40

reating a foundation for academic success involves a number of factors, and in the forefront is motiva-

tion. Although some students come to school highly motivated, others demonstrate reluctance during learn-ing activities. Teachers have attempted to motivate reluctant learners by using strategies and activities with varying degrees of success. Tokenism, for example, focuses on extrinsic rewards that can be effective in the short term. To develop autonomous learners, however, teachers must use intrinsic satisfiers and valuations (Bartholomew 2007), which are essential for the long term. The intrinsic, or big-picture, perspective is more likely to provide motivational benefits for reluctant learners when the context of the classroom and its relevance to students’ lives are highlighted. To sup-port the intrinsic stance, I present commonalities that describe reluctant learners, discuss important aspects of motivation, and suggest ways to encourage motivation throughout the school year.

Who Is a Reluctant Learner?Reluctant learners are as individual in their reluc-

tance to learn as they are in their motivation to learn; however, some commonalities exist. According to Pro-theroe (2004), reluctant learners do not complete tasks, do avoid challenges, and are satisfied with just getting by. They are often capable of excelling but do not seem concerned about achieving in school.

Another related issue is how these individuals perceive themselves. If they consistently receive negative comments about their school performance, they may develop low self-esteem, low-efficacy, or learned helplessness. When students believe they are incapable of completing mean-ingful assignments, their motivation to learn diminishes.

Although the problem of unmotivated students is evi-dent in all grades, it is most apparent in the middle grades when these students’ enthusiasm may fade because of increased academic demands. If lack of interest becomes deep-rooted and continues into high school, some of these students may drop out of school. The reasons for their lack of effort are varied and include the beliefs that academic learning is irrelevant to their personal lives, that not striving to learn is cool to their peers, and that achieving poorly in school is a way of rebelling against their parents’ expectations for them to excel. “The essen-tial point to remember is that a student’s motivation can vary, depending on the subject, setting, and teaching style” (Shore 2001, 20). Identifying the reasons students are reluctant to learn is vitally important to engaging their interest and supporting their success (Protheroe 2004).

What Is Motivation?In the professional literature, researchers present

useful definitions and frameworks for understanding

Turning Reluctant Learners into Inspired Learners

JOSEPH SANACORE

Joseph Sanacore, EdD, is a professor in the Department of Special Education and Literacy at Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus, Brookville, New York.

Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications

Abstract: Motivation is a key factor in promoting aca-demic success, and intrinsic motivation is especially important for developing autonomous learners. Reluc-tant learners, in particular, benefit from intrinsic moti-vation that makes learning relevant to their lives. In this article, the author describes commonalities of reluctant learners and presents definitions and frameworks for understanding motivation. The author also suggests a variety of strategies and activities for turning reluctant learners into inspired learners. Keywords: autonomous learners, intrinsic motivation, reluctant learners

C

Vol. 82, No. 1 Reluctant Learners to Inspired Learners 41

motivation. For example, focusing on the benefits of teaching, Ryan and Cooper (2007b) write that “the intrinsic rewards of an occupation are the internal psy-chic or spiritual satisfactions one receives from one’s work, such as a personal sense of accomplishment or an enjoyment of the work itself” (5). Although seem-ingly idealistic when applied to students, moving from reluctance to inspiration requires a serious shift in classroom philosophy and practice. If teachers expect students to value learning, they should help them grow beyond token rewards and give them opportunities to respond to learning in personal ways.

Specifically, teachers need to remind themselves that emphasizing external constraints weakens intrinsic motivation and performance. These constraints include surveillance, deadlines, bribes, threats, evaluation by others, and rewards. “Yes, even rewards are a form of constraint! The reward giver is the General who dictates rules and issues orders; rewards are used to keep the troops in line” (Ryan and Cooper 2007a, 219).

Also important for understanding motivation is the differentiation of instruction for academic diversity. When teachers incorporate learners’ interests and pro-clivities into the curriculum or across the curriculum, learners are more apt to be motivated and engaged, and their achievement is more likely to improve. This type of differentiation, based on students’ interests, is intended to help individuals connect their experiences, preferences, and talents to required content. Simi-larly, when students work with topics in which they are personally interested, their motivation and task persistence increase. In summarizing related research, Tomlinson (2006) concluded, “Modifying instruction to draw on student interests is likely to result in greater student engagement, higher levels of intrinsic moti-vation, higher student productivity, greater student autonomy, increased achievement, and an increased sense of self-competence” (155).

