The Big Picture at Chilwell School

How to demotivate students in two easy steps

(And this is happening ALL across the country !!)

I can see WHY I have a career and why ‘The Big Picture’ manages to make the huge impact that we do with students across the UK.

Nearly 4000 student Facebook fans can’t be wrong !!!

There are two BIG factors that concern me right now about our education system that are causing students to be more demotivated.

1. EMA – Education maintenance allowance
2. FEAR – and the culture of not allowing mistakes

These two factors are helping students get more demotivated.

I’ll explain:

1. EMA – Education Maintenance Allowance

The reason we go to school is because of these long term motivators … our desire to…

1. Learn (be educated)
2. Grow (if you don’t you’ll die !)
3. Get a better life

No-one ever went to school for the sake of it and it is not always going to be enjoyable – it just isn’t. BUT, it is a damn sight more enjoyable NOW than in the days when I went to school, just trust me. However, contradicting this is the fact that students are less engaged than they used to be !! This is not a FACT but it is true (as I have no data to prove it).

BUT we then introduce a short term motivating factor called ‘money’ which is the government’s way of saying ‘please go to school’ and ‘please work hard’ and I’ll pay you for doing so.

This message is so confusing…

• It means that everything becomes short-termist
• You’ll get paid for coming to school – this is extrinsic, not intrinisic
• You’ll get something NOW ie. money
• You’ll focus more on this (the short-term) and less on where it’s taking me in my life(the long-term)

For some students the message it’s delivering is “You’re better off being poor because you’ll get EMA benefits over other students, so you might as well do nothing, be poor and just get the benefits instead !!” – imagine what kind of culture that builds?

2. FEAR – Not allowing students to make mistakes

I’m going to presume like most people that YOU learnt most in your life when ‘things went wrong!’

Q. Is that true for you? It’s definitely true for me,

• When I got divorced, I reconsidered everything about how I’d behaved and how I would behave in the future.
• When I’ve lost my job I worked out how to do better next time and avoid that situation etc…

The time you changed most was when you ‘had to’ not when you ‘wanted to’. The two reasons people change are normally…

• Inspiration
• Desperation

… and the most powerful of these is desperation because it’s a threat that you ‘have to… do whatever you have to do …. or else’.

So, basically what I’m saying is that we’ve learnt most through making mistakes. That’s how everybody learns quickly.

Picture the scene then…

• A student says “I’ve got no pen” – teacher says “I’ll get one for you” when they should say “find one then”, or “copy the work up tomorrow”, but of course that doesn’t happen.
• A student says “Not done my homework” – teacher says “Don’t worry I’ll extend the deadline” when they should say “Oh dear, that means you’ve failed this module”, or “sorry you get no marks then”, but of course this doesn’t happen.
• A student says “I don’t want to do this” – teacher says “Get on with it”, when they should say “well, that’s a choice you have to make”, but of course this doesn’t happen.

This is the teacher fixing the student’s problem. They’re not allowed to fail, at least that is the message that they get. Students, if they are to grow, have to find their own answers not answers we give them.

Let’s face it, you wouldn’t give a starving Africa food handouts indefinitely: you have to, at some point, give them the tools and the knowledge for them to grow their own food, not feed them !!

It’s the same for education.

BUT, in school… If they haven’t got the answers, we give them the answers.

BUT, In life… People don’t want the answers, they want the tools to find them for themselves.

So, you can see, something has gone wrong.

My job is to give students THOSE tools that they need for life not just the ANSWERS to life. My job is to let them make their mistakes and fail… not deliver them a ‘life’ with all of their answers, because… I don’t have them.

High Achievers DON’T Need a Degree!!

Q. Why would you need a degree when you don’t need one ?

A. You don’t !!!

An article in ‘The Guardian’ talks about how ‘high achieving students are spurning the debt and further education of university in favour of employment’

Let’s face it – we don’t need to do stuff we don’t need to do. We do stuff we do need to do. At least… that is the theory

So… why is it then that some of us feel like we’re going to university because we ‘ought to’ rather than we ‘want to’?

Nearly three-quarters of 1,180 A-level pupils surveyed by the site said they felt going to university was viewed as a necessity rather than a choice. Over half said that parents contributed to this feeling, while a fifth said pressure from school was to blame. It’s interesting because it means that many of us go to university because we ‘have to’ rather than because we ‘want to’.

There MUST be some confusion in our minds as to whether the value of university is all that it’s cracked up to be because of course, if all we do is end up….

1. Wasting 4 more years of your life
2. Racking up £10,000’s of debt
3. Not getting closer to what you want at the end, or worse still not being sure that it was even of value
4. Not being qualified to do anything specifically at the end

Then you can see, that it would prevent people from making the big leap into university.

So, you can see why some other students are choosing an alternative …

1. Not waste any time – and go to FE college
2. Not get into any debt and maybe even be sponsored or work part-time
3. Be IN the workplace that you want to be in
4. Being qualified AND having the experience to do what you wanna’ do

On paper, it looks like a ‘no-brainer’ and in a further survey of university students carried out by the same site, it appears that two-thirds don’t believe they will find work relating to their degree, and one in four feel that on-the-job training or an apprenticeship would have served them better in building a career in their chosen field.

Hardly surprising then that some of these young people are choosing to do what they’re doing. It begs the question in my mind as to whether the same is true for those that are encouraged to take ‘A’Levels etc…?

Because, just because it’s been something we’ve done in the past – does it have to be the right way for the future?

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