly browsing through the magazines there when you come across an ad for a new medicine or medical exam. You go through the symptoms and all of a sudden it dawns on you – you have them all! OK – this is from the opening page of ‘3 Men in a Boat’, where the main character describes how he discovered he was suffering from practically every known disease (except housemaid’s knee). It is meant to be funny, but the reason we tend to smile is that we recognize the grain of truth in all this; we tend to relate everything to ourselves. And if this is true when we read some general symptoms, it is even more true when we read something about ourselves – especially if it happens to be positive. Astrologers of course know all about this – just watch this short clip…

 

The Forer Effect:  In 1948, psychologist R. Forer actually did an experiment resembling the one in the video. He gave his students a personality test and then an analysis – ostensibly on the basis of their responses. The analysis contained such items as ‘You have a great need for other people to like and admire you’ or ‘You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage’ or ‘At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved’. Does anything strike you about these statements? That’s right – they are true of everybody. Notice also the element of flattery in the second and the use of the key phrase ‘at times’ in the third – you simply cannot go wrong!  If they sound like the kind of stuff one might expect to find in astrology charts, that’s because they are – Forer had lifted them verbatim from an astrology book. When asked to rate how closely the description matched their character, the students gave it 4.26 out of 5! No surprises there… (Forer 1948).

There are three main reasons why this phenomenon is so powerful:

i) We are extremely self-focused. As Fine (2005) points out, the human brain is vain. We tend to relate everything that is happening to ourselves. No wonder then that when told that we are ‘kind’ for instance, we tend to think of incidents which confirm this without pausing to think whether it could equally well apply to others.

ii) We are programmed to try to find connections. Even where none exist (Ramachandran 2012 – p. 228) . Thus when we are informed that we are ‘creative’, we might for instance connect this with our ability to try out different approaches at work (which some might label as ‘resourcefulness’) rather than to our non-existent artistic propensities.

iii) We focus on ‘hits’ and ignore the ‘misses’. If told that we like ‘being with friends and having a good time’ we are likely to remember the two occasions when we went to parties and did enjoy ourselves and forget that these were the only occasions within the past decade (Gilbert 2007).

Applications in the field of ELT:   Given these all-too-human tendencies, it should be extremely easy to get people talking about themselves and others. As teachers, we can make use of this fact in order to help our learners develop their reading and speaking skills and (very importantly) help them learn all sorts of words and expressions related to personality. I have found the following activities extremely popular with my learners:

A walk in the woods: This is an amazing activity. Students listen to some instructions (see the clip below). They are then asked to make brief notes of what the scene is like and to describe various items. This is supposed to reveal something about their ‘inner self’. Then they listen to someone providing an analysis of the personality of someone who has completed this task (same clip – after 2:45). Then the students, working in pairs, analyse each other’s personality on the basis of what they heard earlier and discuss how accurate this is. Variations of this activity can easily be found on the web (e.g. here).

Graphology: Graphology is supposed to be able to deduce things about our personality on the basis of our handwriting. This task is simplicity itself. Students work in pairs. You ask each of them to write a short paragraph on a white sheet of paper (without lines). They then pass it to their partner. Once the writing is done, you give each student some short paragraphs which explain what certain elements of our handwriting reveal about us (e.g. ‘Size: large letters show seriousness and generosity’ or ‘Slant: if your writing slopes upwards it means you are ambitious and optimistic’). Students then take it in turns to interpret each other’s handwriting on the basis of the information they have got. Once again this is something one can easily find on the web (e.g. here).

Doodling: This is a similar activity, the only difference being that instead of asking someone to write something, this time they are asked to just make some doodles. The ‘expert’ then looks at these doodles and tells the other person what certain elements might mean (e.g. ‘flowers and animals might mean you are in love’ or ‘confused lines mean that you lack self-control’). Again, there are lots of such examples on the web (e.g. here) but the best version for me was one used by Gillian Porter Ladousse (1983 – pp 63-65) as students are given specific little boxes to doodle in, so the whole thing is less open-ended. The extra benefit here of course is that students love to doodle/draw!

Astrology: Astrology of course is the most easily used springboard. For one thing, no additional input is necessary as most people have some idea of what the most representative traits of their zodiac sign are (e.g. ‘Leo: Magnanimous, generous and dominant’ [If your class know little about such things, they can find brief descriptions here]). Students can simply take turns talking to each other about how well these traits reflect their own personality (e.g. ‘I would not say I am bossy, but I can be assertive if I have to’). One can then follow this up with a more serious discussion about how valid these descriptions are – perhaps by making use of the first clip with the Astrologer and the Psychologist. [NB: To round off the lesson one can use the brilliantly funny clip ‘Madam Zodiac’ (link here; for a handout click here)].

A word of warning:  McRaney (2012 – p. 122) relates a fascinating anecdote about the Psychologist Ray Hayman. The latter had started out as a magician and then moved on to mentalism. His specialty was ‘cold reading’ where you start off with vague generalities about the person opposite you and then depending on how they respond you fine-tune your statements so that by the end it looks like you could read them like a book, when in fact it is they who (inadvertently) provide you with all the information. So successful was Hayman and so enthusiastic was the response he got that he actually came to believe he genuinely had a gift! It was at this point that another mentalist came to his rescue. ‘Try telling them the exact opposite of what you intended to tell them’ he advised Hayman. So Hayman did and amazingly, his ‘victims’ were just as stunned by his perspicacity as they had been before! Hayman switched to science… 🙂

References

Fine, C. “A Mind of its Own”  Icon Books 2005

Forer, B.R. (1949). “The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (American Psychological Association) 44 (1): 118–123

Gilbert, D. “Stumbling on Happiness” Harper Perennial 2007

Ladousse, G. P. “Speaking Personally” Cambridge University Press 1983

McRaney, D. “You are not so Smart” Oneworld 2012

Personality – A walk in the woods: http://www.allthetests.com/quiz26/quiz/1264264524/True-Seasons-Personality-Test

Personality – Astrology: http://www.the12houses.com/2008/09/20/the-12-zodiac-signs-short-version/

Personality – Doodling: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2036328/What-doodles-really-say-Arrows-ambition-flowers-family.html

Personality – Graphology: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2380858/What-does-handwriting-say-Study-finds-5-000-personality-traits-linked-write.html

Ramachandran, V. S. “The Tell-Tale Brain” Windmill 2012