Alee Swanner
Monday, February 8, 16
Motivation and Student Learning
Second Grade, Life Cycles
We all need inspiration or some motivation to complete tasks or embark on
learning a new skill—even to get out of bed in the morning. The same motivation is
necessary for the learning process. A common misconception about learning is that some
students love it and others hate it, or certain people only like to learn certain things.
While that may be somewhat true, chapter nine of Elementary Classroom Management
places much more emphasis on the teacher’s responsibility to cultivate the motivation to
learn for each and every one of her students. A teacher cannot simply decide that a
student is not willing to learn and give up on him or her. Instead, using strategies created
by J.E. Brophy, the teacher can engage that student in a specific, meaningful way to
enhance his or her natural motivation to learn.
The VDOE’s website has an Enhanced Scope and Sequence Sample Lesson Plan
that focuses on Life Cycles. Since my second grade practicum class just spent time
discussing the life cycle of a butterfly, I decided this was a great sample lesson plan to
use for this particular exercise. While reading through the lesson, I immediately noticed
several important strategies that Brophy noted enhances students’ motivation to learn.
The goal of this sample lesson plan is to teach students about the different life cycles of
the plant and animal kingdoms. Specific life cycles covered include butterflies,
mealworms, and white-tailed deer, to name a few. There are three basic activities that
include observation of different species. The first outlines the stages of a butterfly and
has students also observe and document the stages of a live mealworm. The second
activity outlines the stages of a plant, as well as the components a plant needs to survive.
The students create bags of seeds to wear around their necks for the duration of the
experiment. The final activity for this lesson is a nature walk that ends in a presentation
of the student’s chosen research topic and their findings.
Throughout this lesson plan, there are many opportunities for choice. One such
time is after the nature walk in the third activity. Allowing students to decide which
animal that they observed in the wild would be interesting enough for further research
takes the chore out of the assignment. Any time a teacher can give ownership to her
students, she has effectively enhanced their motivation to learn. I hope to get to know my
students so well that I can teach with their interests in mind regularly.
In the first activity, the students were allowed to grow their own mealworms and
again in the second stage they were able to grow their own seeds. Not only did this add
relevancy to what the students were learning and connected it back to the real world, but
this is very novel and varied from the day to day schooling. Whenever a teacher can
“include novel/variety elements,” she achieves a Ms. Frizzle status. Ms. Frizzle is the
elementary school teacher on the Magic School bus—a 90s cartoon. She is basically my
hero and is more of a magician than a schoolteacher. Ms. Frizzle motivated her students
to learn by doing something new or different every single time they walked in the door.
While I have not figured out how to shrink a bus and follow a butterfly around, I still plan
to involve new and interesting things into my classroom. A real live mealworm is a great
way to do just that.
I personally lose my mind a little when I have to sit silently and listen for longer
than twenty minutes… maybe not even that long. Providing students with an outlet to
actively respond to the material being presented is an excellent way to enhance their
motivation to really learn it. This particular lesson includes a journal prompt that allows
them to pretend they are a wildlife biologist or botanist. They are asked to study the plant
or animal life cycle that they chose earlier in this lesson. They pretend that there had been
a wildfire and discuss the implications of this catastrophe on their chosen species. I think
this is an excellent way to allow students the opportunity to critically think through what
they have learned—thus enhancing their future learning.
Often times in a classroom, teachers have students work on something that they
never get to finish. Allowing them to create finished products helps them see the outcome
of all their hard work. In this lesson plan, students conduct research on their animal, write
a report, and are allowed to present their findings to the class. This allows them to
actually follow through on an activity that they started.
One way that I would add to this lesson is allow more opportunities for my
students to interact with their peers. A good place to allow this is during the nature walk.
If you allow students to work in groups or pairs, they will bounce thoughts and ideas off
of one another and their shared interest will grow. Children, and adults, feed off of the
attitudes of their peers. If I were to do this lesson I would love to give them that
opportunity so that they can enhance each other’s motivation to learn.
As teachers, we must be vigilant against apathy in our classrooms. There many
things we can do to stoke our students’ desire to learn. Finding ways to help them own
their education is a great way to start. This can be achieved through providing outlets for
choice, peer interaction, success, and much more.