6 minute read
Murdoch Centre for Educational Research and Innovation
Finding the Silver Linings in the Shutdown
I’m going to come right out and say it: I think the school shutdown has been a great experience. Now, I’m not downplaying the enormous disruption this has caused to family life, the angst it has caused parents torn between work and caring for their children, the students who really struggled and the economic damage the country has suffered. I’m speaking purely from the admittedly rather limited educational research point of view, with the determination to get a silver lining out of the dark storm clouds that have hovered over the world since December – because I think there is a silver lining. The first thing the shutdown has shown is the power – and the limitations – of online learning. Online learning has been held out as ‘the next big thing’ in education for years now, and it has finally arrived – but not to universal acclaim by any means. The experience of parents and students has been mixed. Some have loved the experience of online learning, while others have hated it, or found it tedious. Some students have seized the opportunities, while others have found it hard to keep focused. The same thing has been found at the university level, where online courses have notoriously high drop out rates. We have now had a massive experiment in online learning across the world: why does it work in some cases, and not in others?
I believe that understanding student motivation is crucial to understanding why online learning does, and doesn’t, work. One classic view of student motivation is Gardner’s: that students have two motivating factors: integral and instrumental (Gardner, a Canadian researcher, was looking at language learning, but I have found his findings have relevance for most subjects). In the integrative model, students view a subject as integral to who they are – they want it to be part of their identity; for example, a student might see himself as an artist – art is part of who he is: he has strong integrative motivation to make himself part of that artistic community by working hard at his art. In the instrumental model, a student sees the usefulness of a subject, which overrides whether that subject is intrinsically interesting or engaging. For example, a student’s view of his future might be as a successful international businessman, effortlessly moving between Melbourne, Shanghai and New York: he learns Chinese because that is essential to his future success. On a shorter timeline, a student might have a strong desire for an excellent ATAR score, and he understands that great results in Chemistry will be vital for this. But these models only cover the experience of only some students; some are not enormously passionate about a subject area, or do not have a clear idea of where they want to get to. For these students Hungarian researchers such as Dörnyei identified classroom factors as being the most important: whether a student enjoys the experience of being in the class, whether they like their teacher, and whether they feel they are making progress. Crucially these different motivations occur in different ages. Younger students are most strongly motivated by classroom factors (and even if they can state the instrumental value, often the real motivation is the classroom factors); instrumental motivation kicks in later, often not until VCE, and integrative motivation might not happen at all. When we look at online learning through this lens the experience starts to make more sense. The older students seemed to adapt to online learning much better (although there are always exceptions), and they are the ones for whom Gardner’s integrative and instrumental motivations are strongest. Online learning requires organisation, and without the motivating presence of the teacher, students need to provide their own motivation. For younger students, online learning provides very few of the rewards they need from classroom factors to motivate them, and they do not have the integrative or instrumental motivation to fall back on.
For online learning to work, schools need to understand student motivation. Online learning works best when it can be linked to integrative motivation – feeding a passion a student has for a particular area – or instrumental motivation, where a student recognises that it is of strategic importance to him. For other students – arguably the majority – once the excitement and novelty has worn off they need the dynamism and personal connection of the classroom to keep them engaged and learning. This does not mean that there is no place in school level education for online learning, but that it has a very specific niche – and the shutdown has helped us identify this fact. The shutdown has also demonstrated something that teachers have always known: that teaching is actually really quite difficult. I must admit to a sense of smugness as I heard numerous cries from frazzled parents who were exhausted helping their children with their lessons at home: try doing that all day long, with 25 students, not one or two. As parents know, the dynamics of keeping one or two children motivated and focused on their learning is a very tough challenge – they have been given a glimpse of the everyday life of the teacher. Of course, teachers are trained and professional in what they do, and this is just the point: teaching is, as the educational expert Dylan Wiliam has said, “too difficult a job to be able to master in one lifetime”. People sometimes ask me how I can teach the same subject year after year. Parents who have been helping their children with online learning now know the answer: that every hour, let alone every day, is unique; that what worked last time won’t necessarily work this time; that the material being taught might stay the same, but the student is infinitely variable, and this is what makes teaching such a challenging and such a rewarding profession at the same time. Above all, the shutdown has helped make clear what we really value in a school. One student wisely complained to the Headmaster that it was “school without any of the fun bits”. The learning still went on, and educational content was delivered, sometimes better than it was in the classroom (it’s hard to press pause and replay a classroom lesson!). But what was missing was the human element: the value of being able to pick up on all the non-verbal cues that a student gives off to indicate they are stuck, or confused, or enthralled; the little jokes and laughs that make the classroom fun; the feeling of being an individual who is cared for, not just another face in a square on a screen. We had online staff meetings, but I missed the unplanned interactions that make up a day, with all the “now that I see you” and “that reminds me” opportunities they bring, that often end up providing the real breakthroughs in what we do. As we move more into a technological age the power and necessity of the human side of what we do only becomes more important, not less – and the shutdown has helped make this crystal clear. So this has been a great experience – a learning experience – for us all; we just don’t want to repeat it any time soon!
Dr John Tuckfield
Director of the Murdoch Centre for Educational Research and Innovation
