Customer Reviews

Motivating Students Who Don't Care: Successful Techniques for Educators

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The only person who can motivate an unmotivated student is the unmotivated student. All a teacher can do is provide a classroom environment that maximizes the chances that his students will choose to get motivated.

And that's where this book comes in. It is packed with useful and practical suggestions sorted into five big ideas: Emphasizing Effort, Creating Hope, Respecting Power, Building Relationships, and Expressing Enthusiasm. A brief introduction, including research sources, is given for each big idea, then the author gets right to the strategies.

Don't be fooled by the relatively unassuming size and the more then reasonable price. If you teach, this is a book you will use until you've used it up. Then you can buy another copy and another, and you still won't be out the price of many of the educational motivation books that sit pristinely on my shelves collecting well-deserved dust.

This book contains a lot of useful information for the new teacher or the burned out teacher who needs a boost. It's useful in the sense that it tries to get teachers to stop taking negative beahvior personally (usually it's not about the teacher) and to use positive reinforcement as much as possible--always a good idea whenever you are trying to change behavior, be it animal or human! But I had to laugh out loud when the author suggests praising the consistently tardy student for being in class "most of the time." Give me a break!

I deal with many unmotivated students. While I realize tht this is primarily a learned behavior and it takes time to unlearn it, this book has several good strategies to help kids get back into the "want to learn" mode. The ideas of emphasizing effort and restoring hope of passing or doing well in the class is difficult under the best circumstances. The book addresses these and, without being a spoiler, teaches teachers how to instill these in the students.
While the book does devote quite a bit to building character, (buzz word bingo there), it offers practical solutions to many of the problems that teachers face in today's "short attention span" classrooms.
While not for everyone (some teachers are just not charismatic enough to connect with students), this book is an excellent resource and I can heartily recommend it for upper elem ed through secondary ed.

After reading the many positive reviews of this book, I felt disappointed in the advise given by Dr. Mendler. Yes, the author identifies some of the reasons why we have problem students, but it isn't really news that these students suffer from lack of hope and self-esteem, and don't identify with the educational system as a whole.

When he suggests that teachers "build relationships" with these troubled students by calling them at home, and seeking them out at their lockers and the cafeteria, he borders on getting the teachers in trouble for stalking or identified as child predators. This advice might have been good in 2000, but it will get teachers in trouble in 2010.

I also found Medler's solutions contradictory. On the one hand, he advises challenging the student, while at the same time, he says, "praise them" for getting half of the answers right on a test, or coming to class five minutes late. In my experience, the best relationships are build on mutual respect of teacher and student. Repeated tardiness is not a sign of respect for either, and condoning it would soon result in a classroom of tardy students.

The book seems best oriented toward classrooms where the majority of students are problem students. I did like his comment that teachers should concentrate on teaching the subjects that they like and sharing their enthusiasm for the subject matter rather than focusing on any failure in "reaching" a troubled student.

I found more usable advise in Doug Lemov's "Teach Like A Champ."

"Can I ask you something Mr. Bowen?" I had noticed him lingering, sort of wading in the doorway just after the bell.
"Sure." He looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed to ask it. You never know what you're going to get with one of these. I readied myself.
"Well," he hesitated, "why are you so nice to us?" At first, I felt relieved. Nothing I had to report. I hadn't discovered that his life was far worse than my educated guess. Next, I felt confused.
"Why am I so nice to you?"
"Yeah. I mean, we're bad to you. Really, really bad to you." He said it like I didn't know it was true.
"Oh, I know. You guys are the worst part of my day. I dread third period." He stared for a moment. He was shocked to see that I wasn't as oblivious as he had thought.
"Then, why are you still so nice to us?"
"Because my behavior doesn't have to change. Your behavior is the problem. Not mine." He looked at me like I was crazy.
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Sure it does. I treat people just the way I think they should be treated. I'm not going to change that. It's your behavior that we should be asking about, don't you think?" This, he wasn't expecting.
"But, come on. I'm just one kid. The whole room is bad to you."
"That's true. But, Juan and Stephen look up to you. If you're behavior changed, then they would follow. And, Stephen loves to turn around and bother Karla. He'd probably stop and then Karla would cause less trouble. So would her whole table." I paused and let him wash in it a little. "It only takes one sometimes. Could be you."

