Putting
Passion On-Line
A
Protocol for Building Motivation into Curriculum Webs
By Craig A.
Cunningham
Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago
c-cunningham@uchicago.edu
Diana Joseph
Center for School Improvement at the University of
Chicago
djoseph@mail.consortium-chicago.org
Abstract: This paper reports on the authors' collaboration on
a special section of the Web Institute for Teachers 2003, an intensive summer
professional development experience at the
University of Chicago that supports
teachers as they build web-based curriculum units, or curriculum webs. The special section utilized the
"Passion Curriculum Design Framework", developed by Diana Joseph,
which aims to leverage student motivation in curriculum designs. Participants' own passions were foregrounded
in discussions and materials, and participants developed curriculum webs
designed to evoke their students' passions as leverage for learning various
subject matter and skills. The paper describes the design
of the special section and reports on the results, using a combination of
teacher-developed materials, student work, journals, and surveys. We conclude
with some general guidelines for considering student motivation in curriculum
design.
Introduction
ABSTRACT
This paper reports on the authors' collaboration on
a special section of the Web Institute for Teachers 2003, an intensive summer
professional development experience that supports teachers as they build web-based
curriculum units, or curriculum webs.
The special section utilized the "Passion Curriculum Design
Framework", developed by Diana Joseph, which aims to leverage student
motivation in curriculum designs.
Participants' own passions were foregrounded in discussions and
materials, and participants developed curriculum webs designed to evoke their
students' passions as leverage for learning various subject matter and
skills. Our paper will describe the
design of the special section and will report on the results, using a
combination of teacher-developed materials, student work, journals, and
surveys. We will conclude with some general guidelines for considering student
motivation in curriculum design.
PROPOSAL
The
Web Institute for Teachers (WIT) is an 80-hour professional development center seminar hosted by the
Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago. The primary goal is
to help teachers to incorporate the Web into their lesson planning and teaching. Two
strands are offered. “Using the Web in
the Classroom” is designed for teachers just beginning to use the Web with
students, and focuses on the creation of a WebQuest as a
culminating activity.. “Creating a Curriculum Web” is for teachers
with significant experience using the Web with students, and who are ready to create theirculminates in the creation of own curriculum webs
using Macromedia Dreamweaver. (More
information about WIT can be found in Cunningham,
Dairyko, & Boxer 2000; a full discussion of the structure and creation of
curriculum webs can be found in Cunningham & Billingsley 2003.)
Begun
in 1997, WIT has trained more than 650 Chicago-area teachers. More than 300 teachers participated in WIT
2003. These were divided into 15 “homerooms” of 20 to 30 teachers, each with
two “mentors,” or instructors, who are teachers with broad experience in
technology integration. Instruction
takes place in computer labs, with each participant having full-time access to
an Internet-linked computer.
For
2003, WIT initiated several special sections. One, called the Judaic Web
Institute for Teachers, or JWIT, was specifically designed to help teachers
from Jewish day schools to build Judaic-studies WebQuests. (See
http://jwit.webinstituteforteachers.org.) Another was specially designed to support the
professional development needs of the Chicago Public Schools Magnet Cluster
Initiative. A third, dubbed “Passion WIT,” was the result of a collaborationcollaboration between the authors of this paper. It was designed to support teachers in
developing curriculum webs that leverage student motiviationmotivation.
The
Passion Curriculum Design Framework, developed by Diana Joseph, is a complete
set of protocols and procedures for designing curriculum around student
motivation. Based on a broad
base of research into student motivation, , the Passion
Curriculum Project has primarily been implemented in after-school programs such
as Video Crew and Multimedia Workshop. . In addition, the
protocol has been integrated into the ordinary classroom day in middle-grade
classrooms in one Florida and one Chicago elementary school. (See Joseph
and Nacu 2003.)
The
Passion Curriculum Design Framework
callsFramework calls for designers and
teachers to centralize learner interest in the development of activities,
instruction, and assessment. It aims to maximize peak cognitive engagement in
student learning activities by offering It offers practical
strategies for creating structured, interest-centered projects,
“certifications” that use tailored rewards to engage learners in particularly
challenging learning objectives, and classroom “professional culture” aligned
with an interest-based theme.
The
special Passion WIT section differed from the “regularordinary”
WIT sections in several aspects:
.
·
First,
the mentors were self-selected based on their interest in the project. , Most of the
participants chose to join the section after receiving an email describing the
project. Indeed, due to interest, the Passion WIT section
expanded to 28 participants, more than any other WIT section
·
[how much more?].
Second,
one of the mentors has expertise in interest-based instruction: she mentors teaches in a progressive private
school where student interest is often used as a motivator for project-based
learning. The other has worked
extensively with elementary students, helping them to
build Flash movies about curricular topics.
