Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn E-Book

Raymond J. Wlodkowski

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 687

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

New to this edition is the blending of a neuroscientific understanding of motivation and learning with an instructional approach responsive to linguistically and culturally different adult learners. Based on the most current educational and biological research, Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn addresses issues that focus on deepening learner motivation and helping adults to want to learn. In the book, Raymond J. Wlodkowski offers a clear framework and sixty practical, research-based strategies that are designed to elicit and encourage learner motivation. In addition, the book is filled with practical examples, guidelines for instructional planning, and cutting-edge ideas for assessment and transfer of learning.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Overview of the Contents

Acknowledgments

The Author

Chapter 1 - Understanding Motivation for Adult Learners

Why Motivation Is Important

A Neuroscientific Understanding of Motivation and Learning

The Intersection of Cultural Relevance, Intrinsic Motivation, and ...

Emotion, Memory, and Intrinsic Motivation

Underserved and Diverse Adult Learners in Postsecondary Education

Instruction as a Path to Improving Educational Success among All Adults

Chapter 2 - Understanding How Aging and Culture Affect Motivation to Learn

Characteristics of Adult Learners

Specific Effects of Aging

Cultural Diversity and a Macrocultural Perspective

Location of Responsibility for Learning

Two Critical Assumptions for Helping Adults Want to Learn

Chapter 3 - Characteristics and Skills of a Motivating Instructor

Expertise: The Power of Knowledge and Preparation

Empathy: The Power of Understanding and Compassion

Enthusiasm: The Power of Commitment and Expressiveness

Clarity: The Power of Organization and Language

Cultural Responsiveness: The Power of Respect and Social Responsibility

Chapter 4 - What Motivates Adults to Learn

What Is Adult about Adult Motivation to Learn

Integrated Levels of Adult Motivation

How Inclusion Fosters Involvement

How Attitudes Influence Behavior

How Meaning Sustains Involvement

How Competence Builds Confidence

The Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching

Applying the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching

Chapter 5 - Establishing Inclusion among Adult Learners

Understanding Dimensions of Intercultural Nonverbal Communication

Engendering a Feeling of Connection among Adults

Creating a Climate of Respect among Adults

Chapter 6 - Helping Adults Develop Positive Attitudes toward Learning

Four Important Attitudinal Directions

Creating Relevant Learning Experiences

Chapter 7 - Enhancing Meaning in Learning Activities

Engagement, Interest, and Meaning

How to Maintain Learners’ Attention

How to Evoke and Sustain Learners’ Interest

How to Deepen Engagement and Challenge with Adult Learners

Chapter 8 - Engendering Competence among Adult Learners

Supporting Self-Directed Competence

Relating Authenticity and Effectiveness to Assessment

Some Thoughts about Grades, Assessment, and Motivation

Fostering Transfer of Learning to Engender Competence

Communicating and Rewarding to Engender Competence

Promoting Natural Consequences and Positive Endings

Chapter 9 - Building Motivational Strategies into Instructional Designs

Increasing Motivational Self-Awareness

Designing an Instructional Plan

Assessing Learner Motivation

Continuing Adult Motivation and Lifelong Learning

Self-Directed Learning and Self-Regulation

Epilogue

Appendix - Observation Guide for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning ...

References

Name Index

Suject Index

Raymond J. Wlodkowski

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Chapter One epigraph from The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter by Vivian G. Paley.

Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wlodkowski, Raymond J.

p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7879-9520-1 (cloth)

1. Motivation in adult education. I. Title.

LC5219.W53 2008

374.001’ 9—dc22

2007049555

HB Printing

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

Preface

When I wrote the last edition of this book, the question that guided its conception was, How can instructors help all adults to learn? If we consider only age, income, and ethnicity and race, we have had societal changes in the last ten years that have expanded this challenge significantly. Demographic trends and immigration have increased the diversity of adults throughout postsecondary and workforce education. More adult learners than ever before are English-language learners. The number of younger nontraditional learners and older adult learners in formal educational settings is the highest it has ever been in the history of this country. Among these learners are higher proportions of low-income students as well. Although the enrollment rates for Latino and African American adult learners in two- and four-year colleges have grown, fewer than a quarter of those who enroll complete their degrees.

