The motivation of school work

Preface

Two forces have combined in stimulating the preparation of this volume. One force is personal, the experience of the authors; the other is general, the growth of an educational theory demanding motive and interest in all school work. In the twenty or more years of their experience in rural, grade, and high schools, both as teachers and superintendents, the authors came to see clearly the large gains in the speed, thoroughness, and scope of the work when pupils were trying to do things of personal concern to them. From these experiences, they gradually accumulated a large body of concrete results secured under perfectly normal schoolroom conditions. Through presentation of these data to teachers and superintendents in educational meetings, in college and normal school classes, and through educational magazines, a demand arose for a more complete and organic statement of how to motivate the pupil's mastery of the various school subjects and of the results which have been secured from such motivated work.

The fundamental theory of motivation is not new. Glimpses of this theory appear here and there throughout the history of education. Rousseau, half consciously, was one of its first popular exponents. In recent years, Dr. John Dewey has given it cle'ar statement and a large following. But teachers find difficulty in carrying theory into practice even when clearly understood and appreciated. Teachers and superintendents, alike, have been seeking help in putting the theory of interest and motivation into practice under schoolroom iv PREFACE

conditions. A demand for a collection of the best practices of the best schools has grown increasingly insistent.

The present volume, therefore, seeks to satisfy personal obligations and a growing professional need. It recognizes that the largest daily task of the teacher is the detailed planning and preparation of the various lessons to be taught. The most difficult phase of teaching is not acquiring the necessary information nor controlling the class, but it is discovering problems and motives for the work that will make it appeal to and interest the pupils. This book is designed to furnish concrete help of a fundamental kind in solving this daily problem of every teacher.

While giving some attention in Part I to a clear and comprehensive statement of the theory of motivation, the main body of the work is devoted to concrete illustrations of the practical working of the theory in teaching the subjects of the common school curriculum in the classroom. The general plan of the book is easily comprehended from the table of contents.

While a more complete and thorough grasp of the technique of motivation may be secured from a careful study of the entire volume, it is organized in such a way that each chapter dealing with one of the school subjects may be readily understood and used without reference to the other chapters. Any teacher whose time does not enable her to read the entire volume will find it easy to get the spirit and purpose of the authors and to secure the help she wants by reading chapter II and then turning to the chapter treating the subject in which she needs special help.

The indebtedness of the authors, particularly to their associates in public-school work during the last decade,

PREFACE v

is so great that individual acknowledgment here would require the printing of a long list of names. Where possible, credit for illustrations used has been given in the body of the text. Due acknowledgment is likewise made to those leaders in education to whom the authors are heavily indebted not only for guiding principles, but also for inspiration.

The authors acknowledge gratefully the courtesy of School and Home Education, American Education, The Elementary School Teacher, The Midland Schools, The Educator-Journal, and the Atlantic Educational Journal for permission to use freely portions of certain chapters previously published in these educational magazines.

Among those to whom the authors are deeply indebted for helpful constructive criticism of certain portions of the manuscript in the various stages of its formulation are Miss Frances Jenkins, Mr. George A. Brown, President John R. Kirk, Assistant Superintendent K. J. Hoke, Professors T. W. Galloway, J. W. Searson, J. Fleming Hosic, C. R. Mann, L. D. Coffman, Thomas H. Briggs, George D. Strayer, W. C. Bagley, and E. L. Thorndike.

Preface To The Revised Edition

The main feature of the revision is the addition of the chapter on the project method. The project method of teaching is a direct outgrowth of the general acceptance of the doctrine of interest and the principles of motivation. There has been much confusion in the use of the terms "project" and "project-method." The added chapter on the Project Method will make clear the proper application of these terms and will vi PREFACE

show the fundamental relationships of the project method and motivation.

The book as originally written has furnished such a satisfactory working guide for motivated teaching, and has been so stimulating in leading teachers in all parts of the country to work out and report motivated types of school work, that it seems best to leave the original chapters practically unchanged for this revision.

Motivated teaching has gained in favor rapidly because it is based squarely upon the doctrines of interest and self-activity, and it recognizes that the child engaged in purposeful activity of a worthwhile nature furnishes the ideal condition for learning and instilling right habits and right ideals. The proper motivation of school work not only means increased efficiency in teaching, but it means for the child richer experience, larger personality, and new joy in living.

The Authoks

September 1, 1920

Part I Motivation In Modern Education

I. The Present Need m Education 3

The present attainment and the next step — The old school and the new — The divine discontent — The fundamental difficulty — The remedy.

II. The Meaning of Motivation 15

The motive and the goal — The educational value

of a May-Day party — Motivated language work — The incentive and the motive — Interest and motive — The technique of motivated teaching.

