“Your student is a great child, but I really wish they would just try a little bit harder…”

“Welcome! It’s so great that you’re here for the conference. Take a seat,” the teacher warmly welcomes the parent to our November Parent-Teacher conferences, inviting them to sit together at a table.

“Let me just start by saying how nice your kid is and how much I have enjoyed getting to know him,” the parent smiles as the teacher shares personal connections with the child and acknowledges an area of strength. “Let’s review the comments prepared by all of the teachers.” One by one, the teacher relays messages repeating the similar theme: “Your child would be doing better if he/she just tried a little bit harder,” or, “Your son/daughter is very nice, but not very motivated,” or, “I really like your son/daughter but he/she is not trying their best.” As a classroom Spanish teacher of these same students, I completely understand the sentiment expressed during these conferences. Parents expressed appreciation for our support, expressing similar concerns about effort/motivation, and typically left hoping that their child would do better by trying a little harder.

As an educator, I reflected on my own practice: What am I doing to scaffold and facilitate motivation from my students? What am I doing to engage my students to authentically want to improve their own knowledge and skills for their own benefit? How am I explicitly preparing to motivate and scaffold my students’ effort?

In Visible Learning for Literacy: Implementing the Practices that Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning, Fisher, Frey, and Hattie (2016) outline three aspects at the foundation of all learning:

1. Challenge
2. Self-efficacy
3. Learning intentions with success criteria

Hattie defines self-efficacy as, “the confidence or strength of belief that we have in ourselves that we can make our learning happen (2012). Fisher, Fry, and Hattie (2016) explain how a students’ level of efficacy can certainly determine their performance in class: students with high-efficacy often perform at or above standards while students with low-efficacy often perform below standards and below their own capacity.

In Taking Action on Adolescent Literacy: An Implementation Guide for School Leaders (2007), Irvin, Meltzer, and Duke outline three strategies outline three strategies to engage students:

1. making connections to students' lives, thereby connecting background knowledge and life experiences to the texts to be read and produced;
2. creating safe and responsive classrooms where students are acknowledged, have voice, and are given choices in learning tasks, reading assignments, and topics of inquiry that then strengthen their literacy skills; and
3. having students interact with text and with each other about text in ways that stimulate questioning, predicting, visualizing, summarizing, and clarifying, preferably in the process of completing authentic tasks (tasks with a personal purpose or for a larger audience than the teacher).

Adolescent’s motivation can be pretty fickle, developmental, and related to their feelings of self-esteem and community. After conferences, one strategy that I implemented is a preview of upcoming topics/objectives (learning intentions) with a survey that asked for their feedback on the planning (topics, activities, etc.) that I intend to integrate and explicit reference throughout the second trimester. I hope that this makes connections with students’ lives, creates a safe/responsive classroom where students feel acknowledged, and completing authentic (school assignments that resemble real-life communication/projects with a REAL audience) tasks.

If you are looking for ideas to plan for engagement and motivation, the chart below outlines a variety of considerations throughout the planning, instruction, and assessment process. If you are looking for more ideas to increase student engagement, I look forward to collaborating with you and learning through the process.

Figure 1.2. Linking Instruction with Needs, Interests, and Dispositions (Irvin, Meltzer, and Duke, 2007)

Adolescents' Needs, Interests, and Dispositions	Possible Instructional Response	What could this look like in our classrooms?
Need for control / autonomy	Provide choices in Assignment topics Assessment modes Books to read Order of completing work	Try book studies or providing choice in informational texts rather than whole class novels. Give students a preview of the upcoming targets as well as a selection of ways to demonstrate learning: invite students to participate in individual and/or class choices about how to demonstrate new knowledge/skills.
Interest in technology / media	Use technology to support Communication Presentation Research	Consider and implement 21st century communication modes like video, dialogue, and presentations as a component of writing/literacy instruction and assessment. Expand literacy instruction to include 21st century digital literacy skills like evaluating a website for credibility, ascertaining ads. Vs. content, identifying fake news, etc.
Need to be heard	Provide authentic audiences, expectations, and opportunities for writing/speaking for an audience beyond the teacher	Students create and publish work on blogs to authentic audiences around the world. Connect classroom writing to real audiences like students in other classes, families, community members, business, or classrooms in other schools.
Disposition to debate	Plan many opportunities for Debate Text-based discussion Opinion boards Blogs Letters to the editor Student correction of content/format errors	For argumentation, students engage in collaborative debates with two sides of a controversial, age-appropriate topic relevant in current events. Develop formative and formal assessment/reporting of oral language for actual targets: writing is not the only way to assess and report progression of learning of targets.
Need to make a difference	Set up opportunities for Reading to/tutoring others Research into real issues Apprenticeships Creating informational Web sites Writing articles for publication Peer editing	Consider setting up occasional partnership with a younger classroom to have older students ‘tutor’ or teach younger students; or create class assignments that use younger students as an audience for old students teaching about high interest topics. Create opportunities for older and former students to provide guidance (SEL and academic) through guided classroom visits.
Need to belong	Create a classroom culture and reinforce classroom norms that support the development of a community of readers, writers, and thinkers	Display exemplary student work throughout the classroom and embedded into instruction - show students that their learning and skills dominate the classroom. Class building activities to generate student consensus on criteria for growth, achievement that is aligned with their own personal/individual life goals - help them identify, describe, and understand the steps to achieve their personal goals.
Sense of accomplishment	Teach students how to participate in Literacy goal setting Progress monitoring Use of rubrics Collaborative teaming for completion of literacy tasks	Provide feedback (positive and constructive criticism) on rubrics and facilitate students writing their own areas of strength and growth with target language. When assigning a group or partner project, identify different specific functions of the team to ensure that all contribute and collaborate.

Let’s return to the conference to the same student to reflect on how planning for engagement might transform the conversation:

“Welcome! It’s so great that you’re here for the conference. Take a seat,” the teacher warmly welcomes the parent to our November Parent-Teacher conferences, inviting them to sit together at a table.

“Let me start by saying how much our classroom community has valued the contributions of your child,” the teacher describes while the parent smiles, “Your child was an active and engaged participant in our recent debate on recess in middle school. The students engaged in research and collaborative conversations to argue for or against recess. Your child was a leader in the group and demonstrated a strong ability to argue orally. However, when asked to engage in the same writing tasks on the end-of-semester benchmark, your student did not demonstrate the same ability to argue and present their ideas.”

“I know what you mean,” the parent laughs, knowing very well their own child with similar reports heard every year during conferences. “My child is a very strong debater that never seems to want to lose an argument, but I know that he doesn’t love to write. What can we do to help him become a better writer?”

The parent and teacher engage in conversation about strategies that they each might be able to try to help transfer the child’s strong oral skills to their literacy skills. After discussion, the teacher describes how turn-and-talk cooperative discussion will precede instructional writing activities; the parent leaves with a plan where they will have a whiteboard on the wall and each day the student will write their opinion on a question that the parent writes.

Each leaves with a plan; each knows the successes and challenges of their student. Each feels engaged as a partner with shared goals and shared plans.