How to
Create Nonreaders
Reflections
on Motivation, Learning, and Sharing Powers
By Alfie
Kohn
Autonomy-supportive teachers seek a student’s initiative
… whereas controlling teachers seek a student’s compliance.
-- J. Reeve, E. Bolt, & Y. Cai
Not that you asked, but my favorite Spanish proverb,
attributed to the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, can be translated as follows:
“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.” In keeping with this
general sentiment, I’d like to begin my contribution to an issue of this
journal whose theme is “Motivating Students” by suggesting that it is
impossible to motivate students.
In fact, it’s not really possible to motivate anyone,
except perhaps yourself. If you have enough power, sure, you can make
people, including students, do things. That’s what rewards (e.g., grades)
and punishments (e.g., grades) are for. But you can’t make them do those
things well -- “You can command writing, but you can’t command good writing,”
as Donald Murray once remarked -- and you can’t make them want to do
those things. The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as
a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever
they were induced to do.
What a teacher can do – all a teacher
can do – is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a
curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that
everyone starts out with: to make sense of oneself and the world, to
become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to
connect with (and express oneself to) other people. Motivation – at least
intrinsic motivation -- is something to be supported, or if necessary
revived. It’s not something we can instill in students by acting on them
in a certain way. You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you
can’t “motivate them.” And if you think this distinction is merely
semantic, then I’m afraid we disagree.
On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the
ability to do with respect to students’ motivation is kill it.[1] That’s
not just a theoretical possibility; it’s taking place right this minute in too
many classrooms to count. So, still mindful of the imperative to “write
the other way,” I’d like to be more specific about how a perversely inclined
teacher might effectively destroy students’ interest in reading and
writing. I’ll offer six suggestions without taking a breath, and then
linger on the seventh.
1. Quantify their reading assignments. Nothing contributes to a student’s
interest in (and proficiency at) reading more than the opportunity to read
books that he or she has chosen. But it’s easy to undermine the benefits
of free reading. All you need to do is stipulate that students must read
a certain number of pages, or for a certain number of minutes, each
evening. When they’re told how much to read, they tend to just
“turn the pages” and “read to an assigned page number and stop,” says
Christopher Ward Ellsasser, a California high school teacher.[2] And when
they’re told how long to read – a practice more common with teachers of
younger students -- the results are not much better. As Julie King, a
parent, reports, “Our children are now expected to read 20 minutes a
night, and record such on their homework sheet. What parents are
discovering (surprise) is that those kids who used to sit down and read for
pleasure -- the kids who would get lost in a book and have to be told to put it
down to eat/play/whatever -- are now setting the timer…and stopping when the
timer dings. . . . Reading has become a chore, like brushing your teeth.”
2. Make them write reports. Jim DeLuca, a middle school teacher,
summed it up: “The best way to make students hate reading is to make them
prove to you that they have read. Some teachers use log sheets on which
the students record their starting and finishing page for their reading
time. Other teachers use book reports or other projects, which are all
easily faked and require almost no reading at all. In many cases, such
assignments make the students hate the book they have just read, no matter how
they felt about it before the project.”[3]
3. Isolate them. I’ve been in the same book
group for 25 years. We read mostly fiction, both classic and
contemporary, at the rate of almost a book a month. I shudder to think
how few novels I would have read over that period, and how much less pleasure
(and insight) I would have derived from those I did manage to read, without the
companionship of my fellow readers. Subscribers to this journal are
probably familiar with literature circles and other ways of helping students to
create a community of readers. You’d want to avoid such innovations – and
have kids read (and write) mostly on their own -- if your goal were to cause
them to lose interest in what they’re doing.
4. Focus on skills. Children grow to love reading when
it’s about making meaning, when they’re confronted directly by provocative
ideas, compelling characters, delicious prose. But that love may never
bloom if all the good stuff is occluded by too much attention to the machinery
– or, worse, the approved vocabulary for describing that machinery.