·
Third,
the Passion WIT section was encouraged to use a special set of materials
designed to support interest-based curriculum design. Diana Joseph served as a consultant in the
design and implementation of the Passion WIT curriculum. She designed a special curriculum module (http://webinstituteforteachers.org/2003/modules/passion/) to support the
participants’ development of passion-based curriculum webs.
·
Fourth, AlsoWwhile participants
in all sections could choose their own topics for their curriculum webs (based
on their teaching assignments and their interests), all Passion WIT projects
included some aspects of the Passion Curriculum protocol. Finally, the participants received some extra
follow-up support from WIT staff including Joseph.
All
participants in WIT 2003 completed pre- and post-surveys. Some kept journals
during WIT and during implementation.
The Passion WIT section was observed by Diana Joseph and by an
independent evaluator from Rockman Eet
Aal. The evaluator
also visited other WIT sections.
Projects were evaluated by peers and by mentors in terms of a rubric
developed for the purpose. Participants
filed implementation reports and evaluations of the curriculum webs were
completed by the students who learned from them.
Preliminary data highlight differences between
Passion WIT participants and other Creating a Curriculum Web participants. For example, we found that Passion WIT
participants tended to rate themselves higher than other Creating a Curriculum
Web students on their confidence regarding key technology skills. This suggests that teachers may become more
interested in passion-based design of web materials after they establish a
baseline level of confidence in their ability to create web pages. In addition, we found that Passion WIT
participants was unwavering– offered the opportunity to transfer out of the
overcrowded, overheated Passion WIT classroom into a spacious, air-conditioned
classroom offering the general “Creating” curriculum, all but two declined, and
one of the decliners asked to return after a few days. PassionWIT participants appear to have been
more eager than others to talk about their work. These differences can be attributed in part
to characteristics of participants who selected the Passion WIT curriculum, and
in part to characteristics of the WIT curriculum, mentors, materials, and
classroom infrastructure. We identify
lessons learned from analysis of these factors.
In
our this paper, we will describe the
instructional model used in Passion WIT, report on some of the data collected,
share some of the projects that resulted, and propose some guidelines for
others who wish to build a concern for student motivation into technology
integration projects.
We
know from cognitive science research and from motivation research that when
learners are interested, they retain more knowledge, they persist longer and
put in more effort, and they connect what they are learning to their prior
knowledge (cf. Joseph
& Edelson, 2002). Interest is the key to learning. But interests can be fragile – when human
beings face difficulties or social pressures, interests are likely to waver.
The
passion curriculum model builds on this premise to propose an approach to
developing working interest-based curricula.
Several principles guide design:
1. Use interest to determine the content of the
curriculum. Learners are more persistent and remember more
of the deep content of an activity if they are personally interested. Interest,
in a sense, generates an automatic desire to learn. Therefore, it makes sense to design the
content of
the curriculum
--curriculum -- the
core ideas and activities -- to match learner
interests, as much as possible given circumstances.
2.
Be aware of the difficulties in designing for interest. Attempting to meet that goal raises two
thorny problems: First, not all learning
objectives fit neatly into learners’ interests.
Second, personal interests are fragile – lengthy commitments, difficult
challenges, social pressures, or rewards offered for behaviors contrary to
learner interest are all likely to lead to reduced interest.
3.
Use motives other than interest to guide the design of the context. In
the passion curriculum model, learner interest is used as a design constraint
in determining the content of
the curriculum. Other motives are used
to design the context of
the curriculum – the grouping structures, reward mechanisms, techniques for
assigning levels of difficulty, etc. To
highlight this goal, we refer to these kinds of motivators as
"context-based".
From
a design point of view, the coverage and strength problems demand that
designers and teachers provide ways of motivating less-palatable learning
objectives, and ways of motivating students in the face of obstacles to
interest. People are very responsive to
a wide variety of motives -- avoiding difficulty, pleasing others, rewards,
etc. While these kinds of motives are
very powerful in guiding what learners do, they do not carry with them the kind
of automatic drive to learn that comes with interest. Some studies suggest that these kinds of
motives can distract from interest, potentially reducing desire to learn. So it
makes sense to use these motives as a design resource, but it also makes sense
to manage their use in such a way that their diversion from interest is
limited.
4. Use context-based motives to initiate and
sustain engagement when circumstances hide what is interesting in the learning
environment. Once engagement is
established, students may become interested again. For example: For example, in a physics unit on laws of
motion, engagement might be initiated through a catapult-building
activity. The competition and challenge
cause students to become hungry for knowledge about the laws of motion.
Based
upon these principles, we offered Passion WIT
participants several practical techniques for developing and teaching
interest-centered curricula:
1. Choose a theme that is likely to captivate
the interests of the students in a particular classroom. Past passion curriculum themes have included
video-making, website design, astronomy, geology, and trees.
