When school learning is meaningless

Breaking the school resistance of unjustified students requires commitment and responsiveness. Through a learning that is perceived as “real”, the teacher can build up the lost sense of meaningfulness and contribute to the student’s inner motivation.

One of the fundamental problems in today’s school is that too many students experience the meeting with the school as meaningless. These students’ inner motivation for school work decreases the more they are in a school where they do not feel involved or do not feel that the content is real. The fact that it is possible to succeed in making the school meaningful and motivating when there is no motivation shows among other things.

The teachers’ main ability to create inner motivation among the students is about having a sense of and being able to interpret what students feel about different situations in school. Motivation is a complex and multifaceted concept that involves different things for different people and in different situations. There are a number of different definitions of motivation in different types of research that are influenced by different paradigms. For example, a simple and clear definition of motivation can be: “what makes man do something”. Targeted to the school then becomes the question: What is it that causes students in the school to do something?

The answer is that what causes students to do something could be different motivational factors and these are very different for different individuals. It is common for motivational factors to be roughly divided into the two categories of internal and external motivation. Internal motivation is, for example, people’s own interests, experiences of meaningfulness, being able to choose for themselves, the feeling of having control of tasks and challenges themselves. External motivation is more about rewards, stimuli and response, coercion, punishment and control from outside.

In the school, some examples of external motivation are homework, tests and grades – which are also strong motivational factors for large student groups. I, myself, prefer to the best essay writing services uk as by working online, I am not limited by a set of conventional rules. The grades, homework and tests are not motivational factors for students who have built up a school resistance or for students who think that “the school is not a place where I can learn meaningful things”. For those students, grades, homework and tests instead become an obstacle to learning, thus something that reduces students’ internal motivation for school work.

Pupils who have built up a strong school resistance often have poor self-confidence in the school context because of previous negative experiences of school failures. Another group is those who have study conditions but who do not identify themselves as individuals who study, which is often linked to social group or low level of education in the home. The completely different activities are required in the school if the students are to receive an internal motivation for school work.

Formative assessment and the relation pupil – teacher are two of the highest ranked factors. The common interpretation is that what the teacher does together with students in a close relationship is most crucial for what students actually learn, which is because these learning situations increase students’ internal motivation for school work.

If a teacher meets a student group that already has great internal motivation generally for school work, then focus can be placed on being as good a didactic as possible regarding the content that the teacher, hopefully together with the students, has planned as important to learn. When a teacher meets students who perhaps have built up a large school resistance for a long time, then the focus must first of all be on activities and learning situations that are aimed at breaking the school resistance.