Drive and Motivation
Grade abatement eliminates the worst of the impact of traditional grades, but there is still a score in the gradebook every three weeks or so. There just isn’t any illusion about how grades act as a vector for the most toxic parts of education.
We also have no illusions about how hard it is to make the right decision. How do you motivate yourself outside of that number? How do you improve without a grade? And what do you do when even clicking on the links that answer these questions feels too difficult?
As we discuss motivation, keep in mind what Alfie Kohn wrote about grades:
I’d argue that too much attention to the particulars of implementation may be distracting us from the bigger picture — or at least from a pair of remarkable conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the subject: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.
Then shift to Dan Pink’s TED Talk on motivation. Here is the video:
You can also watch an RSA Animate:
After watching those, consider that your project-based learning can be inspired by projects made in the real world. Well, what motivates people to create work like this outside of school? Some of them get a paycheck. Others are after recognition.
Obviously, though, the Skinner-box logic of grading isn’t the motivation. So what motivates creative people in the real world to tackle literature, art, video games, and so on?
That’s the kind of question Dan Pink asks — and, again, the most critical answer is that extrinsic motivators like grades work poorly.
The rest of this post will link to the various ways we, in makerspace fashion, have tried to hack your motivation. This is about much more than your final project, of course; it’s about what you’ll do in the future, whether you’re going into the military, going to college, or getting a job.
Remember that the most important thing you learn is always something about how you learn. Read the rest of this post with that in mind.
Against the Grain
That post deals with the decisions you make every day. The approach, however, is a macro view of the impact: You become yourself slowly and incrementally. Can you motivate yourself by imagining who you’ll become in the future? Will that push you to make good choices in the present?
This post also links to other hubs for discussions. Topics include the Dunning-Kruger effect and knowledge-based herd immunity. The latter, in fact, could be another motivation: We all need to make good decisions to be able to work together.
Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor
That Latin phrase has been posted before in our classroom. The translation: “I see and approve of the better, but I follow the worse.” It was the central idea behind this unit:
Self-control is essential in every fact of your life. A “flying guillotine” may seem hyperbolic, but there are always penalties for a lack of self-control. That may motivate you.
Remember, however, that the motivation to choose wisely must eventually come from within. Akrasia is a human failing, which means we can work together to overcome it.
Action by Action
This is the deeper “level” of a unit on project-based learning:
The shallower level is here:
Read one or other (or both), especially if you missed them the first time around. They are helpful explorations of motivation and focus.
The struggle during the pandemic years was more obvious: We lost the 36th chamber of meeting in person, and the class period is the most important part of the learning environment. There’s a reason the word academic comes from Academia, the place where Plato taught. The physical interaction is essential. That is also why distance learning is different from online learning (and why the work in the makerspace is called interstitial learning).
You need to motivate yourself around your access to the daily workshop. You have to solve the problem of focus and feedback. Fortunately, that’s the whole point of a Humanities makerspace: to solve problems like this one.
Poisson D’Avril
Finally, a look back at posts from April 1 of two very different years. In 2020, this instructional post led us to a singular Final Project:
In 2022, we were able to find something closer to normalcy:
That is another look at motivation and self-monitoring. It is always true that you get out of your education exactly what you put into it; now, however, there is no way to deny it. You will get out of this process exactly what you put into it. Everything depends on your self-awareness and your capacity for self-advocacy.