The increased linguistic and cultural diversity make teaching adults today more exciting than ever before. We have more to learn from each other and more ways to do it better. Our potential as instructors has evolved with greater knowledge in multicultural studies, cognitive and biological sciences, assessment practices, online learning, use of the Internet, and the opportunity to use brain-imaging technology to study learning as it happens.

We continue to have a responsibility to create learning environments that sustain the integrity of all learners as they attain relevant educational success. I am convinced that in conjunction with educational policies that promote the common good, a powerful means to helping all adults learn is to go to the source, to the energy—to human motivation. All adults want to make sense of their world, to find meaning, and to be effective at what they value—this is what fuels their motivation to learn. The key to effective instruction is to evoke and encourage the natural inclination in all adults, whatever their background or socialization, to be competent in matters they hold to be important.

As in the last edition, the model in this book for teaching and planning instruction focuses on how to continually enhance intrinsic motivation among all learners as part of the instructional process. Dr. Margery Ginsberg and I developed the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching in 1994. It is based on the principle that learning and motivation are inseparable from culture. For over a decade, the framework has been applied nationally and internationally with productive learning outcomes.

The Third Edition of Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn is designed to be a practical and immediately usable resource for faculty, trainers, educators, and staff developers whose primary task is instructing adults in universities and community colleges, in professional and industrial settings, and in community organizations. This book will also be very useful to part-time as well as full-time faculty and administrators.

As in the earlier editions, deepening learner motivation and helping adults want to learn are the major topics throughout this text. Within the last few years, the number of books about teaching adults seems to have doubled, but this is the only volume focusing on motivation as a constant positive influence during learning. In the chapters that follow, you will learn how to teach or train in ways that make the enhancement of intrinsic motivation an essential part of adult learning. Four chapters describe in detail sixty tested strategies for eliciting and encouraging learner motivation. You can choose the strategies that best apply to your content and learning situation.

Among the important additions are insights and examples from the past nine years of application of the motivational framework and the strategies introduced in the previous edition. With applications ranging from postsecondary education to communications technology, in cities from Toronto to Tokyo, ideas advocated in this book have been tried and tested. The results have not been excellent every single time. Through correspondence and on-site visits, I have learned the framework’s limitations and advantages and gained a more nuanced understanding of what can be accomplished when teaching is focused on strengthening intrinsic motivation during learning.

What is most exciting to me about this new edition is the integration of a neuroscientific understanding of motivation and learning within an instructional model responsive to linguistically and culturally different adult learners. The research emerging from a biological perspective of learning is used to provide insight and confirm educational practices grounded in knowledge about adult education, the social sciences, and multicultural studies. We are at the beginning of a reciprocal relationship among adult education, biology, and cognitive science, and each has much to learn from the other (Fischer and others, 2007).

This edition has greatly benefited from instructors who use this book as a text for their courses. Their experience and suggestions continue to guide its development. As requested, there are more practical examples and case studies to illustrate the motivational framework and its strategies. In this edition, the sections relating to feedback, self-regulation, and transfer of learning are also more substantive than in earlier editions.

Any instructor who has searched for a straightforward, true-to-life, and useful book on how to enhance adult motivation for learning should find this book helpful. Because the focus of the book is on motivation and instruction, it does not discuss philosophy, curriculum, or policy in depth. However, there are references to allow interested readers to pursue further study in most of these areas. This book is mainly about face-to-face instruction. It can be used for online learning because the motivational framework and most of the strategies are applicable to this format. I have worked with many instructional designers for online learning, and an example of their instructional plans is included in the Chapter Nine.

Some promises to you the reader:

• A minimal amount of jargon. With the growth of technology in adult education and a neuroscientific perspective as part of this edition, I have had to work hard to keep this commitment.

• A little bit of humor. It’s still great to have some fun while you’re learning.

• Many examples. Instructors and learners continue to ask for more.

• A practical and consistent way to design instruction that can enhance adult motivation to learn any content or skill. This is my professional raison d’etre. I have co-taught courses in disciplines as removed from my background as dye-casting and electronics to continue to extend this commitment.

• Motivation theory and methods positively supported by my own experience Instructors have appreciated this characteristic of the book. Nonetheless, please keep in mind that my experience is not unlimited.

