This year I decided to use real world projects to try to motivate my seniors to produce high quality work. The real world projects that I created are amalgamations of several pedagogically sound methods of instruction. For example, all real world projects that I developed were experiential, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and authentic in their design (For a more thorough explanation of the projects and the philosophy behind them, please visit my "Real World Projects" link).
For every class of seniors that I taught, I carefully examined my curriculum and searched for areas where a project might be incorporated into the curriculum. Once I identified areas where projects would fit, I began designing the projects. In designing projects I took several factors into consideration:
Theme--all my projects revolve around a theme. The reason a theme is important is because many of the projects require a great deal of time to complete and as a teacher you will be covering many topics in your course. You don't want to be stuck talking about one topic for four weeks so a good theme enables you discuss many different topics in your curriculum, but all of them relate to your central theme in some way. For example, in political science a theme I use is "representation." With this theme I can discuss topics of: direct vs. representative democracy, the presidency, the congress, the judiciary, and even local politics. Students also enjoy a curriculum designed on themes because it affords them a great deal of freedom. Each of my projects allow my students to explore an aspect of the theme that is particularly interesting to them.
Skills--all my projects are designed to teach my students academic skills as well as course content. I feel this is vital to any good project because I am hoping to teach my students to become "life long learners." If I just teach my students content, they will only be able to use this knowledge in few, specific situations. If I, however, teach my students skills (such as research, computer, and writing skills) they will be able to apply these skills to any new situation they may encounter in their futures.
Relevance--all of my projects must be relevant to my students lives. The key here is that the project (or content of the course) must be relevant to their lives NOW, not 5 years from now. My students must believe that the work they are completing will have an immediate and obvious impact upon their present lives. Very few students (and for that matter, very few adults) are motivated to work on projects that they think will only benefit them four years from now.
Audience--all of my projects are designed so that the students must present their work to an audience. If you want to really hold students accountable for their work, they must believe that other people (aside from their teacher) are going to see and evaluate their work. When I design a project I think about "what audience could my students present this information to?" I have used audiences of kindergartners, parents, community members, senior citizens and other high school students with equal success.
Final Product--all of my projects are designed with the end in mind. What will be the final product the students are responsible for creating? How can I make this a "fun" product to create? The key here is making the final product something relevant to the students and something requiring creativity to create. In my opinion, one problem affecting student motivation in a negative way is that students are not asked to be creative. Thus, all of my projects offer and encourage my students to use creative thinking skills. It is amazing how designing a children's book on the Constitution, rather than simply writing an analytical essay about it, will stimulate my students' interest and effort on this topic.
After designing these projects, I began implementing them into my curriculum. As I did this, I was faced with the challenge of monitoring and measuring my students' motivation levels. This, I learned, was a very difficult task to complete. How could I determine if a student was motivated or not? How could I measure if a student's level of motivation had increased or decreased as the semester progressed? With students' lives being incredibly complex, and with my students attending six other classes throughout the day aside from mine, how could I know if my projects were making a difference to my students or not? These questions challenged me to think critically about my research and they led me to the development of the following research methods.
Method One--Student surveys:
The easiest method for gathering information on student levels of motivation
was through the use of surveys that were designed solely for measuring
motivation levels. I administered these surveys to my students
several times throughout the semester, each time looking to see how their
motivation had increased or decreased from the time before. I
also used this survey to determine what aspects of my course were affecting
my students motivation. For example, was the difficulty of my class
affecting motivation? Did the projects affect motivation? Did
the classroom environment affect motivation? The surveys yielded
invaluable data and allowed me to sharpen my understanding of how to
motivate my students.
For a more thorough explanation of the survey and a complete discussion of the data it produced, click here or see my "data" page.
Method Two--Natural Observation:
As a teacher, I am acutely aware of my students moods, attitudes, feelings,
and actions. I observe my students daily and I come to know their
behaviors quite well throughout the year. Thus, to measure student
motivation I simply observed my students class performance and participation
and made judgements as to what this revealed about their motivation
levels. Though I watched all aspects of my students' behavior, I was
particularly interested in the following actions:
Preparedness--did
students come to class ready to learn and participate? Was homework
complete, assigned readings read, and all necessary course materials brought
in? A motivated student would generally be well prepared for class.
Engagement--were
students actively engaged in class discussion and activities?
Did the students spend a great deal of time on task when given class time to
work? Were class debates lively and intelligent? Were
class discussions used for teacher-student interaction? Motivated
students would be engaged and interested in what was occurring during class
time.
Enthusiasm/Enjoyment--did
students appear to be excited about what they were doing? Did
the class enjoy working on the projects that were assigned to
them? I believe that motivated students would generally enjoy
working on class assignments more than non-motivated students.
Attendance--did my
students attend class or were there large amounts of absences?
Motivated students would attend class more, thus I monitored my attendance
closely.
Making Connections--did
my students make connections of my course content to other aspects of their
lives? Did students stay after class to talk to me about a movie they
had seen that related to our course? Did students tell me that
they know understood something in their lives that they hadn't before?
Did students bring me clippings from the newspaper related to our
class? Motivated students tend to reflect on their learning outside of
the classroom, thus, I was looking to see if my classes were recognizing the
concepts we had discussed in class in their daily lives.
Throughout the semester I kept a journal and recorded thoughts and observations about these qualities in my classes. For a complete discussion of this journal see my "data" page.
Method Three--Student Reflections:
A third and final method of collecting data was for me to ask my
students to reflect upon their learning and their levels of motivation
throughout the year. To do this, I would ask my students to
write reflections at the conclusion of our units, and whenever they had
completed a project. Educational research supports student
reflective thinking, claiming that inorder for students to internalize their
learning, they need to actively reflect upon what they have
learned. I utilized the reflection process not only to increase
student learning, but to gather data about how their levels of motivation
shifted throughout the year.
For a more thorough discussion of this data please see my "data" page.
Introduction Examples of Real World Projects Data Reflection