Motivation: Reading Requires Skill and Will
Teaching Reading in the 21st Century is subtitled “Motivating All Learners.” Motivation has always been important, but in today’s world it is absolutely crucial. Today, many children come to school unmotivated, uninterested, and even with negative attitudes toward school. While national reading scores are stagnant, the amount of reading by children and adolescents has been declining for a decade or more with upper elementary and middle school students experiencing the most severe declines in leisure reading. Many children come to school having been mesmerized by the siren-like content of games and other enticements presented on an array of electronic devices including game consoles, hand-held controllers, pads, pods, and phones. Teaching Reading in the 21st Century was crafted with these factors firmly in mind.
The foundation for making elementary classrooms a seedbed for motivation and engagement is to make the classroom and the school a literate environment—an environment in which reading, writing, and discussion are fundamental, fostered, nurtured, and necessary.
Frequent use of intrinsic motivation stimulating and building interest in all students.
Judicious use of extrinsic motivation rewards that are carefully planned and integrated into daily activities.·
To succeed in reading and in school, students need to experience a great deal of success and develop positive attitudes about themselves as learners, about their ability to succeed in school, and about the instructional goals that they and their teachers set.
Chapter 3 begins by stressing the huge importance of motivation and the multiple factors that motivate a child to read. Then it describes specific ways of making the classroom a literate environment, explores ways to nurture intrinsicmotivation for reading, and discusses tools useful for extrinsic motivation.
In school we asked students to engage in some complex thinking and complete some difficult activities. If we want students to try hard teachers must ensure that learning tasks have value, interest, and help children realize how much they have grown as readers and writers.