Students’ feelings, opinions, and choices are also important factors for promoting motivation in addi-tion to their interests. Cole (2002/2003) conducted a qualitative study to discover her students’ intrinsic motivation to read. Using a case study approach with four students, Cole focused on a conceptual framework involving Pintrich and DeGroot’s (1990) three general motivation categories: readers’ beliefs (self-efficacy, attitudes, and values), readers’ reasons and purposes (goals, meaning construction, and interest), and read-ers’ affective reactions (engagement and flow, self-expression, and self-efficacy). Cole found that what motivated the four students to read was multifaceted and complex:

Each reader held his or her own beliefs about reading; applied specific and unique reasons and purposes for reading; and participated in varied, personal affective reactions to reading and literature. My exploration

revealed that the students were motivated to read by totally different factors and exhibited their own dis-tinctive literacy personalities. My desire as a classroom teacher, then, was to become more responsive to the literacy personalities of my students and provide a class-room culture that fostered their strengths, honored their voices, and met their needs. (334)

These perspectives highlight the value of intrinsic moti-vation, consider both the context of the classroom and its relevance to students’ lives, and clarify the importance of “inspiration to do or to achieve” (Bar-tholomew 2007, 594).

How Can We Turn Reluctant Learners into Inspired Learners?

One major goal of educators is to increase their stu-dents’ independence and interest in learning. Although tokenism can be useful to immediately hook reluctant learners, teachers should not forget the big picture. If teachers expect students to have a strong sense of self-determination at the end of each school year, they need to encourage students’ intrinsic motivation during the entire school year. The following suggestions are intended to support this goal. Although they focus on reluctant learners, they can be adapted to all learners.

Create a learning environment that is encouraging and challenging. Whether we are teaching or learning, we all benefit from support. Reluctant learners, in particular, thrive on a balance of being praised for specific accomplishments and challenged to attain high expectations. A typical example is teacher questioning. Regrettably, some teachers still use an interrogation approach in which they ask literal questions (who, what, where, and when) and expect students to respond with interest and understanding. I often wonder why these teachers focus on low-level questions, especially for learners who are unmotivated or at risk of failure. I raise this concern in many professional development sessions I conduct nationwide. Most of the teachers articulate a similar scenario:

My students don’t have the ability to make inferences or to think critically during reading, so I need to give them a foundation in basic comprehension skills. When my students have mastered the basic literal level, they will be able to handle higher-level skills. (anonymous teacher, pers. comm.)

Although this belief is well-intentioned, it is both biased and flawed because (a) all students deserve opportunities to engage in challenging learning activi-ties, and (b) all learners, including those who are reluc-tant or at risk of failure, do not need a foundation in literal comprehension before they can engage in more challenging thinking. Even nonreaders can listen to a story being read aloud and respond inferentially to their teacher’s prediction questions (e.g., “What do you think will happen next in the story?”). They can also

42 The Clearing House September/October 2008

react critically and personally after the story has been read aloud, and the following questions can provide a necessary scaffold for success:

If you were the main character, how would you have approached the problem? What would you have learned about yourself from your approach to the problem? What difficulties would you have encountered as you attempted to solve the problem? What would you have learned about yourself from the ways in which you handled these difficulties? Would you have dealt with the problem successfully? Why? (Sanacore 2005, 103)

These questions are nonthreatening because there are no correct or incorrect responses. They are also valu-able tools for motivating learners to respond personally, think critically, and share collaboratively with peers in an interesting and meaningful context. As teachers continue to demonstrate thoughtful questions, they increase the chance that their students will independently develop and apply similar questions. Teachers should support this sense of self-determination throughout the school year.

Provide students with opportunities to make learning choices. Students’ self-determination flourishes when they have some degree of power and control over classroom activities, but their self-determination is compromised, or negated, when teachers require them to rigidly follow curricula, rules, and assessments. As expected, when students have freedom to make choices that are relevant to their lives, they are less likely to burn out because freedom can positively influence their values and behavior, their academic performance, their overall growth and development, and their general well-being (Kohn 1993; Sanacore 1999).

In the last several decades, I have been fortunate to observe and work with many teachers in sharing deci-sion making with their students. I learned from these first-hand experiences that students, including those who are less inspired, become more interested in learn-ing when teachers provide deliberate and consistent encouragement to make choices. The teachers inspired their students to make choices about which material to read (e.g., fiction, nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, or comics), what topics to write about (e.g., personal responses to literature), how to study for meaning and retention (e.g., SQ4R [Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Reflect, Review] and Two Column Notetaking Strategy), when to engage in peer sharing (e.g., before, during, or after a reading, writing, or study activity), and how to determine the value of these efforts (e.g., portfolios, rubrics, and conferences). These successful teachers and students realized that motivation and performance are predicated more on freedom and autonomy than on coercion and constraint. Clifford (2007) strongly supports this stance:

We must redesign instructional and evaluation materi-als and procedures so that every assignment, quiz, text, project, and discussion activity not only allows for, but

[sic] routinely requires, carefully calculated decision making on the part of students. Instead of minimum criteria, we must define multiple criteria (levels of mini-mum, marginal, average, good, superior, and excellent achievement), and we must free students to choose cri-teria that provide optimum challenge. Constraint gives a person the desire to escape; freedom gives a person the desire to explore, expand, and create. (220)

By giving students freedom to act responsibly, we increase their autonomous behavior, which in turn elicits cognitive flexibility, high task interest, positive emotion, creativity, and persistence (Clifford 2007; Deci and Ryan 1987).

