Creating a Positive Motivation to Learn

School systems love to motivate their students to succeed. Most schools do so by making students fear failure. While this could be a powerful motivator, it is also detrimental to their well-being. This doesn't mean we need to remove failure as an option, as failure is part of a positive learning experience. We need to include a new motivation: the love of learning, so that we can teach students to embrace their failures and move forward from them.

The way that schools are usually set up punishes failure, while hardly rewarding good behavior. Additionally, it often makes students feel badly if they didn't reach perfection, when perfection is unnecessary. By assigning grades other than "pass" or "fail," we make some students dwell on the fact that they didn't get everything right. Students are usually not given an opportunity to review something that they did fail, and try it again until they do learn it. There is also the fact that someone could fail on a few key points of the class, pass the rest, and wind up with a C in a class that they didn't really learn everything that they needed to. Discrepancies between different teachers' grading styles, such as the amount of partial credit given on partially correct answers can give a student an A in a class that would receive a D if taught by a different teacher. All of these make our current school system ineffective at assessing whether or not a student is actually learning.

If a student is failing, do we really want to tell him that he can't get another opportunity to learn the material? The pace that a traditional class is taught at really only benefits the average student. Students who are ahead of their peers are usually bored by continuous repetition of something that they already know, while the students who are behind are never given the opportunity to learn the material and will usually fall further behind. An ideal system would allow all three groups of students and everyone in between to learn the material at their own pace. If a student needs more or less than one week to learn a concept that would have been taught in that amount of time in a traditional classroom, he should be allowed to either move ahead or keep trying until he learns it.

Students who love the learning process will learn more than ones who don't. Being bored or frustrated does nothing to further a child's growth. A good way to keep children entertained, allow them to learn at their own pace, and allow them to embrace their mistakes as a learning experience is to turn learning into a game. We have great technology now, and we can use it to make learning more fun. A well-designed game can teach almost any concept we would like to teach a child, allow someone to repeat a level as necessary, or move onto the next level when it's clear that they are ready to move on. Children who are playing a game will be less likely to consider learning to be tedious, like they would in a classroom. With our technology, a game could easily be stored on a flash drive, SD card, or other storage device and distributed as desired. This can be a more efficient way to teach many concepts than a traditional classroom.

Another possibility is to create videos on a variety of topics. These videos don't have to be like average documentaries are to young children, but can include cartoon characters and language or jokes appropriate to keeping young children entertained by them. A video can also be stored on a flash drive, SD card, or other storage device and distributed as desired. If given to a child to take home, he can watch the video as many times as he wants until he learns the material.

In any case, a grade free system can provide a more positive learning experience whenever appropriate. When a child is allowed to develop at his own pace without fear of failure, and is entertained by the learning process, learning is usually more efficient and effective. Instead of being motivated by a fear of failure, a child can be motivated by a love of learning, and this will make teaching less of a chore.