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Marva Collins' Pride, Fear, and Motivation

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In this final post, I analyze Marva Collins' emotions as depicted in the movie  The Marva Collins Story  .  The most obvious and sustaining emotion shown in the movie is her pride in her teaching methods and her students.  She saw the vibrant potential in children that the public school system had written off as "problematic" or learning disabled. Her appraisal of those students' failure was radical: the failure was not in the students, but in the system that lacked faith. When the bureaucracy refused to change, she built her own solution, founding Westside Preparatory School. There, her pride was validated daily as she taught these very children to read Shakespeare and, more importantly, to believe in their own intellect and set high expectations for them. Her pride motivated her to consistently invest effort in her teaching.  This deep-seated pride was what made a particular scene in the movie so profoundly powerful. It is the moment her husband told...
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Marva Collins' Dynamic Process of Control and Value Appraisals

     Marva Collins' stories as an influential educator present the dynamic process of how she perceived control and value in her teaching in different phases of her education career. What fuels a revolution? In the world of education, we often point to curriculum, funding, or policy. But the story of Marva Collins, who transformed the lives of many "unteachable" students on Chicago's West Side, suggests the real fuel is the fundamental human need for agency. By analyzing her journey through the lens of the   Control-Value Theory (CVT) , we can see how her superhuman motivation was not a mystery, but a predictable outcome of her psychological appraisals.      Control-Value Theory posits that our emotions and motivations are not random; they are ignited by our appraisals of two key things: Perceived Control : Our belief in our ability to influence activities and outcomes. (Can I do this?) Perceived Value : The subjective importance we assign to...
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Marva Collins' Adaptive Attribution System

     Attributional theory  posits that our explanations for success and failure are not random, which can be categorized along three critical dimensions. Locus of Control:   Is the cause   internal  or   external ? Stability:   Is the cause   stable   (permanent and unchanging) or   unstable   (temporary)? Controllability:   Is the cause   within my control   or   outside of it ?      The most resilient individuals are the ones who turn setbacks into fuel, who consistently make attributions that are   internal, unstable, and controllable.   In the following two examples, we can have a look at  Marva Collins' adaptive attribution.  Example I: Explaining Systemic Failure      Marva Collins spent 14 years teaching in Chicago's public schools, a system she watched fail its students, particularly those from low-income Black communities. She believed that the ...
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Marva Collins' Hierarchical Goal Complexes of Building

     One of the monumental achievements of Marva Collins is that she founded her own school and revolutionized education for "unteachable" children. We can use a hierarchical model of goal complexes to analyze how Marva Collins made it happen. The hierarchical framework moves from a broad, internal drive down to the specific, daily actions that bring a vision to life. Level 1: The Foundational Goal Pursuit       At the top of the hierarchy is the core goal pursuit. This is the overarching, fundamental "want to" that directs a person's life energy. For Marva Collins, this was to prove that every child, without exception, possesses innate intelligence and the capacity for academic excellence. This goal pursuit was born from her direct experience in the Chicago public school system, where she witnessed children, particularly Black children from low-income families, always being underestimated and cast aside. Her fundamental pursuit was to disman...
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The Three Pillars of Motivation in Marva's Classroom: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness

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     At her  Westside Preparatory School, Marva Collins not only taught students specific skills, such as reading, writing, and calculation. More importantly, she transformed her students, who were previously labeled as problematic or left-behind, into confident and successful learners using practical motivational strategies. In this post, I will examine how Marva Collins motivated her students through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, which highlights that intrinsic motivation thrives on three psychological needs, including autonomy, competence, and relatedness.  Autonomy      Autonomy is the need to feel in control of one's own behaviors and goals. Marva Collins didn't force her students to do certain things; instead, she empowered them to succeed. In her book, Marva Collins' Way , she declared,   "There is no such thing as 'I can't,' only 'I won't.'"   This single statement placed the responsibility for learning on students, ma...
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Marva Collins' Way of Teaching Reading: Roles of Perceived Utility, Goals, and Interests

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     Every educator and parent may face the same fundamental challenge: how can we transform a reluctant and unmotivated learner into an active, self-driven one? For example, how to turn a student who has been discouraged by his/her previous unpleasant reading experience into a reader who enjoys the reading process? After reading Marva Collins' stories of teaching in her book Marva Collins' Way , I found that the secret may lie in students' perceived utility, goals, and interests. In this post, I will adopt theories in perceived utility, achievement goals, and interest development to explore how Marva Collins, as a successful and important educator, unlocked her students' boundless potential in developing reading proficiency.  Establishing Utility      Before a child can love reading, they must understand its value. Marva Collins was a master at communicating what psychologists call  instrumentality or utility , which refers to a po...
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Marva Collins's Self-Efficacy and How She Developed Her Students' Self-Efficacy

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     Self-efficacy , which refers to an individual's belief in their own capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments , has been examined to be a meaningful predictor of people's success. In this post, we utilize theories of self-efficacy to understand  Marva Collins's  foundation of her own belief and how she  fostered her students' self-efficacy and achievement.  The Sources of Marva's Self-Efficacy      Marva Collins's powerful sense of self-efficacy was built in her childhood when her grandmother taught her how to read before school age, and her father consistently encouraged her to break the discrimination towards Black people and establish her career. Identified by Albert Bandura and other psychologists, the four key sources are previous  mastery experiences ,  observations of similar others performing the same behavior ,  verbal persuasion  from others, and  emotional...
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