Increase students’ participation in classroom activities. Some students participate minimally during classroom activities because they are bored, shy, embarrassed, nonresilient, passive, or learning disabled. Furthermore, individuals who fail repeatedly or who perceive academic requirements to be irrelevant to their lives might refuse to demonstrate effort in fulfilling curricular requirements. How can teachers encourage more participation among students?

As part of an Annenberg Foundation grant, I served as Literacy Program Director for a comprehensive school reform collaboration involving Yale University’s School Development Program, Long Island University’s C. W. Post School of Education, and Westbury (New York) Public Schools. An important part of the grant was to provide professional development to Westbury’s faculty, and the results of a needs assessment indicated that the teachers’ first priority was to build their students’ resil-ience. The teachers were concerned about some of their ethnic minority students’ lack of participation during instructional activities. Cooperatively, the teachers and I reviewed related literature, used assessment instru-ments to determine their students’ level of resilience, and developed a plan to encourage participation and resilience during classroom activities. The teachers agreed to maintain reflective journals about their grow-ing awareness of how to assess nonresilience and how to increase resilience.

The teachers’ reflective journals were interesting and included valuable information. One teacher indicated that she motivated her students to be peer tutors. She gave both resilient and nonresilient learners leadership roles (e.g., table leaders and captains) that she desig-nated as “expert” status. “Regardless of their limita-tions, all the children were supported equitably as they planned and carried out their responsibilities as peer tutors” (Sanacore 2000, 243).

Another teacher’s journal stressed the importance of giving students freedom to choose the order in which they preferred their instructional areas to be presented. She met with them individually and helped them deter-mine their comfort zones and learning priorities. She treated her students as individuals by accommodating

Vol. 82, No. 1 Reluctant Learners to Inspired Learners 43

their preferences. She also organized flexible groups including resilient and nonresilient learners and immersed them in activities concerning their instruc-tional preferences. According to the teacher, the stu-dents demonstrated as much enthusiasm and par-ticipation in their last instructional area as they did in their first, and she attributed this enthusiasm to the students’ delight about having had their choices respected (Sanacore 2000).

In my final example, the teacher challenged a mixed group of students to write an authentic story. Initially, she read aloud an interesting book and then invited group members to create their story. This activity is a variation of the language experience approach, in which the students dictate a story and the teacher tran-scribes it on the chalkboard. In this case, as individuals contributed ideas and sentences, the teacher placed their initials in parentheses after their contributions. This recognition had such a motivational impact on these budding coauthors that they continued to write, revise, and edit their story before posting the final ver-sion in the hall. In the teacher’s final journal reflection, she indicated that throughout this collective process all the group members were so engaged in their writing that she could not distinguish the resilient from the nonresilient students she had initially identified.

These practitioner reflections have much in common. The teachers did not give up on any students but discov-ered ways to challenge them to be active participants in their learning. The teachers also focused on meaningful activities that were important and relevant to students and that enriched their self-esteem and self-efficacy in specific ways. While experiencing the value of intrinsic motivation, the students gained insights about positive outcomes being attributed to their efforts.

Encourage students to love learning. If teachers provide optimal conditions for enjoying learning, students will likely develop intrinsic motivation to learn. Encourag-ing intrinsic learning, however, can sometimes be as much of a challenge for teachers as it is for students attempting to develop an inner desire to learn.

How can we encourage students to love learning and to become lifetime learners? To begin, I have always believed that effective teaching practices represent “the power of teaching to students’ strengths—of tapping into students’ areas of greatest comfort, confidence, and passion” (Tomlinson and Jarvis 2006, 17). This valuing of what learners can do goes a long way in promoting self-efficacy and a lifetime zest for learning. Imagine that as undergraduate or graduate students, teachers expected us to complete courses that focused on our weaknesses. In this scenario, our professors discovered that we struggled with aspects of statistics, physics, creative writing, music theory, art, or other areas. Our well-intentioned professors then required us

to successfully complete an individualized education plan in which the goals, strategies, and assessments highlighted our weaknesses. If this were the case, we would probably drop many of our courses or even con-sider dropping out of college. This scenario is a reality for many elementary and secondary school students who do not have the option to drop courses or change teachers. When they reach legal age, however, some of these students may become high school dropouts. Certainly, this negative context, which relies on what students cannot do, does not support motivation to love learning or to become a lifetime learner.