HI. The Psychological Basis of Motivation . . 28 Child or subject-matter? — Interest and moral development — Relation of interest to apparent fatigue — Interest and the learning curve — Interest and memory — Interest and formal discipline — The center of method.

IV. The Origin and Sources of Motives ... 43

The analysis of motive — Instinct the basis of motive — Different types of motive.

PART n

THE MOTIVATION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL SUBJECTS

V. The Motivation of Reading 57

Establishing the motive — Choice and treatment of selections — The use of games — Other motives.

viii CONTENTS

VI. The Motivation of Language and Composition . 71

Establishing the motive — The desire to acquire property — Using the need for communication — Using the instinct of sharing — Using the motive of entertaining — The motive of preservation — Using the text — The value of formal grammar.

VII. The Motivation of History 101

Re-living history — The solution of a modern problem — Other motives — The Constitutional Convention in class — Dramatizing historic events — The social-group method — Motivated work and "page" work — Organizing history around problems.

VIII. The Motivation of Geography . . . .133 What should be learned in geography — Motivating

the work — Creating a real problem — From local to foreign geography — Direct correspondence with other regions — The imaginary journey — Correlation — Suggestions for a course of study.

IX. The Motivation of Arithmetic .... 158

The demand for practical arithmetic — Correlation with other subjects — Buying a lot and building a house — Furnishing a six-room house — Organizing a stock company — Occupational studies — The school bank — Comparison of courses of study.

PART in

THE MOTIVATION OF OTHER SCHOOL SUBJECTS AND ACTIVITIES

X. The Motivation of Other Subjects . . .185

The motivation of writing — The motivation of spelling — The motivation of music — The motivation of drawing — The motivation of home economics — The motivation of manual training — The motivation of agriculture and nature-study — Correlation.

CONTENTS ix

XI. School Activities a Means of Motivating the

Work of the School 220

Using the social and competitive instincts — The school assembly — Athletic events and school societies — The school paper.

XII. Motivation and Efficiency 241

Efficiency and progress — Motivation the agent — The elimination of the useless — Efficiency applied to organization — The value of the child's time — Establishing concentration.

XIII. The Project Method 250

What is a project ? — Purposeful act, problem, project — Is the project fmethod applicable to all subjects ? — May projects be undertaken in the appreciation subjects ? — Is project work to replace drill ? — What are the advantages of a project in teaching ? — What are the essential and desirable characteristics of a project ? — Are there dangers in the use of the project method ? — Many or few projects ? — Can the work be as well done ?

Recent Publications. Particularly on the Project Method 270

Chapter I

Notwithstanding all the advances in public education in recent years, negative criticism of the work of the public schools constantly confronts us. Much of it is sensational and groundless, but some of it is undoubtedly temperate and well founded. Educators must frankly concede that in spite of all the improvements which have been made in the public schools in recent years, the work and activities of the school system are not sufficiently significant to the pupils to possess the impelling, absorbing power that should characterize preparation for a life-work. Before discussing the improvements needed, a brief consideration of the evolution of the school and of the social progress it has made possible will afford a clearer perspective, in view of which present conditions and pressing needs may be more adequately stated.

The present attainment and the next step. Despite the general demand for the improvement of the public schools, the cause of education was never in a more encouraging condition than to-day. In every respect, the schools are better to-day than ever before. They enroll more children and hold them longer. They do more work and do it on a higher plane. The teachers are better trained and better paid. The schools have a broader outlook and do more real service in the community. The schools were never more skillfully managed, or more powerful. The introduction of the American school into the Orient has broken up forty centuries of conservatism. It has given us a new China, a new Japan, and is working marked progress in Turkey and the Philippines. The schools not only encourage social solidarity and progress, but they are in position to determine the lines of progress. Have they reached the limits of their power, or are they just approaching an era of expansion into greater power and usefulness? What is their present attainment and what should be the next step forward?

The ancient conception was not that of an educated people, but merely of an educated class. In ancient Egypt it is doubtful if as many as one per cent of the people were educated. Learning was an ornament for the few. The same was true in Greece, that ancient center of culture and learning. It was education for the few, probably not exceeding ten per cent of the total population. The masses were left in ignorance and slavery. The Greek culture was a culture for ornament and for leisure. Early Roman education aimed at the practical, — commerce, war, and the forum. But education was a private enterprise and was confined almost exclusively to the boys. Later it was limited to the rich and the ruling classes. Slavery and ignorance were the common lot.

