Say When.

I was once asked if I will be a teacher who is a “sage on the stage or a guide on the side?” I am afraid however of devolving into the Video-Cabinet sith lord.

I am trying to be history teacher, but even with significant resume revisionism, I’m not one. I’ve taken history classes, but I’m no historian. Wearing feathers . . . does not make you a chicken. This is the way it always is with the copyrighted Liberal Arts education.

I desperately want to give my students quality instruction, rich in examples and strong in scaffolding. I am afraid of becoming the teacher I met in my field experience last fall.  He had a cabinet of videos related to World History (have you met him too?) As a connoisseur of the History Channel from it’s golden days, I know it was a beautiful collection.  However I know it’s the Dark Side; when I said he seemed like a nice guy, one of his students said, “do not defend him,” he’s a horrible teacher.

A year later, I’ve been trained in the Light Side.  We are supposed to have students “doing history”.  Here’s the identity crisis: I am not a historian. My best history classes were seminar style. My best papers were five pagers on architecture and social history.  I gave a devoted analysis, however I lack virtues like  “historical thinking”, sourcing documents or some kind of dialectic forensics. Passing on this trade, in a master apprentice fashion is not going to happen. It is, as my fellow apprentice teacher said the other day, “pie in the sky”.

I would call the master teacher and accuse my fellow apprentice teacher of slipping to the Dark Side already, but in the words of one much greater than I, “First, remove the log from your own eye, then remove the sliver from your neighbor’s eye”.  So where do I begin?  I am willing to do better.  I do not want to just teach the products of historical methods, but I don’t know how to do that, specifically.  I can read all I want about the historiographical constructivism of the  “Salem Witch Trials” or the “Starving Time” lesson plan, but how do I translate these examples into a unit on Egypt?  I feel like I am unable to produce a quality lesson plan for every day – much less any day – because I lack the time to assimilate high quality information and make decisions about how to best present that information.  Furthermore, I have been trained to design lessons, but perhaps, like any novice, I have the vocabulary but lack the fluency.

Whatever I learned in my undergraduate may not have been “history” with a registered trademark, but it was a social science and it was in the liberal arts.  For me, it takes time for ideas to peculate before they can be articulated.  If I am going to write good lessons, I am going to need to do a lot of reading, expand my time for ideas to grow before working an end product.

So, there, I’ve got it.   Is that it?

P.S. You might ask what good is a liberal arts degree if he can present on the fly, but think of the children.

Can I put this graph in my cover letter? It would suggest that my competitive edge is the top option. Hire me and your student’s test scores will increase dramatically! 

 Although the context of this graph was elementary testing, it could be a general study, I’m not sure.

@rbvandijk was musing about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on twitter while I was trying to remember some stuff from my educational psychology class from Fall 2007 with Stephen Hoover. I got rather excited for no particular reason. I am intrinsically motivated to learn about motivation, and I am extrinsically motivated by a variety of factors. Professor Hoover however taught the self-determination model of motivation, which he was a big fan of, if I remember correctly. So I’ve been mulling this over and finally remembered Hoover’s example as @rbvandijk posted intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. It is accurate graph but I thought Hoover’s example might be still more useful to help students, especially if we know their hobbies and goals. So I wrote this response to try to be helpful:

Intrinsic does not mean “wants to do it” but that I want to do it for its own sake. Furthermore, just because I don’t want to do something doesn’t mean it’s extrinsic exactly. (example borrowed from Stephen Hoover’s CEEP class)

• Consider the idea that I’d never just want to jog for jogging sake. I kinda dislike jogging.
• But, I can value jogging because it improves my health – that’s extrinsic but an internally regulated idea.
• I can value jogging because it seems attractive to women – that’s extrinsic and based on external social comparisons.
• I can value jogging because it gets me away from housework, that’s extrinsic.
• Maybe I jog because I want to be a police officer – this is not intrinsic either, but also extrinsic motivation.
• The only intrinsic motivation is if, I jog because I love jogging for jogging sake. If that’s the only tool I have to motivate my students, I’ll be sunk.  

If anyone knows of a good online resource that explains this better, please leave a link.  The sites I’ve found so far are academic psychology papers.  

Hoover’s other example was a science student who loved snakes and wanted to be a snake studying specialist. This students couldn’t care less about anything else in science, but if Hoover could explain how another aspect of science was attached to his interests and goals, then he could extrinsically motivate the student.

In sum, extrinsic motivation is an essential and nuanced tool that goes beyond the carrot and the stick.