In contrast, students need opportunities to feel suc-cessful in activities that have personal meaning for them. For example, by selecting and reading books in which they are interested, students realize that reading can be pleasurable, informational, and useful to their lives. The nucleus of these positive outcomes is a class-room library that includes a variety of resources written at different reading and interest levels that are use-ful across the curriculum. The library should include updated nonfiction trade, fiction, picture, audio, large-print, and student-written and -illustrated books as well as poetry anthologies, newspapers, magazines, comics, pamphlets, bibliotherapeutic resources, and other materials (Sanacore 2006a). To increase the chance that these materials will be relevant to students’ lives, teachers should seek information about students’ interests and preferences before they purchase mate-rials for the classroom library or the school library. Observations, conferences, peer sharing, checklists, stu-dent reviews of print and nonprint resources, and port-folios are among the venues for collecting pertinent information in classrooms and school libraries. After-ward, teachers and school librarians can share insights about students’ interests and preferences, which are vitally important to matching the right materials with the right students (Sanacore 2006b).

When teachers focus on students’ strengths and provide them with well-matched resources across the curriculum, they increase opportunities for motivation and for successful learning (Palumbo and Sanacore 2007). Although easy access to quality resources is important, it is not enough to promote students to be competent, lifetime learners. They also need well-trained teachers’ instructional support (Neuman 1999; Neuman and Celano 2001). This balance of instruc-tional materials and effective teaching sets the stage for immediate and future success.

Is all This Effort Worth the Energy?Transforming reluctant learners into more inspired

learners requires deliberate effort. When teachers sup-port this transformation, they not only help less moti-vated students but also prevent others from becoming reluctant. We need to remind ourselves often that

44 The Clearing House September/October 2008

students are primarily emotional and secondarily intel-lectual (Sanacore 2007), and that we are more apt to improve their interest in learning when we challenge them, give them choices, increase their participation, and encourage their love of learning. These consider-ations are neither presented as a cure-all nor intended to negate curricular goals and content. Rather, teachers need to strike a balance between important curricular requirements and students’ motivational needs. As teachers focus more seriously on motivational issues in the classroom, they strengthen the chances that their students will be successful learners and will want to learn for the rest of their lives.

REFERENCES

Bartholomew, B. 2007. Why we can’t always get what we want. Phi Delta Kappan 88 (8): 593–98.

Clifford, M. 2007. Students need challenge, not easy success. In Kalei-doscope: Readings in education, ed. K. Ryan and J. Cooper, 218–24. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Cole, J. 2002/2003. What motivates students to read? Four literacy personalities. The Reading Teacher 56 (4): 326–36.

Deci, E., and R. Ryan. 1987. The support of autonomy and the con-trol of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (6): 1024–37.

Kohn, A. 1993. Choices for children: Why and how to let students decide. Phi Delta Kappan 75 (1): 8–20.

Neuman, S. 1999. Books make a difference: A study of access to literacy. Reading Research Quarterly 34 (3): 286–311.

Neuman, S., and D. Celano. 2001. Books aloud: A campaign to “put books in children’s hands.” The Reading Teacher 54 (6): 550–57.

Palumbo, A., and J. Sanacore. 2007. Classroom management: Help for the beginning secondary school teacher. The Clearing House 55 (2): 67–70.

Pintrich, P., and E. DeGroot. 1990. Motivational and self-regulated learning components of classroom academic performance. Journal of Educational Psychology 82 (1): 33–40.

Protheroe, N. 2004. Research report: Motivating reluctant learners. Principal 84 (1): 46–48.

Ryan, K., and J. Cooper. 2007a. Kaleidoscope: Readings in education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

———. 2007b. Those who can, teach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Sanacore, J. 1999. Encouraging children to make choices about their

literacy learning. Intervention in School and Clinic 35 (1): 38–42. ———. 2000. Promoting effective literacy learning in minority stu-

dents by focusing on teacher workshops and reflective practice: A comprehensive project supported by the Annenberg Foundation. Reading Psychology: An International Quarterly 21 (3): 233–55.

———. 2005. Increasing student participation in the language arts. Intervention in School and Clinic 41 (2): 99–104.

———. 2006a. Nurturing lifetime readers. Childhood Education 83 (1): 33–37.

———. 2006b. Teacher-librarians, teachers, and children as cobuild-ers of school library collections. Teacher Librarian 33 (5): 24–29.

———. 2007. Needed: Critics of literacy education with a more inclusive perspective. International Journal of Progressive Education 3 (1), http://www.inased.org (accessed April 1, 2008).

Shore, K. 2001. Motivating unmotivated students. Principal 81 (2): 16–18, 20.

Tomlinson, C. 2006. Differentiating instruction for academic diver-sity. In Classroom teaching skills, ed. J. Cooper, 151–84. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Tomlinson, C., and J. Jarvis. 2006. Teaching beyond the book. Educa-tional Leadership 63 (1): 16–21.