• A way to teach that respects the integrity of every learner This promise is a lifelong work in progress. And I do have mishaps, faux pas, and mistakes. I continue to videotape my teaching to see if I do as I advocate: to make the learner’s history, experience, and perspective an essential consideration that permeates this approach to instruction.

Overview of the Contents

This book focuses on the most important ideas and information to make effective instruction a consistent motivational process that enables optimal learning for culturally diverse adults and their instructors. Chapter One offers a neuroscientific understanding of motivation and learning with discussion and definitions of the physiology of the brain. It also explores the intersection of cultural relevance, adult learning, intrinsic motivation, and neuroscientific understanding, concluding with a view of how instruction can be a path to improving educational success for all adults.

Chapter Two addresses the characteristics of adult learners, with particular attention to age, culture, and memory. There are overviews of different orientations to adult intelligences including multiple intelligences, practical intelligence, and emotional intelligence. The last part of the chapter offers a rationale for using a macrocultural approach to adult instruction and learning.

Chapter Three discusses the core characteristics—expertise, empathy, enthusiasm, clarity, and cultural responsiveness—that are necessary for a person to be a motivating instructor. The chapter outlines performance criteria for each characteristic so that you can comprehend, assess, and learn the behaviors that are prerequisites to enhancing learner motivation. It concludes with Paulo Freire’s conception of critical consciousness as a guide to creating a learning environment that contributes to the common good of society.

Chapter Four introduces the four conditions—inclusion, attitude, meaning, and competence—that substantially enhance adult motivation to learn. These motivational conditions are dynamically integrated into the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching, a model of motivational theory in action.

This model is also an organizational aid for designing instruction. The framework provides guiding questions for creating instruction that elicits diverse adults’ motivation to learn throughout a course or training session.

Chapters Five through Eight provide the central content of this book. Each chapter provides comprehensive treatment of one of the motivational conditions: inclusion is covered in Chapter Five, attitude in Chapter Six, meaning in Chapter Seven, and competence in Chapter Eight. These chapters describe in pragmatic terms how each motivational condition can positively influence learning among culturally diverse adults. They also describe and exemplify a total of sixty specific motivational strategies to engender each of the motivational conditions. Where applicable, I discuss each strategy in terms of its cultural relevance, neuroscientific support, and how it relates to adult learners. In most instances the strategies are referenced to further readings that provide research findings and examples of their use in educational settings.

Chapter Nine summarizes the previous chapters with an outline of all the motivational strategies and their specific purposes. In addition, it explains two ways to use the Motivational Framework for instructional planning, the superimposed method and the source method. The chapter also provides five real-life examples of instructional planning with discussions of how each plan has been designed, using the framework and motivational strategies from the book. With a discussion of the growing literature on self-directed learning and self-regulated learning, this concluding chapter presents useful suggestions for increasing the capacity for lifelong learning among adults. The book ends with an epilogue addressing the ethical responsibility of being an effective instructor of adults.

Acknowledgments

This edition has benefited from the insightful suggestions of instructors, trainers, and students who have read and used this book. Although they have had faith in its merits, they have also spoken to its flaws. I am particularly grateful to David Brightman, senior editor of the Higher and Adult Education Series at Jossey-Bass, for his continuing support of this project and for his enormous patience and guidance. I also want to express my appreciation to Erin Null, editorial assistant at Jossey-Bass, for her responsiveness and care, which contributed to the ease of completing this work. In addition, I want to thank my friends and colleagues at Regis University, George Brown College, and Edgewood College, where I could apply these ideas in earnest and with the benefit of their good will and support. Finally, I wish to thank Margery, Matthew, and Dan for continuing to bring light to my eyes and warmth to my soul throughout this and many other adventures.

Raymond J. Wlodkowski Seattle, Washington December 2007

The Author

Raymond J. Wlodkowski is Professor Emeritus at Regis University, Denver, where he was formerly director of the Center for the Study of Accelerated Learning and executive director and founding member of the Commission for Accelerated Programs. He is a licensed psychologist who has taught at universities in Denver, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Seattle. His work encompasses adult motivation and learning, cultural diversity, and professional development. He lives in Seattle and conducts seminars for colleges and organizations throughout North America.