The Christian era gave us a new conception of the value of the individual, woman included, but the ideal was not realized during the Middle Ages. The mediaeval practice was to educate only the exceptionally bright boys. Theology and discussion were the end, authority and the syllogism were the chief means. Latin was the language of learning, the vernacular being considered common and vulgar. No practical ends were sought in education. It is doubtful if the percentage of educated people was any greater in mediaeval than in ancient times. Certainly learning did not attain to such heights.

Modern ideals require that all shall be educated, and that such education shall be serviceable to the individual culturally, socially, and practically. These ideals have been slow in evolving and are probably not fully realized anywhere to-day. Rousseau did valiant service in directing our attention to the child and in helping to make the child — his interests and needs — the center of the educative process. He was supported in turn by Pestalozzi, Froebel, and other reformers. But the ideal is still far from general realization. The general influence of Luther and the Reformation was toward universal education in the vernacular. It was not long until compulsory education was tried out. To-day compulsory education is the rule in civilized nations, and the vernacular is thoroughly established in the schools. We scarcely realize that for a thousand years it was otherwise and that the new regime is hardly a century old.

But our difficulties and responsibilities have increased almost in proportion to the numbers being educated. As long as we sought to educate only the few, — the wealthy and the precocious, — we did not need to be very critical of either our subject-matter or our method. But when we compel the attendance of the laborer's son, and when by taxation we take from the widow's income, then all phases of our school work are immediately brought under scrutiny, and very properly so. The taxpaying public has a right to demand that the subject-matter selected for school work shall be sufficiently valuable to justify the parents' expenditure of money and the children's expenditure of time; that schoolroom methods shall be effective and economical; and that teachers shall be properly trained for their work.

The old school and the new. The extent of the improvement in all of these lines within recent years can best be appreciated by contrasting the schools of yesterday and of to-day in a typical Middle- Western State. In a particular township fifty years ago there were seven log schoolhouses. The schools opened after Thanksgiving and continued for three or four months. The subjects taught were spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic, the greater part of the time being devoted to spelling and arithmetic. Girls seldom studied arithmetic. The pupils ranged in age up to twenty-one or twenty-two years. There was no classification by years or grades, no uniform texts, and no compulsory attendance. Each pupil moved forward at his own rate, or stood still. The teachers were men who had been examined by the local school directors, and had demonstrated their ability to spell, to write, to read in McGuffy's Sixth Reader, and to cipher to the Rule of Three. Most of these men were transients in the community and in the profession. They merely stayed for the winter, and would later pass on to more permanent and more remunerative employment, or would use the money received to buy government land. Seldom did a year pass, however, that some one of these teachers was not " whipped out " by the big boys and compelled to give up the school without finishing the term.

To-day in that same township there is one central school plant which is surrounded by ten acres of ground devoted to lawn, playgrounds, gardens, and agricultural experiments. Most of the children are transported in school wagons. The others receive pay for transporting themselves and are provided with a commodious barn for their horses and vehicles. The schoolhouse is modern in every particular, properly heated, lighted, and ventilated, equipped with indoor toilets, basement play-rooms, manual-training shops, domestic science kitchens, gymnasium, and a spacious assembly-room. The school is thoroughly graded, and offers four years of high-school work. The program of studies is modern and diversified. In comparison with an eighteen- or twenty-year-old pupil of the old school, a twelve-year-old boy of to-day not only knows more arithmetic, reads better, writes better, spells better, but he also knows far more history, physiology (sanitation and hygiene), geography, and language, and he has had work in music, drawing, manual training, and agriculture. Furthermore, this modern boy's attitude is good. He admires his teacher and his principal, he cooperates with the other children, and he is interested in the community and in affairs. He will make a better citizen and a more intelligent voter.

The principal of this school is a graduate of the state normal school and of the state agricultural college. He is in sympathy with country life and is the inspiration of the entire community. He has made the school a community center, and the high school a center for agricultural extension work among the farmers of the township. He was employed for this position three years ago at a salary of twelve hundred dollars for twelve months. His salary has been increased each year since. He is now married and lives across the road from the school plant. He has cooperated with the trustee and county superintendent in the selection of the teachers. All of these are at least high-school graduates with a year of professional training. The assistants in the high school are college graduates with professional training. One of the grade teachers is a graduate of the state normal school. The janitor is employed by the year and lives on the school grounds in the house that was formerly a one-room school-building.

This picture is not overdrawn. It can be duplicated to-day not alone in Massachusetts, Indiana, and California, but also in Louisiana, in North Carolina, in Kentucky, in Ohio, in Iowa, in the Dakotas, in Idaho — in short, in almost every State of the Union. The progress in town and city systems has been equally marked.

