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When I started to think about my action research project I found it very hard to try and decide what to do. My second placement was in a completely contrasting school to my first and so any ideas I had, had seemed to not really apply to my new setting. I found myself constantly looking at classes and trying to decide what the problem was, how I might tackle it and whether it would work with them – at the same time as trying to get to know a new school, names and schemes of work. In the end I settled on a year 10 GCSE Drama class that had students in it who seemed to be lacking motivation – I wondered how I could turn this around and, from my reading, discovered that self-goal setting supposedly worked to allow students to take a personal interest in the task and consequently increase their motivation.

My plan was to get the class of year 10 students to set themselves a goal every lesson and reflect on it in that lesson and then, suddenly, they would become super-motivated, get lots of work done and be amazing. This proved a lot harder than I thought. Ironically, I found it hard to motivate them to even set a goal every lesson as they didn’t really see any purpose in it. It therefore became a challenge to do an intervention on motivation when my students were not motivated to do something that was attempting to motivate them. I’d been told at the end of my second placement that I needed to take more risks. I found myself really grateful, though, that I hadn’t taken a risk to do this 6 lesson intervention with a class of 30 boisterous year 8s, or even worse, 30 year 9s who had already chosen their options for GCSE and so didn’t see any point in trying in my lessons any more – these classes may have also needed a boost in motivation but I think their motivation to complete the intervention would have been even less.

Despite this, as I moved further through the intervention, I started to realise that I was actually embedding a similar idea in my other lessons, just calling it a different name and not using it for, what I thought, was the same outcome. As part of the whole school initiative and as part of my knowledge gained from University sessions I had been getting my students to set themselves targets on a regular basis. The difference was, I was expecting these targets to work to improve their skills and encourage reflection to help them understand their learning, not improve their motivation. Also, I was calling them by a different name – targets, not goals.

This made me realise that, maybe, my intervention wasn’t having an impact on my teaching in any other areas because to an extent, I was already doing it. I was scared to take it further because I wasn’t seeing the impact on the year 10s and I couldn’t see an impact on motivation in any other classes when they were setting themselves targets.

Another interesting point that made me think about my practice: at the end of my action research project, 10 of the students involved said they prefer the teacher setting them goals than self-goal setting. I really started to think about the reason for this and wondered if it was better for them as I am the one that holds their data and the knowledge about the course. However, I came to the conclusion that it should be a two-way process; that I should continue to share their data and say what I think they need to do, but also get them to reflect and think about where they need to go next, because if they don’t, they are never going to learn how to do it on their own and motivate themselves to succeed.

Something positive that has come out of my action research project is the impact an intervention can have on one single student. Out of 11 students that I did the intervention with, one student came out at the end saying she was more motivated, that she found self-goal setting really helped to push herself and her work actually showed a huge improvement in terms of the detail and focus that was put into it. This is really exciting and, although this action research hasn’t necessarily affected my teaching practice to a great extent, it has taught me a lot – I look forward to the next one.