What Motivates You to Read?

From what I have read in my classes and learned in real life, motivation is one of the most complicated and difficult areas for future teachers and current teachers alike. There is something ever so complex about how to inspire so many different minds in your classroom or future classroom. With all the various theories and speculation about motivation, it is hard not to get overwhelmed. As a future middle school teacher, I found both of the readings valuable and was able to take information from both of them to apply to my future classroom. Kelly Gallagher’s “Nine Reasons for Reading” chapter was geared towards an older audience and the Graves Chapter 3 felt as though it was geared towards a younger audience.

With “Reading Reasons,” I tried to really consider how these reasons to read that high school students came up with will apply to my classroom of slightly younger students. Some of them would be more difficult to relate to them than others. For instance, explaining to a group of middle school students that reading is necessary for college is much less applicable than explaining that it is going to be particularly important in high school, and emphasizing that reading is hard, but we need hard things in our lives might not be something they are interested to hear. I was thinking about teaching Math, since I don’t know at this point if I will end up in Math or Reading, and the reason that reading is important financially really hit me. I would love to do a class project with allowance tracking or even pretend class bills. We could create a classroom community where students had to research funding and spending, but in a simpler way than with high school students.

With the Graves chapter, I was really thinking about the students that will be in my classroom. They with be ages 9-13, so opinions on reading may have already formed. They might also have in mind if they are a “good reader” or a “bad reader.” I hope that I can create a fresh start environment for my students where they can all be good readers and all can love to read. In that, there was one little line that really hit me on page 54, “Perhaps the best books offer an experience that is similar to looking through a window at twilight. At first you see through the window into another place, but, as the light gradually fades, you end up seeing yourself.” My students will be at a time in their lives where everything they knew about themselves and their world is starting to change. With that quote, I realized that I can help them learn about themselves and their world through the books I have them read. Maybe the best way to motivate my students is to have them divided into book groups, where each group is filled with students who are different from each other, but by the end they will all be reflecting on the book and themselves together, once it’s dark and the window reflects themselves. I think motivation can seem daunting, but the trick is finding what motivates us now, and when we were children, and I think Graves has it, it’s finding literature that allows us into another world, different from our own, but leaves us thinking about our own lives, no matter the age.

(2003). Nine Reasons for Reading. In K. Gallagher, Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School (pp. 15-38). Portland: Stenhouse Publishers.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.