Wow! Was this a timely article to read...I am teaching BOCES summer school, one session a day. Due to my lighter summer schedule, I was asked to sub for another teacher's class. I had some hesitation because taking over another teacher's class can be a nightmare or a pleasure. Well, it was a nightmare.
The class was Global 9, meaning, if these students pass, they enter 10th grade. They consisted of every bad behavior one can imagine in a classroom: disrespectful, arrogant, aggressive, rude, non-cooperative, no participation, talking, laughing, argumentative, and yes, paper airplanes. Although I did my best to connect emotionally with them; yes, I am a nice person and a teacher you can work with, I was clearly outnumbered by the majority of students who already had severely damaged self-esteem. What a teacher can end up with when confronted with a whole class of students' who failed a course(s) (and are older) is that they are deeply embedded in avoiding any more threat to their self-esteem (Thompson, Davidson, & Barber, 1995). What does this look like? Rather than risking any more deterioration to their self-esteem, the class withdraws all academic effort. If their noncompliance results in another failure, the failure is not due to their intellect or lack of ability. They simply decided to enjoy the class in a non-productive, poor behavior, peer encouraged display of, "Who cares about school anyway? It's stupid." In Rabideau's Effect of Achievement Motivation on Behavior, he writes that self-worth theory states that in certain situations students stand to gain by not trying and deliberately withholding effort. Due to their uncertainty (Rabideau) of being successful, even if they were to put forth effort, it appears they don't want to take the risk. If I had this class for a school year, my task would be to present instruction that would motivate them and hopefully encourage them to relax. I would have to time to link instruction to their interests. I am a huge promoter of sowing confidence into my learners and allowing them to experience success. I would then expect student satisfaction to increase in their own abilities and possibly grow a willingness for individuals to reduce performance-avoidance goals and increase performance-approach goals (Elliot & Church, 1997).
4 comments:
H Denise,
I thought your reflection was spot on in detailing how difficult it is to come in on a task halfway through and try to make any progress. It sounds as if the kids already had their minds made up to not make any progress and that is really too bad. I wonder what they are like throughout the school year, or is that fact that they're in summer school an indication of their lack of progress during the year as well? I wish there was a magic wand for this sort of thing but unfortunately it happens all too often. There is usually a group who is underperforming and the effort to motivate them is frequently stalled. I think you have your work cut out for you!
Denise,
Sounds like you had your hands full! It pains me to realize that your assessment of these students is probably right on - rather than put forth effort and fail (again), they are simply withdrawing any effort. This is an attitude all of us have allowed to fester in some of our students (I know I can think of a few past students of mine who fall into this category). I agree with you that the key to working with students like these is to find ways to connect their personal lives/interests to the material you want to teach them. In some subjects this is easy (i.e. cooking in the classroom as a way to teach fractions) but in other subjects it is quite challenging (i.e. teaching biology to students who want to become auto mechanics). Good luck if you encounter them again!
- Jess Redmond
I always things of substitute teaching as a really difficult task because a teacher has to walk into a classroom with x amount of students who don't want to listen to "the sub," and on top of that you are supposed to try and teach them something that you might not have taught in a while. I always just think worse case scenario when it comes to substitute teaching. As for these students with a lack of self-worth I wonder what would happen if some type of education game was used in this classroom. Maybe it would get the students more involved in the lesson. Maybe it might even help them to see that succeeding in education can help them become something like a board or video game maker. There are a lot of students who think education is worthless because, today, people have to achieve more in education to be more successful. Because of this, it's almost like many individuals don't want to put in all the work; they would rather get the results faster. It's really unfortunate.
I can only imagine how difficult it is for a teacher to walk into that sort of a situation. I like how you come up with some suggestions of strategies if you had the kids for a full year. I am not sure how much one can do as a sub, but are there some potential ones you could try to incorporate into that sort of situation? Sort of... triage strategies.
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