I think that any successful high school teacher on the list should have
good answers to your motivational questions. A good high school teaching
certification program teaches motivation, discipline, and management
strategies. I taught high school for 2 years before moving to the
university level. IMO, teaching high/middle school is much more about
motivation than it is about content. This trend is "leaking" into the
first few years of college, such that college faculty now need to develop
similar strategies. (Whether it SHOULD be leaking in is another
question...but one I can't directly do much about in my role.)
So my answers are:
-- How do you motivate the generic moderately-good students?
You make very good use of the time you have in class because that may be
all the time your students spend on your subject. You make science (or
whatever content) interesting and fun without lying to them about its
challenges. You find out where students are now, and start at their
level. You give students real opportunties to try difficult things, and
to fail and to redeem themselves, so that they learn real accountability.
You find ways to have students work in groups, which is fun and a valuable
skill, and at the same time be individually accountable. And you give
students a taste of opportunites that lie ahead if they're willing to
climb the necessary mountains.
-- How do you motivate half of the students when you're hardly even
trying to motivate the other half? I don't know. That sounds hard.
I think it is hard. People who work in universities (myself included)
don't regularly interact with HALF of the population. This missing half
is much more concerned about who got kicked off of American Idol last
night than anything in science class. In high schools, these are the
students that teachers spend 90% of their time and energy motivating
because their mandate is to "leave no child behind". If you want
retention, I think early university classes need to build kinds of systems
that motivate the "lower half" of the students we see in the same way.
These students need to be taught responsibility, how to network, and how
to really learn things. They need to be reminded about deadlines but then
held accountable.
For example, I built a database to help me search through the 1000+
students I have in my introductory physics labs to find those that missed
this week. Each student gets an e-mail asking why they missed labs and
discussing the consequences--and motivating them to DO something about it
(arranging a makeup or avoiding future misses). We have gone from
routinely failing 30-40 students per semester to failing under 10. But
this is lots of effort for 2-3% of my students!
Lots of university faculty (including some at my own institution) think
this kind of "babysitting" is counterproductive. My take is that many
students (for a variety of reasons) are NOT learning these skills before
they arrive on our doorstep. If we don't meet them at their level, they
fail and/or leave. So if we want retention (and my institution does), we
need to learn from high schools--even if that means putting effort in a
different place.
Mike Meyer
Lecturer/Lab Coordinator
Michigan Technological University
mrmeyer@mtu.edu