It is safe to say that the last one hundred years have seen more progress in the schools than did the preceding one thousand years. Furthermore, the last generation has seen more progress than did the preceding ten generations. Under these circumstances the times are auspicious for a general advance. If the ideals that have been realized in our schools in a few places could be realized universally, if the rank and file could be fired with the zeal and inspired with the vision of our leaders, and if the best practices of the select few could be made to prevail throughout our schools, the level of efficiency would be raised immeasurably. And that advance will be made. The American people will not be permanently content with untrained teachers in most of their schools, with organization which is expensive and inadequate, and with subject-matter which fails to serve the interests of developing childhood.

The divine discontent. Nor will the school people themselves be satisfied; indeed, they dare not be. The schools to-day have keener competition than ever before. Formerly almost the only intellectual competitors of the schools were dry Sunday sermons and the weekly party paper. Now the schools must compete successfully, not alone with improved intellectual agencies, but with every other outside means of culture or amusement — with the socialized church, the cosmopolitan daily and its Sunday supplement, the moving-picture shows, the Boy Scouts and C amp-Fire Girls, the modern library, the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, and the dance hall. True, the school should utilize these forces and cooperate with them; but it must also compete with them. It must show improvement in comparison. It must make an appeal which is sufficiently interesting and worth while to hold the children in school. And all of this means that the times demand better teaching, a better selection of subject-matter, and better methods of working. The rank and file of the teaching profession must advance to the higher levels.

To promote this advance, teachers should have available for their use the helpful material growing out of the best practices of our best teachers in our best schools. We know that it is possible to meet the demands of childhood, and to keep the children in school better, because it is being done in many places. The progressive teacher wants to know of the better practices which secure these results, which secure the cooperation of parents, and which secure a larger income in school taxes without dissent or murmur. It is found that these better practices also develop childhood, nurture individuality, and encourage desirable variation and initiative. They tend to abolish the treadmill of education. They make the educative process more effective and economical, doing for teaching what Emerson and Taylor, as efficiency engineers, have done for business.

In fact, it is the development of the individual workman through motive and interest which constitutes the basis of the success of Emerson and Taylor. Why not secure interest and more effective effort in school work through a thorough motivation of all the pupil's work by giving him an opportunity to expend his energies upon problems and situations that to him are real and worth while? Why not substitute for the formal text-book routine of schoolroom practice, self-imposed tasks which the pupil is vitally interested in successfully completing?

The fundamental difficulty. The fundamental difficulty is that the work in which the schools seek to engage the child is not significant to him. It does not satisfy the needs which the individual child experiences. It does not gratify any hunger or yearning he has felt. It does not answer any questions which his experiences have raised in his mind. It does not contribute to the solution of any problems which he has encountered in actual life. With the work thus external and foreign to the child's personal hungers, longings, questions, experiences, and problems, it does not render him aggressively self-active. In the average school, we find him listlessly sitting, looking, listening, and answering when questioned, rather than initiating, doing, and creating. Yet we know definitely that growth and mastery can come to the child only as a result of vigorous, aggressive self-activity.

It is not necessary to arouse controversy by emphasizing a particular aim in education. The aim of education may be variously stated to include knowledge and character and to lead to efficiency in citizenship. But however satisfactorily the aim of education may be stated, we are forced to admit that such statement in itself has rendered very small service, for an aim may be two centuries in realizing itself in actual school practice. vThe crying need to-day is for educational leaders among practical school people who can make ideals operative, who can work educational aims into the course of study and the practices of the schoolroom. We need to realize aims in content and method as well as in abstract statement. From whatever source we draw our inspiration and whatever the avowed quality of our subject-matter, — humanistic, disciplinistic, materialistic, scientific, socialistic, or an eclectic combination of these, — the questions of content and of method are almost equally pertinent. And above content and method as final determiner of correct school practice, stands the child with his attitude, his interests, his motives and problems.

While the schools have made remarkable progress and are continuing to make progress, there is strong evidence that there is much room for improvement. In the United States as a whole, of one hundred pupils entering the first grade, only ninety enter the fourth grade, seventy -two remain in the sixth grade, and fortythree enter the eighth grade. Thirty-six pupils out of the one hundred reach the high school, but half of these never reach the second year and only twelve remain to graduate from the fourth year of high school. 1 That we graduate only twelve per cent of our pupils from the high school is a very severe indictment. The indictment becomes more severe when we are convinced by careful studies that this dropping out of school is not due to the poverty of parents, but that most of it may be charged up to the inefficiency of the schools. 2

1 Strayer, Bulletin no. 5 of the U.S. Department of Education (1911).

2 St. Louis, Report of the Board of Education (1911).

The St. Louis study shows that eighty per cent of the children leav-

While a larger percentage of pupils enter the upper grades and secondary schools in America than in Europe, yet there are special, private, vocational, trade, evening, and continuation schools in a large part of Europe that give their total figures a very different aspect.