Knowing the definition of dramatic irony or iambic pentameter has the same
relationship to being literate that memorizing the atomic weight of nitrogen
has to doing science. When I look back on my brief career teaching high
school English, I think I would have been far more successful had I asked a lot
fewer questions that have only one correct answer. I should have helped
the kids to dive headfirst into the realm of metaphor rather than wasting their
time on how a metaphor differs from a simile. “School teaches that
literacy is about a set of skills, not a way to engage a part of the world,” as
Eliot Washor and his colleagues recently wrote. “Consequently, many young
people come to associate reading with schooling rather than with learning more
about what interests them.”[4]
5. Offer them incentives. Scores of studies have
confirmed that rewards tend to lead people to lose interest in whatever they
had to do to snag them. This principle has been replicated with many
different populations (across genders, ages, and nationalities) and with a
variety of tasks as well as different kinds of inducements (money, A’s, food,
and praise, to name four).[5] You may succeed in getting students to read
a book by dangling a reward in front of them for doing so, but their interest in
reading, per se, is likely to evaporate – or, in the case of kids who have
little interest to begin with, is unlikely to take root -- because you’ve sent
the message that reading is something one wouldn’t want to do.
(Duh. If it was fun, why would they be bribing me to do it?)
Elaborate commercial programs (think Accelerated Reader or Book It!) may be the
most efficient way to teach kids that reading isn’t pleasurable in its own
right, but ordinary grades will do just as well in a pinch. As far as I
can tell, every single study that has examined grades and intrinsic motivation
has found that the former has a negative effect on the latter.[6]
6. Prepare them for tests. Just as a teacher’s grade can
be every bit as effective at killing motivation as imported incentive programs,
so a teacher’s quiz can hold its own against your state’s standardized
exam. It’s not the test itself that does the damage; it’s what comes
before. Heidegger said that life is lived toward – informed by and in
anticipation of – death (Sein zum Tode). By analogy, a classroom
where learning is always pointed to a test (Lernen zum Examen?) is one
where ideas, and the act of reading, are experienced as just so many means to
an end. That, of course, is exactly the same effect that rewards create,
so if your classroom is one that emphasizes tests and grades, the damage
is effectively doubled. And if those tests and grades are mostly focused
on memorizing facts and mastering mechanical skills, well, you’ve won the
Triple Crown at creating a roomful of nonreaders.
*
7. Restrict their choices. Teachers have less autonomy
these days than ever before. The predominant version of school reform,
with its emphasis on “accountability” and its use of very specific curriculum
standards enforced by tests, proceeds from the premise that teachers need to be
told what, and how, to teach. At the same time, this movement confuses
excellence with uniformity (“All students in ninth grade will . . . “) and with
mere difficulty (as if that which is more “rigorous” were necessarily
better). It’s now reaching its apotheosis with an initiative to impose
the same core standards on every public school classroom in
the nation. This effort has been sponsored primarily by corporate
executives, politicians, and test manufacturers, but, shamefully, certain
education organizations, including NCTE, have failed to take a principled stand
in opposition. Instead, they have eagerly accepted whatever limited role
in the design of standards they’re permitted by the corporate sponsors, thereby
giving the impression that this prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to
schooling enjoys legitimacy and the support of educators.
The bigger picture here, which transcends and predates
national standards, features top-down control all the way along the education
food chain, from legislators and state school officials to school boards to
superintendents to principals to teachers. That means the pivotal
question for teachers – a moral as well as a practical question – is whether
they will treat students the way they, themselves, are being treated . . . or
the way they wish they were being treated.
Those who choose the latter course – a “working with”
approach -- make a point of bringing students into the process of making decisions
whenever possible. Teachers who choose the former – a “doing to” approach
– may, as I say, be taking their cue from the management style of those who
seek to micromanage them. Then again, they may be reproducing the
teacher-centered classrooms with which they’re familiar. Or perhaps they
just find it difficult to give up control. As long-time educators Harvey
Daniels and Marilyn Bizar put it rather provocatively, “Teachers probably
wouldn’t have originally chosen their vocation if they didn’t crave the
spotlight on some deep psychological level. The hunger to ‘really teach
something’ has probably derailed more student-centered innovations than
administrative cowardice and textbook company co-option combined.”[7]
Mea culpa. When I taught, almost every classroom
decision was made unilaterally by me: what students would read, in what
format they would respond to the readings, how their learning would be
assessed, how much time would be devoted to a book or topic, whether a given
task would be done in small groups or as a whole class, how conflicts would be
resolved, whether homework was really necessary (and, if so, what would be
assigned and when it would be due), how the chairs were arranged and what was
posted on the walls. To be honest, it never occurred to me to ask rather
than to tell. After all, it was my classroom, wasn’t it?
