“Some middle schools help students identify their preferred learning style. Teachers must also explain to students that they are in control of their attitudes and effort toward learning. Conversations with entire classes about attitudes and effort may help to improve student motivation as students learn how their attitudes affect learning” (Brown and Knowles 31-32).
Brown, D., & Knowles, T. (2007). Understanding the young adolescent’s physical and cognitive growth. In What every middle school teacher should know. (2nd Ed., pp. 10-36). New Hampshire Heinemann Press.
While reading this piece, this passage really resonated within me and brought me back to my high school days. I firmly believe that it is the attitude that students have towards certain material that impacts their learning and that teachers can make a world of difference in impacting how students view the material.
Personally, I have never been interested in science. From biology to chemistry classes all throughout my education, I struggled with the textbooks and had difficulty completing the labs on my own. For some reason, I just couldn’t grasp the material like I could for my other classes. When I got to AP Physics my junior year of high school, I thought I was doomed to earn my first failing grade in a class; sure enough, I got a 46% on my first exam and went home feeling completely and utterly discouraged. However, my teacher invited me to come in for extra help sessions on the days before class, and he slowly worked with me through the material that I was not grasping properly. With his encouragement, I learned to take on the problems in a formulaic way and to break down the parts that I did not understand.
If my teacher hadn’t reached out to me and shown me that I had the ability to change how I viewed the material, I truly believe I would have never gained confidence in that class and that I would have given up on it entirely. However, because of his devotion to my learning and his interest in my success, I ended up doing extremely well on the AP exam and using that credit towards my college degree. Now, he remains in my mind as one of my favorite teachers that I have ever had, and I strive to emulate his devotion towards his students in my personal teaching experience.
Leslie, I totally agree with your belief…I felt the same exact affirmation in reading this text. I, too, was never a science person, and that actually made the reading of some of these more in-depth scientific texts about adolescent development difficult to read. I have also found that it is a struggle to excel, or even engage myself in subjects that I have no interest in, such as science and math, and I think that after reading your anecdote I can really relate to similar experiences. You mention something really crucial for the teacher in your post, and that is teacher proactivity in noticing a student’s performance (or lack thereof) in a certain subject. In my past, I have always been in classrooms where the teachers put the responsibility on the students to seek out the extra help, and I think that it makes all of the difference in the world to have the teachers really stake an interest in each individual student and his/her success. This “devotion to [your] learning” that you mention is extremely powerful, and it moves me to think how much different my own learning experience could have been if my own teachers had been as devoted to my learning as I was. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have had such a negative connotation to all things science, and wouldn’t be cringe reading about chemicals in the brain that affect adolescence. Thank you for helping me understand my own thinking and for sharing!