Embracing the Why: Purpose Motivates

I love having access to a local public library! Here's my haul from this week's visit.

• What’s a fun activity I can do with my students to get them engaged in Animal Farm?
• What’s a good short story I can do with my students?
• What are some good pieces for a nonfiction unit?

These are questions teachers frequently ask other teachers. The hitch is there is no one activity (or even a list of 10) that will automatically engage students for the rest of the novel, unit, or course. There is no piece of writing—fiction or nonfiction—that is guaranteed to engage every student no matter how it is presented. (If there were, it would have been used long before students got to me, or I’d use it at the beginning of the year, and then I’d be back to where I started.)  

The most important question is Why? Why should students read that novel, short story, or set of nonfiction pieces? There are many strategies for student engagement, and the most motivating of all is purpose. I may have designed the most fun activity in the world—say, an escape room or a game—which may engage students for a period, but they’ll still come back the next day and say, “What fun activity are we going to do today?” 

One qualification: I may say the purpose is to understand a great novel’s structure and beauty, to learn to read more effectively, or to analyze arguments. Those align with the standards, but aren't really something the students care deeply about right now. I need a deeper purpose. How does it touch their lives? What are the questions that consume them (or that I can introduce to them as questions that are intriguing) that they can explore during this study? 

For instance, the driving (or essential) question as we read the modern prose drama A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen is “Who am I?” As we read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s “What’s the difference between infatuation and love?” As we read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night, it’s “What is human dignity and why does it matter?” As we read Cry, the Beloved Country by South African writer Alan Paton, it’s “How do people build and destroy peace and justice?” For contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, it’s “What is empathy and why does it matter?” These are all important questions in the lives of my students, the hallways of our school, the viral posts of social media, and the civic conversations of our society.

For significant discussions of these questions, do students need skills for deeper reading of the text? Yes. Do they need background knowledge for deeper understanding of the topic? Yes. Do they need discussion and thinking skills for more effective processing of the questions? Yes. And do I want to use the most engaging strategies to help them master those skills and that knowledge? Yes. How does this work?  

Because I start with a question students want to have significant discussion of, they are invested in learning reading skills, studying nonfiction, and developing discussion skills. Thus, for instance, when we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream we study reading skills like identifying motifs, understanding word play, and using textual aids. I use engaging instructional strategies like annotating text, sharing modern word play, and acting or drawing scene summaries. 

When we explore the question “What is human dignity and why does it matter?” we read nonfiction like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a Time magazine article “What Makes Us Moral?,” the introduction to An Ordinary Man (the memoir of the main character in the movie Hotel Rwanda who saved lives during that genocide), and a study of implications of the Biblical concept that people are made in the image of God. I use engaging instructional strategies like think/pair/share, jigsaw, and TQE (thoughts/questions/epiphanies). 

For significant discussions of these questions to be most productive, the final piece is direct instruction in and scaffolding of discussion skills like asking questions, listening to understand rather than compose one's own answer, and building on others’ comments. 

How do I come up with my driving questions? When planning a unit, I can start with a question and look for literature and nonfiction that explore it. Conversely, I can start with a piece of literature that really grabbed me, and ask, “Why? Why did this grab me? What intriguing question did it help me explore? And how does that question touch my students’ lives?”

“Why do we have to study this?” This question can be defanged  by embracing it. To transform the material and skills themselves into inherently engaging stuff, I work to context them with a purpose that will motivate students. After all, it's why we as adults read, write, and discuss, and I want to invite my students to "play the whole game at a junior level."