Tension.  Anxiety.  Investment.  These are tangibles most of us want to diminish in our daily lives.  Tension, anxiety, and pressure can be aggravants and we see them as undesirable for our general well-being.  Yet, without degrees of tension, anxiety, and an investment to move forward, it is hard to cause learning.  Highly effective teachers know how to use positive attributes of external tension, anxiety, and investment to raise a child’s internal motivation to learn and keep learning. 

Primary schooling for most children begins with excitement.  School is new and exciting for a 4K or K student.  It is a new place with lots of children who will become friends and new things to do.  The blaze of early social excitement wears off with time.  While some children rise every morning with a “I can’t wait to get to school”, most need our assistance in answering the school bell every day.  Motivational theory helps us to keep children from sinking into the drudgery of compulsory education, the grind of getting through school.

Madeline Hunter taught us how components of tension assists motivation that leads to successful student learning.  (Hunter’s name and teaching reverberate in many discussions of teaching and learning.)  Motivation starts with a teacher setting a positive yet challenging feeling tone about learning.  A feeling tone has a friendly edge to it; an edge like a tool that is constantly pushed into new information and skills to be learned and the tension of that pushing causes learning.  That edge is a tension that the teacher sets and controls over time.  It is a friendly edge because effective teachers coat it with more Hunterisms – personal interest, challenge, the rewards of success, and how what is learned is useful in a child’s future.

Motivation is jump started by a teacher’s understanding of each child’s readiness to learn and beginning point for learning and adjusting initial instruction for early, meaningful success.  Motivational tension is enhanced when the challenge of what comes next is “just beyond the current reach” of student knowledge and skills yet within a student’s grasp with guided work.  There is a tension in that distance between what a child knows and can do now and what she needs to know and do next.  Effective teachers make this a positive tension because it results in success.

Bill Spady taught us that “successful learning begets more successful learning”.  When he laid out the outcomes to be taught and learned, he relied upon sound instructional practices to cause learning.  Students become invested when the outcomes set by the teacher are important and meaningful.  The drive to achieve important outcomes carries an element of anxiety to succeed.  Teachers monitor each student’s sense of internal anxiety knowing that too much causes a student to shut down or make poor decisions.  Just the right amount of anxiety keeps a student properly and positively pointed toward learning success.

All children need to see that what they learn is beneficial to them personally.  They need to see and feel personal gain or improvement in order to invest themselves in school assignments.  If a child does not feel personal interest and connection to a curriculum, it is easy to see school assignments as just a long line of work assigned by teachers and required to pass to the next grade.  Drudgery.  When this is a child’s mindset, any distraction or other thing to do moves a child’s interest from learning to something more immediately rewarding or fun to do.  Gaming and other Internet links are perfect and available for distracted and disillusioned students who have no personal investment in their school education.  A child may not see herself in every assignment, but there has to be enough and frequent enough personal interest to keep her invested.

Effective teachers purposefully tell students that “what comes next” holds special interests for aspiring artists and musicians, or is very hands-on for students needing tactile learning, or is necessary for students who see themselves in a medical profession.  Good teaching tells them then shows them.  Investment in the future is a wonderful subliminal tag for any new subject or skill set.

Teaching and learning carry many caveats, some more meaningful than others.  One of the most potent is “low expectations are connected to low achievements and higher expectations to higher achievements.”  Raising expectations is more than just declaring them or sending them in an e-mail.  Higher expectations are built by teachers with rigorous instruction of knowledge, skills, and dispositions AND by students who elevate their work, their commitment, and their performance.  There is a lot of “doing” in teaching and learning to higher expectations.  Higher achievements are a continuous push-pull between teachers and students.

Tension, anxiety, and investment are used by effective teachers in setting the right tone and providing rigorous teaching toward the knowledge and skills learning children need to learn.  Expectations won’t rise on their own – they are constructed on sound principles of motivation and instruction.  Constructive use of tension is a necessary component for teachers and students to achieve successful teaching and learning.