[JasonSkues]

Thanks for the response ????

The lack of relevance for me fits under perceived value, where relevance relates to perceived instrumental value. I agree with you that the student/teacher relationship helps protect against boredom and foster student engagement. For instance, I think teachers can recognise a student’s personal interest and provide opportunities for them to indulge and pursue these, and at the same time teach in ways that promote situational interest as well. I also agree with you that the combined/interactive effect has the strongest effect on student experience.

[JasonSkues]

The phonics versus whole language debate continues, at least in some of the Australian schools. But here is an observation of mine that I think gets missed in the debate. I have seen that many people in schools do not distinguish between general or first wave approaches to the teaching of reading for all students, versus specific or second/third wave approaches to the teaching of reading for students who experience reading difficulties. It all gets lumped under literacy. This can lead some to incorrectly cite evidence for and against specific approaches or even programs without thinking through the purpose and intended population of that particular approach. For example, the explicit teaching of phonics to all students versus students who experience reading difficulties. The second observation (and there are many more) is that I believe we often fail to acknowledge the many factors that also impact students’ reading, which may or may not have anything to do with reading. We even see this in the research. For instance, some of the research evidence supporting certain approaches and programs “controls out” some of these factors in order to be more internally valid, but it is these factors are important in the real word. Perhaps we need to “control in” these factors to produce more ecologically valid approaches!

[JasonSkues]

Fantastic thread!

Similar to the intrinsic motivation comments, I think we are often blind to or ignore student’s implicit motives. Those motives that are aroused by incentives experienced in doing something, not because of explicit incentives such as rewards, grades etc. One relevant implicit motive in this situation is the need for achievement, or doing something well. However, one of the challenges of implicit motives is that even though we know they exist, predict intrinsic interests and spontaneous behaviours, and are often incongruent with self-attributed motives, they are very difficult to measure (not captured by self-report questions). This makes them difficult to incorporate and inform how we teach and support students. For me, a clear challenge is how to create a learning environment that comprises activities that interact with a student’s implicit motives (as well as explicit ones), which in turn should lead to increased positive emotions, engagement and learning.

[JasonSkues]

This description reminds me of the Yerkes Dodson Curve where boredom would be the emotion at the low end and feeling stressed would be at the opposite end.

I am also interested in how we find the middle ground and in particular the role of student goals here. The co-create approach makes a lot of sense to me in terms of supporting a student’s autonomy and interests. I suspect that an assigned goal without a clear justification would lead to either boredom or feeling stressed.