Erin Doherty

Week 11 Blog
During my week 11 day of interning, I went over some claims about my work with my
learner this semester. These claims included the following: her data (linguistic, socioemotional,
and cultural), her family, her activities, her strengths, her weaknesses and her culture. My focus
student is from the Philippines and she recently moved to Florida a few months ago. I found out
that she lives with her Mom, her Dad, her cousin, and her Grandma. She takes the bus to school.
She enjoys reading funny books. Her activities include riding her scooter, drawing, watching
cartoons, and playing Legos. She told me she eats just about everything. My focus student has a
few best friends in class and she gets along with everyone. Mia likes living in Florida and she is
eager to keep learning English. The linguistic data I collected is that she speaks her language
from the Philippines. For her socioemotional data, I can tell she has a shy personality and is
timid around her peers and her teacher. Finally for Mias cultural data, I collected that she moved
to Florida from the Philippines with her family and she knows Basic English. After learning all
this information about my focus student, I can make claims that she must have learned Basic
English before she moved from the Philippines. I can claim that she is settling in quite nicely.
Furthermore, I can claim that she will require a lot of assistance and patience while she is
learning English.
The three things I learned this week include the two main types of motivation (extrinsic and
intrinsic), learned helplessness, and the Self-Efficacy Theory. According to Module 15,
extrinsic motivation is a motivational orientation in which individuals engage in an activity or
behavior to obtain an external outcome such as a reward or praise. On the other hand, intrinsic
motivation is a motivational orientation in which individuals engage in an activity or behavior

which is rewarding in and of itself. As stated in Module 16, learned helplessness occurs when
students who have experienced repeated failures attribute their failures to causes beyond their
control. For example, a student might say, Math is too hard for me. Lastly, Module 17 talks
about the Self-Efficacy Theory. Self-efficacy is, an expectation that we are capable of
performing a task or succeeding in an activity. The two questions I have left un-answered are:
How can I motivate all my students? and Why is it important to help students that are dealing
with learned helplessness? I have seen some of these behaviors in the classroom. For example,
Mia has said to me, This book is too hard for me. This statement relates to her learned
helplessness. She has experienced repeated failures in reading hard level books, so she thinks her
failures are beyond her control. I have also seen extrinsic motivation used in Mrs. Sellers
classroom. Students are on their best behavior, so that they can obtain a champion chip which
later turns into free prizes from the class treasure chest. Many of the fourth graders are
intrinsically motivated as well. They do well in class because achievement is rewarding in itself.