The Reward Pathway (week 4)

This week we read about the reward pathway, which includes the emotions of pleasure, happiness, motivation, and engagement (Zadina, 2014).  In my current job I work across five school sites, and I find myself and my colleagues constantly problem-solving around how we can get our students more engaged.  I think the idea of engagement has changed a bit over time, at least in my experience and understanding.  For example, discussions around student engagement have moved away from the idea of students being on-task (doing any work) to students interacting with content in an important and meaningful way.


One trend I'd like to explore more as a lever for increased student engagement is the idea of a flipped classroom model.  In a flipped classroom model, lecture-type content is delivered to students through videos, and time in class is reserved for collaborative work, project-based learning, experiments, etc.  A quick search on Amazon turns up several books on the topic, all published within the past three years, so it is a pretty recent topic.  Also, here's a quick link to a NYT posting in case anyone is interested to read more.


The brain research presented by Zadina in Chapter 4 suggests that a flipped classroom model may also have benefits for motivation.  For example, project-based learning is shown to increase long-term memory (Zadina, 2014). Additionally, the reward pathway is activated when people feel a sense of progress, like if a student can see his or her progress in a specific course.


I should also mention that I work preschool through 2nd grade curriculum, students, and teachers who work with this age group.  Many of the flipped classroom examples I've heard about are from classrooms of older students - middle school, etc.  I'm interested to explore this topic further and perhaps use it for my final project, for example to create a "flipped" unit and study the impact on student engagement and motivation.