Level One Rocks

Our DE group hasn’t decided on cool names for our teaching groups yet…so for now, I’m going to have to call my group “level one.” And guess what. Level one is totally the best.

I found it funny that, at first, no one else volunteered to teach the level one students at the second school. They’re so adorable in their greenness and lack of knowledge (I love that wide-eyed stare+big smile that says “I don’t know what the heck you’re saying to me but I am quite intrigued”). I immediately chose to work with level one at both schools because, although I would love to teach any level, I think that I have the plentitude of patience that makes me extremely compatible with the needs of the level one students. But apparently the teachers at the second school don’t have much patience with the students.

I will never forget last Thursday at the second school, when the teacher came in and attempted to help Anamika and me in our lesson. The teacher basically hit each student whenever he/she messed up, and used a tone of voice that implied “why can’t you get this right dummy?” Immediately when that teacher became involved in our lesson, I could feel the class atmosphere shift from one of shared excitement for learning to one of authoritarianism and fear (a lot of the students choked up in their performance because of this fear). I know this authoritarian approach to teaching is a cultural thing, but I still hurt every time the teacher physically or emotionally hurt one of my students. I would never use that tone of voice with a child, let alone hit a child. All of my school 2 children were fantastically well-behaved and tried SO hard. My value is placed on the effort, not the performance. A child can try really hard and still perform poorly, but we should still encourage that child’s effort. Pushing a child to reach for the next level of performance is indeed a great thing, but the execution of this pushing is where many teachers have fallen short in the past. So how can we push the children in the most effective way? Well this is where my psych background comes in handy – the key lies with fostering intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic motivation.

If you hit a child every time she performs below par, she will attribute her motivation to external factors – that is, the fear of being hit. For example, her reasoning (though not at a cognitive level) will be “I want to get this problem correct because I am afraid of punishment.” Likewise, rewards can sometimes make a child attribute her efforts to an external source, the reward (“I want to perform well in order to get this reward”). This type of extrinsic motivation is not desirable, and psych studies prove children externally motivated perform well below students with intrinsic motivation and do not try as hard to push themselves to higher levels. Intrinsically motivated children do things because they enjoy doing those things. We want our students to be intrinsically motivated (“I want to learn because I enjoy learning, not because I desire rewards or because I fear punishment”).  Even though we are using a system of rewards/punishments with the charts and stars, we can still foster intrinsic motivation if we are careful in when we reward students and what we say when we reward children. Psych studies prove that if you encourage a child’s effort instead of performance, that child will be more motivated to push to the next level and perform better on future tasks. For example, you’ll want to compliment or reward a child for how hard she tried on a certain task (like “Wow you really thought hard about that problem to reach the answer. Way to go!”) rather than reward her for performance only. Encourage the process. Encouraging the performance is not a bad thing, but definitely do not underestimate the power of encouraging the process.

Happy anniversary to the Prasads!!!