What Kids Know About Motivation and Mastery
RSSAlicia Eames, Curriculum Connections--School Library Journal
Knowing that students spend "roughly" ten thousand hours in high school and college combined lends debates about best teaching practices and how students learn more urgency. In Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us about Motivation and Mastery (Jossey-Bass, 2010), Kathleen Cushman and her teen collaborators present some suggestions for using those hours to students' and teachers' best advantage. As she did in Fires in the Bathroom (2003) and Fires in the Middle School Bathroom (2008, both New Press), Cushman went straight to the source. As part of "an initiative sponsored by the national nonprofit What Kids Can Do," she engaged secondary students from California to New York in a project-based learning experience that urged them to dig deep into what energizes their most fulfilling pursuits. The author began by asking the teens to identify something that each did well. The students demonstrated a level of expertise in a range of endeavors (many of which were activities that took place outside the school setting). The next step was to take a close look at how they developed their skills and knowledge. From there the students branched out, interviewing experts in area communities, asking the same questions they had answered, "How did you get started? What was hard? What keeps you going?" Along the way, Cushman and her teen researchers identified conditions that inspire learning, what keeps learners going when challenges arise, and what constitutes the kind of practice that advances knowledge to the next level. Finally, the students moved to improving classroom instruction. How could they apply what they learned about acquiring expertise to attaining proficiency in "academic knowledge and skills—the reading, writing, history, foreign languages, science, and math that citizens need in a democracy?" Their answers and ideas are what make Fires in the Mind so compelling; chock-full of anecdotes, the book gives voice to the most important stakeholders in education—students. Cushman observes that the accounts of how these young adults "came to excel do not emphasize inborn talent..., they are stories of interest and skill built on opportunity and relationships." For an audio-slideshow featuring teenagers talking about the hard work of improving their skills and an online book of photographs and interviews generated by Cushman's essential question, "What does it take to get really good at something?" see The Practice Project. The book's accompanying website is rich in materials for teachers, parents, and students, including downloadable checklists to continue the discussion, videos that demonstrate student expertise in real-world practice, and lesson ideas to "light the fire." This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's enewsletter Curriculum Connections. Subscribe here.
