Over the past winter break, I read a book titled “What the Best Teachers Do.” It was an excellent and exciting book because it confirmed my beliefs about the fundamentals of education, and then expanded on those notions as well.
One notion that I became hooked on is the concept that a student who is motivated by external rewards, such as grades, gets less from the semester as a student motivated by internal rewards, such as the pleasure of learning.
In retrospect, I may have been a little too hooked on this concept. To use this concept in practice, I scaled back my emphasis on grading, and tried to increase the emphasis on learning. But I feel as though my students are simply more confused and not trying as hard as they usually are. I have also found it even more difficult to grade papers This is not a scientific study, obviously, and maybe this feeling is simply a bias. But maybe its not. Certainly, a change of cause will lead to a change of effect. But that doesn’t mean that I can trust my memory and feeling to figure out how much the teaching strategy cause has changed, how much the student response effect has changed, and how much the teaching strategy caused the student response effect. After all, the students are each a magnificent nexus of ideas, each of which is distinct, and which can in itself serve as a cause that alters the student response effect. It is impossible to reliably and precisely measure how a change in teaching strategy leads to a change in the student experience. Then again, some measurement can be made, and some things can be learned.
Certainly, many people are engaged in this type of research. But there are many things that researchers are currently not studying. For example, me, and all the subtle things that I do that no one else does, at least not in the exact way that I behave.
Anyway, returning to my original point of going too far in de-emphasizing grades. Perhaps the only way in which I added to the internal goods was by paying it lip service, without having the appropriate class activities and assignments that actually nurture those goods.
Do I need to return to the emphasis on grades? Maybe. Maybe the nature of the student body I deal with simply requires it in order to get a substantial number of students on board with the program. But maybe if I focus my attention on class practices, and recognize that maybe I’ve depended a little too much on class propaganda, I can get the best of both worlds.
Tomorrow, we are starting a significant new phase in my two Ethics classes. We are playing the Reacting to the Past Athens game, and this will certainly be a radical shift in class practices. It will be interesting to see how those two classes diverge from my others. I spent the majority of Spring Break thinking about and preparing for those Ethics classes (of the time that I was preparing…I admit I spent substantial time with friends whom I haven’t seen in a long time). Now I can turn the bulk of my attention back toward my Enlightenment to the Present and Philosophy of Religion class, both of which need attending to if the greatest goods of the class can bloom.
Natural Causes 
what type of motivation creates greatest student learning? good question, and one that almost rips itself in half when trying to put it in a course. students respond most noticeably to external motivation (ie grades, parents, etc) but in our student-centered world, learning is key. and how the heck can you measure that.
In my writing class it’s easier (compare early-semester writing to late-semester (hopefully better) writing) than it would be in a philosophy class. Are tactile, measurable improvements the only way? How can you tell if a student has ‘learned’ anything about ethics at all?
Also, I wouldn’t sweat the ‘confusion’ you see your students having. It’s always darkest just before dawn (it’s always dullest just before yawn), and when I’m most confused/hopeless/sure I’m a failure, I’m usually just one moment away from getting better than i would have if I hadn’t gone through the tempest. I guess it’s not something to expect, but it’s not the end of the world. Who knows, maybe your next lecture will tie it all together and lead them to drier land.
Kamron
You are an excellent teacher, and I can see what you are trying to do. I think it is admirable that you are trying to get away from the “bankable concept of education”. But for many students bankable concept is all they know. Asking students to just think versus repeating and studying everything you tell them, is very controversial. To educate one self for the sake of education in this country is lost, mainly because many will go to the internet instead of the classroom. College is something you pay for, so that one can eventually make a good living and hopefully pay off school debt. It was not always that way. But that is what is left of it now. I remember back when, a teacher was the smartest person one could know and community’s turned to their teachers for knowledge. Now everyone is a philosopher on twitter and facebook. But you can change that and people can once again engage with each other while facing one another.
Thanks for the pats on the back and for the insightful commentary.
Maxwell: I like what you say about not sweating the confusion too much. Every semester I get to points of confusion in the class, only to see things come together again and again. I should expect this, since much of my class involves trying to question and undermine fundamental belief systems. The confusion is ingrained in the class itself. Still, there are productive and unproductive cases of confusion, and very likely the confusion I find in class is a mix of the two. So the question is, what change in my practices will lessen the presence of the unproductive sort?
Alemitu: Thank you, and I agree with what you say about the bankable concept of education and the influence of technology on the learning process.