Wlodkowski received his Ph.D. in educational psychology from Wayne State University and has authored numerous articles, chapters, and books. Among them are Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn (Jossey-Bass, 1985), the first edition of which received the Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature; and Diversity and Motivation (Jossey-Bass, 1995), which he coauthored with Margery Ginsberg. Three of his books have been translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. Wlodkowski has also worked extensively in video production. He is the author of six professional development programs, including Motivation to Learn, winner of the Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications for the best training and development program in 199l. He has received the Award for Outstanding Research from the Adult Higher Education Alliance, the Award for Teaching Excellence from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Faculty Merit Award for Excellence from Antioch University, Seattle.

1

Understanding Motivation for Adult Learners

None of us are to be found in sets of tasks or lists of attributes; we can be known only in the unfolding of our unique stories within the context of everyday events.

Vivian Gussin Paley

Like the national economy, human motivation is a topic that people know is important, continuously discuss, and would like to predict. We want to know why people do what they do. But just as tomorrow’s inflationary trend seems beyond our influence and understanding, so too do the causes of human behavior evade any simple explanation or prescription. We have invented a word to label this elusive topic—motivation. Its definition varies among scholars depending on their discipline and orientation. Most social scientists see motivation as a concept that explains why people think and behave as they do (Weiner, 1992). Many philosophers and religious thinkers have a similar understanding of motivation but use metaphysical assumptions to explain its dynamics.

Today, discoveries in the neurosciences offer a biological basis for what motivation is. Although this understanding is very far from complete, what we know about the working of the brain can enrich and integrate fields as disparate as psychology and philosophy. From a biological perspective, motivation is a process that “determines how much energy and attention the brain and body assign to a given stimulus—whether it’s a thought coming in or a situation that confronts one” (Ratey, 2001, p. 247). Motivation binds emotion to action. It creates as well as guides purposeful behavior involving many systems and structures within the brain and body (Ratey, 2001).

Motivation is basic to our survival. It is the natural human process for directing energy to accomplish a goal. What makes motivation somewhat mysterious is that we cannot see it or touch it or precisely measure it. We have to infer it from what people say and do. We look for signs—effort, perseverance, completion—and we listen for words: “I want to ...,” “We will ...,” “You watch, I’ll give it my best!” Because perceiving motivation is, at best, uncertain, there are different opinions about what motivation really is.

As educators, we know that understanding why people behave as they do is vitally important to helping them learn. We also know that culture, the deeply learned mix of language, beliefs, values, and behaviors that pervades every aspect of our lives, significantly influences our motivation. What we learn within our cultural groups shapes the physical networks and systems throughout our brains to make us unique individuals and culturally diverse people. Social scientists regard the cognitive processes as inherently cultural (Rogoff and Chavajay, 1995). The language we use to think, the way we travel through our thoughts, and how we communicate cannot be separated from cultural practices and cultural context. Even experiencing a feeling as a particular emotion, such as sadness or joy or jealousy, is likely to have been conceptually learned in the cultural context of our families and peers as we developed during childhood and adolescence (Barret, 2005).

Roland Tharp (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988) tells the story of an adult education English class in which the Hmong students themselves would supply a known personal context for fictional examples. When the teacher used a fictional Hmong name during language practice, the students invariably stopped the lesson to check with one another about who this person might be in the Hmong community. With a sense of humor, these adults brought, as all adults do, their personal experience to the classroom. We are the history of our lives, and our motivation is inseparable from our learning, which is inseparable from our cultural experience.

Being motivated means being purposeful. We use attention, concentration, imagination, passion, and other processes to pursue goals, such as learning a particular subject or completing a degree. How we arrive at our goals and how processes such as our passion for a subject take shape are, to some extent, culturally bound to what we have learned in our families and communities.

Seeing human motivation as purposeful allows us to create a knowledge base about effective ways to help adults begin learning, make choices about and give direction to their learning, sustain learning, and complete learning. Thus, we are dealing with issues of motivation when we as instructors ask such questions as, What can I do to help these learners get started? and, What can I do to encourage them to put more effort into their learning? and, How can I create a relevant learning activity? However, because of the impact of culture on their motivation, the way we answer these questions will likely vary related to the different cultural backgrounds of the learners.