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Jere Brophy Has Focused His Research on Helping Teachers and Motivating Students For Jere Brophy, it is always about tackling the tough problems. When the university distinguished professor took on teaching and learning, he focused on students with behavioral and social adjustment problems. When he began studying student motivation, he wanted to provide teachers with strategies on how to motivate all their students, including those alienated from the learning process. Trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist, Brophy always has focused his research agenda on the difficult issues and through it all has sought to make it relevant to teachers and the challenging classrooms they face. Nowhere is that emphasis more evident than in his work on problem students. The work evolved out of his association with the Institute for Research (IRT) at the college. At the time, the IRT surveyed its collaborating teachers on what areas of research they wanted to know more about. Almost all the teachers wanted more information on students who were difficult to teach, or problem students. So Brophy and his colleagues at the IRT set out to find answers. They interviewed about 100 teachers to get a sense of how they handled the 12 most common types of problem students, which included shy and withdrawn, hostile-aggressive, defiant, perfectionist, slow learner, and those shunned or rejected by other children. Then Brophy and his colleagues developed a series of vignettes for each of the 12 types. In the case of a hostile-aggressive student, for instance, the vignettes included a situation where a class bully had taken lunch money away from another student on the way to school. How would a teacher deal with that? The IRT issued a series of reports based on the research, but Brophy felt there was more to be done. "I wanted to compare and contrast and synthesize the principles that came out of the literature review in psychology, education, and child development and the principles that came from these teachers, particularly the teachers who were rated as most effective. "And that is exactly what the book is all about." The book, published in 1996 by Guilford Publications Inc., is Teaching Problem Students. In it, he deals extensively with each of the 12 problem student types and provides teachers with various techniques and strategies for dealing with the students. A key, Brophy said, is socialization. It is central to child rearing, and it is essential to child management in school. For Brophy, the goal of socialization is to instill in students’ expectations, habits and routines that will enable them to control themselves. "So whether you are talking about classroom rules or whether you are talking about general prosocial behavior, the idea is to try to help kids develop a set of values that must be taught through socialization," Brophy said. "The ideas and values relate to peer relations, and fundamental notions of justice, fairness, respect, and politeness. "The socialization process helps students learn what to do and what not to do, but more so it becomes part of their self-control. They learn what to do and do it on their own." He has found that teachers who are effective in socializing problem students employ principles that involve truly listening to the student, showing respect, trying to understand the child from the child’s point of view, showing empathy, and avoiding clashes of will. |
"I like to use words like meaningful, worthwhile, satisfying, valued, appreciated. Those are the right kind of words to describe the affective response of children when they are learning the way they ought to be learning." He also has found that many regular classroom teachers have grown increasingly reluctant to deal with problem students. Part of the reason, he said, is that these teachers get little or no training in this area. But Brophy is clear that teachers are not helpless in dealing with problem students. "We have had this proliferation of special education labels in the last 20 or 30 years and I think that has been a bad thing in a lot of ways, he said. "One way is that more and more regular classroom teachers now feel that they are not qualified to deal with any student with special instructional or social needs. That’s unfortunate because they usually are with the child more than anyone else, and in some ways have more opportunity to deal with the child. They have the opportunity to change the quality of the child’s school experience." Another major area of research interest for Brophy has been what he calls motivation to learn. The interest grew out of what he sees as an overemphasis on motivating students by trying to make education fun. For Brophy, this distorts learning into a game geared at keeping students interested. He believes this to be the wrong model. Learning is not recreation. There is a curriculum and goals that need to be accomplished, and learning requires sustained attention and work. Brophy developed a position on motivation that he set forth in a book, Motivating Students to Learn (McGraw-Hill 1998). In it, he makes case that students must take seriously the intended goals and outcomes of learning activities, and therefore must be taught to undertake the task these activities with serious engagement. "If they enjoy it, it’s a bonus and that’s fine and I am all for it," Brophy said. "But even if they don’t enjoy it, there are good reasons for them to learn given material and therefore to work at it." The book is written for teachers and includes motivational strategies that develop children’s motivation to learn by helping them see the purpose and value of learning the various subjects. Ensuring that children see that value is pivotal, Brophy said, as is structuring a classroom as a learning community where students collaborate instead of compete. It is also important, Brophy said, that teachers help students set realistic goals, and learn to take satisfaction from their progress. "My research has been focused on getting everybody away from this ‘fun’ notion and toward more of an emphasis on learning," he said. "I like to use words like meaningful, worthwhile, satisfying, valued, appreciated. Those are the right kind of words to describe the affective response of children when they are learning the way they ought to be learning. "There might be fun in there but that is not the main point. Teachers are not camp counselors."
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