2. Use the work of adults who work in that arena
as a blueprint for developing formal role identities, grouping structures,
reward structures, and the physical environment of the classroom. GenerallyMany,
passion curricula use certification structures to provide rewards that are
connected both to the theme of interest and to key learning objectives. For
example, the middle-grades video curriculum offered a camera operator certification
and a storyboarder certification, each of which was designed to demand
significant attention to writing.
3. Group students so that their sense of
obligation to others and their desire to affiliate serve your curricular
goals. For example, create group
activities that cannot function without contribution from every member.
4.
Create a public discourse about learner interest. Encourage students to seek the relationship
between their own current interests and the learning objectives required by the
curriculum.
We disseminated a rubric that helped the
participants to move their curriculum webs in the direction of Passion-based
curriculum. The rubric focused on two major criteria for passion: (1) the curriculum is interest-based in terms of its basic subject-matter or that it
allows for student choice; and (2) the activities engaged in are authentic and
interactive (requiring students to create something or do something other than
academic work). While we urged participants to use certifications
in their curriculums (that is, specific achievements that would earn the
students the right to certain resources or freedoms), none of the participants
created projects using certifications, probably due to the limited timeframe
they anticipated allowing for students to participate in the curriculum web.
We conducted
informal interviews regularly during PassionWIT 2003, and recorded one-on-one training conversations
between Joseph or one of the other mentors and each participant. We also analyzed participant websites to determine the quality of match to the passion curriculum model. We found a considerable contrast between the
in-class conversations about engagement, and the final products that learners
created.
Learners in the
Passion WIT
section contrasted
with other WIT participants from the start. They were slightly more likely to be fully
certified than other WIT participants; slightly more likely to have
participated in professional development involving technology during the past
12 months; more likely to describe themselves as proficient in
basic technology skills; much more likely to report regular technology use
for their own work; and somewhat less likely to use computers with students.
[data from wossname arguing that PW students were more into
the idea of passion from the start]. The Passion WIT participants seemed especially passionate about their work. Our external evaluator from Rockman Et Al found
the Passion WIT participants more talkative when she visited the section. Also, when given the opportunity to leave the hot,
overcrowded session, almost all of the Passion WIT participants opted to stay,
and one who went to another section returned after a few ways, saying she
missed the passion of the Passion section. This
finding
can be explained by the recuitmentrecruitment
process – all WIT participants received a detailed, passionately-worded [need better term] invitation
to join the passion curriculum section.
Those who accepted were likely
those who already had a strong attraction to considering their students
interest.
During
Passion WIT, we conducted informal interviews regularly
and recorded one-on-one training conversations between Joseph or
one of the other mentors and each participant.
We also analyzed participant websites to determine the quality of match
to the passion curriculum model. We
found a considerable contrast between the in-class conversations about
engagement, and the final products that learners created.
DuringMany PassionWIT, many Passion WIT
participants
were
quite sophisticated in their conversation about how to use learner interest in
their classrooms. For example, in
the second week of Passion WIT,
one participant
said that she used the ideas offered in the opening presentation regarding
passion to redesign her
summer course. In order to engage her
students’ passions, she asked them to create poetry to articulate the meaning
of each assigned vocabulary word, rather than to simply look up and repeat
definitions. [Fieldnotes 7/15/03]. In collaboration with Joseph, this same high
school teacher
planned to create her curriculum
web to use roller-coaster and rocket design in a multi-disciplinary
math-science-art curriculum. We
estimate that approximately half of the participants talked about
learner engagement and web design with a similar degree of sophistication at
some point during the course.
Unfortunately, what
seemed like a fairly
high level of capacity to contend with the design issues around motivation did
not result in high-capacity designs. We
categorized sitescompleted curriculum webs as
of
November of 2003
into four categories: Abandoned, on-line
textbook, interest
but no authentic work (interaction), authentic work (interaction) but
no interest, and passion
curriculum. Only 4 of
the 28 websites
appeared to be designed to support a passion curriculum according to both the interest-based and authentic
interaction criteria. The participant quoted above created a site
we categorized as an on-line textbook.
She attributed
the contrast to the challenge of attempting to collaborate with other teachers
on a school-mandated but unsupported multi-disciplinary curriculum. Another
participant, an elementary school teacher who had taught in a passion-based
extended day curriculum in the past, explained her interactive but not
interest-based curriculum web
as being limited by the demand to teach a particular set of learning
objectives. She saw no link between
these objectives and learner interest, and therefore chose to use computer-based
interactivity as a motivational hook, rather than learner interest.
The four
curriculum webs that met our criteria for Passion Curriculum (interest-based, authentic
work) were: