Page 60 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

32 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Learning Together features diversity within groups among students who differ in achievement level, gender, race, or ethnicity. Each group is expected to turn in a collabora- tive product, and students are praised if they worked well together and if there was good task performance. Traditionally, Learning Together has four features: positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction among all students, individual accountability for mastering assigned material, and instruction in appropriate interpersonal and small-group skills. This works effectively for problem-based learning.
Group Investigation works very well when a social studies unit has several natural subtopics. For example, a unit focusing on a particular region might offer a range of sub- topics such as environmental concerns, economic priorities, climatic conditions, and so on. Students are formed into interest groups to work together using an array of instruc- tional materials and applying cooperative inquiry, group discussion, cooperative plan- ning, and cooperative projects. Each member of the group chooses an individual task and carries out the appropriate activities to contribute to a group report.
If students have not had previous experience with Group Investigation, the teacher can guide the whole class through one of the subtopics, first paying particular attention to the big ideas to be developed. For example, the class could use maps, the globe, and textual information to determine the climatic conditions of the region and how they impact where people live, the kinds of work they do, and how it influences leisure activi- ties. Then it would be appropriate to assign groups to examine each of the other subto- pics in an effort to acquire a comprehensive picture of a region and the factors that contribute to decision making associated with it. The debriefing whole-class discussions following each of the group reports with an eye toward the big ideas is essential if this method is to enhance meaning.
Having discussed establishing a learning community and incorporating cooperative learning methods, we now address the broad topic of student motivation. As the leader of your learning community, you want to stimulate your students’ motivation to learn—their tendency to find lessons and learning activities meaningful and worthwhile and to try to get the intended learning benefits from them.
Motivating Students to Learn
Students’ motivation is rooted in their subjective experiences (thoughts, feelings), espe- cially those connected to their willingness to engage in lessons and learning activities and their reasons for doing so. Brophy (2010) reviewed existing theory and research on this topic, with emphasis on identifying strategies for motivating students to learn. He depicted motivation in the classroom as expectancy x value reasoning, within the social context of a learning community.
The expectancy x value model of motivation holds that people’s willingness to expend effort on an activity depends on how much they expect to perform successfully if they apply themselves (and thus obtain whatever rewards successful performance brings) and on how much they value those rewards or the opportunity to engage in the activity itself. Effort investment is not likely if either the expectancy factor or the value factor is missing entirely. People do not willingly engage in activities that they do not enjoy and that do not lead to valued outcomes, even if they know that they can perform successfully. Nor do they willingly invest in even highly valued activities if they believe that they cannot succeed no matter how hard they try. Students will be motivated to learn to the extent that they view classroom activities and home assign- ments as meaningful and worthwhile and believe that they can succeed at them if they invest reasonable effort.
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