It's true, too. I wasn't feeding him a line. This was the relationship I was hoping would rise up in a remedial reading class full of kids well known across campus for causing all kinds of trouble. As an educator, I consider my ability to build genuine relationships in the classroom to be my greatest skill when it comes to kids. Allen Mendler's, "Motivating Students Who Don't Care," offers a great deal of helpful strategies to help build those relationships both individually as well as with your whole class. I particularly found it helpful how Mendler suggests using the fact that the concept of "future" ranges from a month to just a few days, depending on age. This alone changed how I set goals and gave out rewards with my classes. I also took time away from the sacred testable standards to teach Mendler's goal setting. It worked. Kids making and achieving simple goals led to bigger goals and real life lessons about personal responsibility and doing your best. I recommend this book to any educator, whether their students seem to care or not. Trust me. They all do. It's your job to find out how to bring it to the surface. This book is a great tool to help do that.

Chris Bowen
Author of Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom

Short and to the point. This book gives specific tools to use to gain and keep classroom respect and decorum. I have begun implementing some of the ideas in my already way out of control classroom. Thanks for your help!!

This little book (only vii + 69 pp) describes the factors underlying the correlation between personal efforts and personal success. It is addressed primarily to teachers and others "frustrated with legions of students who expect success but are unwilling to work for it" (p. 1). Many of these students are unmotivated, and Chapter 1 of the book locates the sources of such unmotivation in a culture that either overstresses materials, in clinical depression, or in both materialism and depression.

Chapter 2 suggests the most effective use of the book, and Chapter 3 is about the basic beliefs that hinder motivation. The next five chapters deal with the strategies "that inspire and reinforce" motivation. These are: "emphasizing effort, creating hope, respecting power, building relationships, and expressing enthusiasm" (p. 8). Among these my favorite are Chapters 4 and 8, perhaps because I see myself implementing them all by myself alone, unlike Chapters 5, 6, and 7 for which student-teacher cooperation, perhaps even the cooperation of many others, is absolutely essential. The book concludes with an emphasis on the need for the strategies it puts forward if teachers truly want to change lives for the better.

I'll pass on my copy to a colleague and ask them to do the same. A nice, easy, and quick read.

Amavilah, Author
National Wealth Accounting and Baseball Player Exports: Economic Implications for Performance ISBN: 978-3838330099
Economic Versus Non-Economic Dimensions of the Well-being of Nations.
ISBN: 9783838320984

Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies. ISBN: 1600210465

Quotable Arthur Schopenhauer. ISBN: 9781430324959

My title pretty much says it all . . . this is a very simplistic book that could have been a phamplet instead. I expected something meatier and with more relevance to high-school and trade school students. It's fair to say that I didn't get a single new idea here.

This slender volume at 65 pages purports to be a practical, "how to" book for educators who are unwilling to leave any child behind. As Mendler states, "We must make it as hard as possible for students to reject their education." (Page 48) Educators need to decide for themselves whether the premise is advisable or not. Given the assumption, however, the author does a fairly good job of pragmatically advising teachers of variously aged students from elementary to high school.

Rather than a comprehensive look at human motivation, the book is more of a cafeteria of suggestions, some of which educators will find more palatable than others. The author apparently has drawn from the experiences and practices of "many educators around the country." An example:

Pam Shelter, a fifth-grade teacher in San Bernardino, California, responds in a unique way when her students ask "When will I ever use this?" She says, "Write down everything you are going to do for the rest of your life. Give it to me and I'll check off when you'll use it." (Page 55)

While I don't imagine any teacher would use all of the suggestions in the book, most of us could find at least one or two ideas that might spark some useful behaviors. On this basis, I'll have to give the book thumbs up - worth reading!

Very easy reading with some powerful and useful suggestions for dealing with a very difficult subgroup of our student population!