Well, yes, it was, but not because it had to be – only
because I kept all the power to myself. And my students were the poorer
for it.
The sad irony is that as children grow older and
become more capable of making decisions, they’re given less opportunity to do
so in schools. In some respects, teenagers actually have less to say
about their learning – and about the particulars of how they’ll spend their time
in school each day -- than do kindergarteners. Thus, the average American
high school is excellent preparation for adult life. . . assuming that one
lives in a totalitarian society.
When parents ask, “What did you do in school today?”,
kids often respond, “Nothing.” Howard Gardner pointed out that they’re
probably right, because “typically school is done to students.”[8]
This sort of enforced passivity is particularly characteristic of classrooms
where students are excluded from any role in shaping the curriculum, where
they’re on the receiving end of lectures and questions, assignments and
assessments. One result is a conspicuous absence of critical, creative
thinking – something that (irony alert!) the most controlling teachers are
likely to blame on the students themselves, who are said to be irresponsible,
unmotivated, apathetic, immature, and so on. But the fact is that kids
learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
Conversely, students who have almost nothing to say
about what happens in class are more likely to act out, tune out, burn out, or
simply drop out. Again, it takes some courage to face the fact that these
responses are related to what we’re doing, or not doing. And the
same is true of my larger point in this essay: A lack of opportunity to
make decisions may well manifest itself in a lack of interest in reading and
writing. Were that our goal, our single best strategy might be to run a
traditional teacher-centered, teacher–directed classroom.
*
At this point, I’ll abandon the somewhat labored
conceit of showing you how to kill interest and instead try to suggest, in more
straightforward fashion, some ways to think about how students can play a more
active role in their own learning. My assumption is that if you’ve read
this far, you’d probably like to support their desire to learn and read.
First, then, a few general principles:
1. Supporting their autonomy isn’t just about
having them pick this over that. “The experience of self-determination is not
something that can be given to the student through the presentation of an array
of teacher-determined options (e.g., ‘Here are six books; which do you want to
read today?’)”[9]. I think there are two insights here. The first
is that deeper learning and enthusiasm require us to let students generate
possibilities rather than just choosing items from our menu; construction is
more important than selection. The second is that what we really need to
offer is “autonomy support,” an idea that’s psychological, not just
pedagogical. It’s derived from a branch of psychology called
self-determination theory, founded by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, among
others. To support students’ autonomy is to meet their need to be in
control of their own lives, to offer opportunities to decide along with the
necessary guidance and encouragement, to “minimiz[e] the salience of evaluative
pressure and any sense of coercion in the classroom” and “maximiz[e] students’
perceptions of having a voice and choice.”[10]
In 1993 I wrote about the advantages of offering voice
and choice, detailing how students benefited intellectually, morally, and
psychologically, according to the available research.[11] Since then, the
data have continued to accumulate. Two experts in the field offered this
summary in 2006:
Empirical research has shown that students with
autonomy-supportive teachers, compared with students with controlling teachers,
experience not only greater perceived autonomy, but also more positive
functioning in terms of their classroom engagement, emotionality, creativity,
intrinsic motivation, psychological well-being, conceptual understanding,
academic achievement, and persistence in school.[12]
2. Autonomy can be supported -- and choices
can be made – collectively. While it is surely important for students
to be able to make some decisions that apply only to themselves, many more
opportunities should be available for the class to figure out things
together. In fact, one might say that when autonomy and community are
combined, they define a concept more often invoked than practiced in our
society: democracy.
Even during the absurdly short class periods still
being used in most high schools, it makes sense to devote some of that limited
time to class meetings in which students can solve problems and make
decisions. I once sat in on several classes taught by Keith Grove at
Dover-Sherborn High School near Boston and noticed that such meetings were
critical to his teaching; he had come to realize that the feeling of community
(and active participation) they produced made whatever time remained for the
explicit curriculum far more productive than devoting the whole period to
talking at rows of silent kids. Together the students decided whether to
review the homework in small groups or as a whole class. Together they
decided when it made sense to schedule their next test. (After all,
what’s the point of assessment – to have students show you what they know when
they’re ready to do so, or to play “gotcha”?) Interestingly, Grove says
that his classes are quite structured even though they’re unusually democratic,
and he sees his job as being “in control of putting students in control.”
3. It’s not all or nothing. Teachers who favor a
traditional approach to teaching sometimes offer a caricature of an
autonomy-supportive classroom – one devoid of intellectual challenge where kids
do whatever they feel like – in order to rationalize rejecting this
model. But autonomy support not only doesn’t exclude structure, as Keith
Grove reminds us; it also doesn’t rule out active teacher involvement.
That involvement can be direct, such as when teacher and students negotiate a
mutually acceptable due date for an essay. (Instead of “You folks choose,” it
may be “Let’s figure this out together.”) Or the involvement can be
indirect, with the teacher setting up broad themes for the course and students
making decisions within those parameters. But that doesn’t mean we should
be prepared to share power with students only about relatively minor issues.
It may make sense to start with that and then challenge ourselves to involve
them in thinking about bigger questions as you (and they) become more
comfortable with a democratic classroom.
4. “See above.” The half-dozen suggestions
for killing interest in reading in the first part of this essay don’t become
irrelevant just because students are given more authority to direct their
learning, individually and collectively. For example, rewards are still
counterproductive even if kids get to choose what goodie they’ll get. And
there’s reason to worry if a language arts course is focused mostly on narrowly
defined facts and skills even if students are permitted to make decisions about
the details. (As one of Bianca’s suitors observes in The Taming of the
Shrew, “There’s small choice in rotten apples.”) Even autonomy
support in its richest sense works best in the context of a course that’s
pedagogically valuable in other ways – and avoids various familiar but
counterproductive practices.
*
Finally, here are a few specific suggestions for
bringing students in on making decisions, offered here in the hope that they
will spark you to think of others in the same spirit:
* Let students sample a work of literature, then
generate their own questions and discussion topics – for themselves and one
another.
* Before having students help each other to
revise their writing, invite them to brainstorm possible questions they might
ask about its construction and its impact on the reader (rather than having
them simply apply your editing guidelines or, worse, evaluating the
writing against a prefabricated rubric[13]).
* Have students think together about ideas for
the papers they’ll write, then follow up once the writing is underway by
inviting each student to ask the group for suggestions. Encourage
discussion about the rationale for, and usefulness of, each idea that emerges
in order to promote reflection that may well benefit everyone.
* When you’re planning to respond to their
journals or other writings, begin by asking students – individually and as a
class – what kinds of responses would be most helpful to them. (Wouldn’t
you prefer that administrators proceed that way when offering feedback on your
teaching?)
* Let students choose the audience for whom
they’re writing, as well as the genre in which they respond to something
they’ve read (e.g., play, op-ed, speech).
* Check in periodically with students during
class meetings about how the course is going for them, whether the
decision-making process seems to be working, whether the climate is conducive
to learning. Ask what might make discussions and assignments more
productive and satisfying – but only if you’re really open to making changes
based on what they tell you.
* Bring students in on the process of assessment by
asking them to join you in thinking about alternatives to conventional
tests. “How can you show me what you understood, where you still need
help, and what I may need to rethink about how I taught the unit?”
Beyond the format of the assessment, invite them as a class to suggest criteria
by which someone’s work might be evaluated – and, later, have them apply those
criteria to what they’ve done.
* Remember that group decision making doesn’t require voting,
which is basically just adversarial majoritarianism. Help them to acquire
the skills and disposition to reach for a deeper kind of democracy, one in
which compromises are generated and consensus is reached.
To be willing to give up some control is to avoid
getting too invested in the amazing course you designed. Strive to take
pleasure and pride from how you help students to learn and become excited about
learning, not just from the curriculum itself. Even the most thoughtful
lesson, the cleverest assignment, the richest reading list is much less likely
to goose students and engage them and help them to think more subtly, if you
came up with it on your own and imposed it on them. What matters
is not what we teach; it’s what they learn,[14] and the probability of real
learning is far higher when the students have a lot to say about both the
content and the process.
The best teachers, I find, spend at least some of
their evenings smacking themselves on the forehead – figuratively, at least –
as they reflect on something that happened during the day. “Why did I decide
that, when I could have asked the kids?” And, thinking about some feature
of the course yet to come: “Is this a choice I should be making for the
students rather than with them?” One Washington, D.C. creative writing
teacher was pleased with himself for announcing to students that it was up to
them to decide how to create a literary magazine – until he realized later that
he had incrementally reasserted control. “I had taken a potentially
empowering project and turned it into a showcase of what [I] could
do.”[15] It takes insight and guts to catch oneself at what amounts to an
exercise in pseudodemocracy. Keeping hold of power -- overtly for traditionalists,
perhaps more subtly for those of us who think of ourselves as enlightened
progressives – is a hell of a lot easier than giving it away.
But if we’re serious about helping students to fall in
love with literature, to get a kick out of making words fall together in just
the right order, then we have to be attentive to what makes these things more,
and less, likely to happen. It may take us awhile, but ultimately our
classrooms should turn the usual default setting on its head so the motto becomes:
Let the students decide except when there’s a good reason why we have to decide
for them.
NOTES
1. The management theorist Frederick Herzberg made an
analogous argument about the asymmetrical motivational properties of money in
the workplace: Just because paying people too little can be demotivating
doesn’t mean that paying them more will elicit greater satisfaction or more
motivation to do their best. This helps to explain why pay-for-performance plans
are doomed to fail.
2. All uncited quotations, like this one, are derived
from personal communications.
3. Regie Routman invites us to imagine ourselves on
the receiving end of such assignments: “Think about the last time you
read a book you loved. Imagine how you would have felt if you had been
required to write a book report or a summary that had to include the main idea
and supporting details. Or, if at the end of chapters, you’d been
required to write answers to questions. For myself, that would have been
enough to turn me off to reading the book” (Literacy at the Crossroads
[Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996], p. 177).
4. Elliot Washor, Charles Mojkowski, and Deborah
Foster, “Living Literacy,” Phi Delta Kappan, March 2009, p. 522.
5. See Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and
Richard M. Ryan, “A Meta-analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects
of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin
125 (1999): 627-668; and my book Punished by Rewards (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1993).
6. I review some of this research, as well as studies
that find a detrimental effect of grades on quality of learning and preference
for challenge, in Punished by Rewards (op. cit.) and The Schools Our
Children Deserve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), as well as in “From Degrading to De-Grading,” High School Magazine, March
1999, pp. 38-43.
7. Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar, Methods That
Matter (York, ME: Stenhouse, 1998), p. 12.
8. Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind
(New York: Basic, 1991), p. 243.
9. Johnmarshall Reeve, Glen Nix, and Diane Hamm,
“Testing Models of the Experience of Self-Determination in Intrinsic Motivation
and the Conundrum of Choice,” Journal of Educational Psychology 95
(2003), p. 388.
10. Christopher P. Niemic and Richard M. Ryan,
“Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness in the Classroom: Applying
Self-Determination Theory to Educational Practice,” Theory and Research
in Education 7 (2009), p. 139. For an argument that “cognitive
autonomy support” may be more important for student engagement with learning
than “procedural” or “organizational” autonomy support, see Candice R.
Stefanou, Kathleen C. Perencevich, Matthew DiCintio, and Julianne C. Turner,
“Supporting Autonomy in the Classroom: Ways Teachers Encourage Student Decision
Making and Ownership,” Educational Psychologist 39 (2004): 98-110.
11. See Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to
Let Students Decide,” Phi
Delta Kappan, September 1993, pp. 8-20.
12. Johnmarshall Reeve and Hyungshim Jang, “What
Teachers Say and Do to Support Students’ Autonomy During a Learning Activity,” Journal
of Educational Psychology 98 (2006), p. 210. Many of these effects
were confirmed in a large meta-analysis published two years later: see
Erika A. Patall, Harris Cooper, and Jorgianne Civey Robinson, “The Effects of
Choice on Intrinsic Motivation and Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of
Research Findings,” Psychological Bulletin 134 (2008): 270-300.
13. On this last point, see Maja Wilson, Rethinking
Rubrics in Writing Assessment (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006); and
Kohn, “The Trouble with
Rubrics,” English
Journal, March 2006, pp. 12-15.
14. See my article “It’s Not What We Teach;
It’s What They Learn,” Education Week, September 10, 2008, pp. 32, 26.
15. Sami Miranda, “Yours, Mine, or Ours?” Rethinking
Schools, Summer 1999, p. 10.
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