Chasing what matters

As a student, I was highly motivated to do well because doing well meant good grades. And as a teacher, I was frustrated by students who didn’t care about their grades. I didn’t get it. Why didn’t they care? As I’ve learned more about the science of motivation, I’ve come to understand that while grades motivate some students, they aren’t a particularly good motivator, not just for the students who don’t care about grades, but also for the students who do.

When I was focused on grades, I thought about what would earn me the most points. What I actually learned was irrelevant as long as I got the grades I wanted. I managed to do quite well in advanced math classes because I was able to plug numbers into formulas, but I didn’t understand what those formulas actually meant. It was the epitome of what Sarah Miles, Denise Pope, and Caitlin Ciannella call “doing school” in this month’s Kappan. Students who are doing school are doing what’s expected, but they don’t enjoy or see the value in their work.

What might my academic life have been like if I’d been required to solve real-world problems using the math I was learning? Anna Rosevsky Saavedra and Amie Rapaport note in this issue that high-achieving students sometimes struggle in project-based classrooms because they’ve figured out how to succeed in the more traditional classroom. This leads me to think that my grades might not have been as high, and I might have been more frustrated at school. But I suspect I would have learned and retained more math. And maybe I would have been more prepared for life beyond school.

Everyone needs opportunities to chase excellence because they want to, because it matters to them.

The reality is that adults don’t routinely get graded for the tasks they do. Even in workplaces that have performance reviews, those reviews tend to be more holistic, looking at overall trends, rather than offering a granular rating of each task. The same is true for other endeavors, whether they be volunteering, managing a household, or learning a new hobby. There may be consequences for not doing well (like losing a job or missing a bill), but to some extent, the work has to be its own reward.

In their article, Eric M. Anderman, Yue Sheng, and Wonjoon Cha assert that students who ask, “Why do I have to learn this?” are actually being reasonable. They understand that work must have some kind of value. As adults, we resist when asked to do pointless tasks, so why wouldn’t students?

Creating a learning environment where students see the value in their work isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s not new. Arts programs, sports, and career and technical education programs require students to work toward a goal that has value to them. Students in these programs will spend hours playing scales and doing drills because those activities are part of the process of getting good. And getting good matters to them. When I engaged in high school music and theater groups, I wanted to do well because of the performances at the end, because my peers were counting on me, and because it was fun. There usually wasn’t even a grade for me to chase. Everyone needs opportunities to chase excellence because they want to, because it matters to them.

This article appears in the February 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 5, p. 4.