Sticks, Carrots, Ogres and Onions.

I’ve been on a podcast kick as of late…and on the drive home from the last face to face session, the podcast gods decided to smile down on me. 

Our last face to face session gave us a design framework to work out the beginnings of our action plan. We conversed with colleagues, spun our problems around, played with them and were forced to iterate, iterate, iterate. Ultimately though, the process prompted me to get back to the “why” of my action plan. I caught myself searching for answers, when really I should have been focusing on my professional questions and challenges.

Before I get into my encounter with the podcast gods, or the sticks and carrots for that matter, I wanted to briefly outline the life cycle of my action plan.

I entered the day of design thinking with guns blazing. My question sounded something like this…”How might we create assessments that foster a love of learning?” Part way through, my “how might we” question sounded something more like this: “How might we create a culture of curiosity in the classroom?”. Eight sticky notes, and a conversation with @lbettencourt later, I was forced to peel some more layers off my question. Like with Shrek and onions, I peeled down to the inner core of my action plan and found motivation*.

Here is where the podcast comes in.

On the drive home I was scrolling through my downloaded podcasts and found one by the Cult of Pedagogy entitled “How to Motivate Students: Five Questions for Teachers.” A blog post version can be found here. (On a side note, it you haven’t yet listened to Jennifer’s podcast, run don’t walk.) Unlike anything I had encountered about motivation before, Jennifer frames the discussion with five questions that force educators to reflect on their own practice. She outlines five dimensions of motivation, all backed by empirical research, that build motivation…or more specifically intrinsic motivation.

Her questions are as follows:

Relationship: How is your relationship with your students, really?

Students are more motivated when they feel a personal connection to their teachers. Am I connecting with all my students as people?

Choice: How much choice do your students actually have?

Studies have repeatedly pointed to the value of giving students meaningful choice in their learning. Am I giving all my students choices that speak to them? Do they find the choices I provide meaningful?

Rewards: Are you relying heavily on sticks or carrots…or jolly ranchers?

This is a biggie for me. Am I providing rewards (carrots) and consequences (sticks) that stifle intrinsic motivation? Is it carrots and sticks that make my classroom go round, or it is inner motivation?

Persistence: Do your words contribute to a growth mindset or fixed mindset?

Am I praising the process?

Relevance: What are you doing to make your content relevant to students’ lives?

If students can see the value in what they are learning, then they will naturally want to learn it. Am I contextualizing and putting value on everything that we do in the classroom.

NOW WHAT?

I have decided that each of these domains will contribute to my planned experiments. Stay tuned as I will be posting a further reflection on each of these five domains, and include how I will experiment with each!

So this blog post in a nutshell? This weekend, my action plan did a serious Benjamin Button and became increasingly more vague and rudimentary. Through reflection, discussion and design thinking I was able to take steps further back and realize the enormity of the question/problem I am facing. By stepping back, I was able to make space for complexity, ambiguity and ultimately possibility.

*I am now remembering someone’s reflection at the end of the last F2F (was that you @tfaucher?) where you realized that your problem was still a problem…just in a new context. Motivation is my old friend – my masters action research project centered around motivation. I guess I realized the same thing… that I wasn’t done with it quite yet.

Image Credit: https://zapier.com/blog/stay-motivated-at-work/