Motivation, Part 2
Last week I was looking at the main messages in a book by Daniel Pink called Drive. Initially, I looked at two key factors, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and engagement with a set task. The third consideration is the nature of set tasks. He favours Goldilocks tasks. These are tasks that are not too difficult and not too easy, in other words, just right! If a task is too easy, learners or workers get bored. If it’s too hard they will get anxious or frustrated. However challenging tasks are ones that engage us and push us to a slightly higher level. Those moments are the optimal experiences in human existence-what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow.’ In flow moments, we lose a sense of ourselves we are in the moment, deeply engaged. Can you think of times when an hour seemed like 5 minutes? If you play sport or a musical instrument, can you remember times when you played or performed intuitively without thinking? You are in the flow! The way that schools are organized by interrupting the flow every 45-60 minutes makes flow or in the zone difficult to achieve.
The fourth thing he talks about is fun and play. The problem is of course that many of us equate these words with a lack of rigour. But they can equate. No one would think that a football team practising with fun to improve, or an orchestra that’s playing music isn’t doing something rigourous. Humans learn by playing as children and as we get older by playing with ideas. This concept speaks to what I wrote about creativity too. The creative process is very rigourous and some of the greatest artists work with rigour, limits and strict guidelines.
The final aspect to motivation is people knowing why they are doing any task. Research has shown that people do better at a task if they know why they are doing it in the first place. School is often about how -here’s how you solve a quadratic equation, here’s how you write an essay, here’s how you do a chemistry experiment. We often give short shrift to why. Why does it matter to solve quadratic equations? Why do we need to know how to write essays or why do we need to know how to do a chemistry experiment? It is never ever enough to say ‘because it’s on the test.’ There has to be meaning, in other words relevance. When students can see clear and direct relevance then motivation levels soar.
Clearly putting all these things together is not an easy job. Pink however, shows us that even just tweaking some of these elements works wonders for our motivation.
Finally, I want to wish everyone a great year of the rabbit! Let’s hope for better things in this auspicious year.