The remedy. The remedy for this situation, — the means of bringing our school work to a higher level, — as developed in the following pages, is the thorough motivation of the child's school efforts. What this means concretely and in detail is developed in chapters II and IV, and the following chapters show its application to particular subjects or to particular lines of school work.

Any thorough effort to motivate the school's work will result in the elimination of useless 1 subject-matter from the traditional course of study. Educational leaders are convinced that the greater part of formal grammar fails to function and should be eliminated from the grade work. 2 In arithmetic fully one half of our energy has been expended upon useless and obsolete subject-matter. In spelling we have been hopelessly burdening the child in our attempt to teach from 10,000 to 15,000 words, while the outside limit of an eighth-grade writing vocabulary is less than 5000 words. 3 And so in geography, in physiology , in history, in writing,

ing the high schools before graduation are not forced out by poverty. The school simply fails to hold them. See also the Report of. the Massachusetts Commission (1905), p. 104; the Report of the Superintendent of Schools of New York City (July, 1909) ; the Report on Vocational Training, issued by the City Club of Chicago, p. 34.

1 See Year-Booh of the National Society for the Study of Education, vol. 14, part I.

2 F. S. Hoyt, "Studies in English Grammar," Teachers College Record (September, 1905).

3 W. F. Jones, The Concrete Materials of English Spelling; L. P. Ayres, Spelling Vocabularies of Personal and Business Letters; B. R. Buckingham, Spelling Ability.

in algebra, physics, and other subjects, — the work has been organized from the standpoint of scientific adult subject-matter, with the result that the child has been crushed, discouraged, and driven out of school. Although the main purpose of the following chapters is to show how to motivate significant and vital subjects for the pupil, the omission of useless subject-matter necessarily receives treatment in showing how to motivate the work pupils should do.

A further remedy for the situation, which is not treated herein, but which we cannot forbear mentioning, has to do with the organization, management, and supervision of the schools. It has been estimated that the loss due to the useless repetition of grades by pupils in our schools amounts to $27,000,000 annually in the United States. This is the money loss alone, and may not be the greatest loss. It is due to a situation which our supervisory officers could and should remedy. Annual promotion should give way to semiannual or quarterly promotion, thus reducing the loss in case of repetition. But failure and repetition should be reduced to the minimum through the employment of special teachers to assist the backward, through personal attention to the backward by the regular teacher, and through a separation of pupils 1 according to ability so that an entire room may move at the same rate; thus making failure unnecessary, and slower but regular progress the rule. On the other hand, the promotion scheme should be sufficiently flexible to permit the more rapid promotion of the bright pupils. They are partic-

1 See Provision for Exceptional Children in the Public Schools, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin no. 14 (1911). See also Reports of the National Education Association (1908), p. 147; (1910), p. 155; (1912), p. 355; and Keyes's Progress of Children through the Grades, Teachers College Publications.

ularly susceptible to disgust with formal treadmill work. They are an unusual asset, and they must be conserved to the school and society.

With our school work thoroughly motivated, with the useless and obsolete eliminated, and with a school organization modified to meet the demands of childhood, we may reasonably expect that our schools will gradually move toward greater efficiency, toward a higher level of teaching and toward results commensurate with the improvement in method and the better selection of subject-matter.

Chapter II

The motive and the goal. That attack upon school work which seeks to make its tasks significant and purposeful to each child, by relating them to his childish experiences, questions, problems, and desires, is called motivation. The child's work is motivated whenever he sees a real use in it — whenever it satisfies some need he feels, provides some value he wants, supplies some control he wishes to possess, secures some desired end, or helps him to attain any definite goal.

The goal sought may be near or remote — as near as earning a penny to buy a stick of candy, as far as gaining the mental and manual ability to construct an airship. So long as the child comprehends more or less clearly the relationship between the work he is doing and the end sought, his work is motivated. The more definitely he appreciates this relationship, and the more keenly he desires to reach the given goal, the more impelling are his motives for working.

How school work moves forward wfieiT'real needs arise may be shown by recounting an actual school experience : —

The educational value of a May-Day party. A great many very interesting real problems grew out of the decision of a third-grade class to give a May-Day party to which their mothers were to be invited. Under the skillful management of the teacher, 1 the children carried the 1 Mrs. Etna Stivers Dwyer, St. Louis, Mo.