July 2002

Accelerated Learning newsletter, July 2002

We're back! Technical difficulties led to the disappearance of the June newsletter but we are now restored to normal service! This month's theme is motivation. We start on the couch with the Simpsons before sharing some of the news from Alite. An excerpt from the Conference Case Study book, The Best on Motivation and Learning follows with some suggested reading and a classroom primer of 10 strategies.

The Simpson's guide to motivation

Homer describes his new post. "I think Smithers picked me for my motivational skills. Everyone says they always have to work harder when I'm around.'

Homer has been on a self-help course

Marge: Homer did you eat my whole pan of Brownies?
Bart: Uh oh you're in for it now, dad
Homer: Marge, I'm feeling a lot of shame right now
Marge: I'm hearing that you feel a lot of shame
Homer: And I hear you feel my shame
Marge: I'm feeling annoyance and frustration but also tolerance
Homer: I feel validated by that
Marge: Good. I'm glad we had this talk.

Homer, consoling Bart after his project blows up in class

'I bet Einstein turned himself all sorts of colours before he invented the lightbulb.'

Alite in the news

Use the newsletter to find support. We have a very large subscriber list for the newsletter. You can use us to identify potential support for projects you are running or research you are undertaking. Alternatively, don't wait - go straight to the Alite discussion board on the website www.alite.co.uk and place your query there.

Work with East Riding LEA begins in June. It is planned for 300 schools to access the Accelerated Learning approach over the three years of the project.

Alite Ltd have just secured their biggest contract ever! It involves work with the UK's largest sporting body. A full press release giving details of who and what will be available in September. So, for the moment and until the World Cup is over, we are sworn to secrecy!

Bruce Potts and Will Thomas join the core team in September. Bruce is a Primary specialist with experience of two headships. Will has commercial experience with Marks and Spencer and a secondary schools background.

Places on Alistair Smith's Autumn programme of Accelerated Learning in the Classroom are filling fast. Full details are on the website.

Move It! Brain Breaks for Learning is out in September. Authored by Alistair Smith, it is a long awaited and eagerly anticipated contribution to 'educational kinesiology'. The book has over 100 different physical activities to aid learning. The exercise are organised in sections with clear explanations of how to do them and why. The sections include Relaxers, Energisers, Stretchers, Lateralisers, Little n' Large, Co-ordinates, Linkers and Eye Trackers. Each is illustrated in detail. Large format posters will follow.

Bill Lucas and Alistair Smith's book How to Help your Child Succeed is out in October. In full colour and illustrated throughout, the book is a parent guide. It is planned for the book to be priced so that schools can buy multiple copies and make these available to parents at a subsidised rate.

Simon Percival and Mel Rocket's book Thinking for Learning is due in July. The book summarises the thinking skills approaches that are current in the UK. It gives details of how different schools have implemented work on thinking and creativity. Simon also edited the Alite 2002 Conference Case Study book The Best on Motivation and Learning. This book contains 19 case studies plus essays from Bill Lucas, Howard Kennedy and Alistair Smith. An excerpt from Alistair's is include below.

The first Train the Trainer programme is now sold out. Launched for the first time in October 2002 we feel that it will very quickly become the experience for developing the developers.

The best on motivation and learning

The Alite 2002 Conference took place at the Café Royale London on June 21st. With over 200 delegates and 19 presenters the day was an outstanding success. To read what was said about the event check the full review on the website www.alite.co.uk

All you need to know about motivation

Its all about attention! Attention is directed by curiosity. Curiosity is engaged by novelty but novelty is a U-shaped curve. There are only so many times an experience remains new. However, novelty, curiosity and attention are all serviced by a range of emotional systems which all play their part in motivation.

Motivation is emotion in motion. Sufficiently motivated, an individual will experience physiological changes. The internal reward system is activated. Different circuitry - the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, the basal ganglia, the brainstem and the hippocampus - become involved. Research shows that with proper motivation, learning is quicker. More areas of the cortex become involved.

We can link to external reward systems but engaging the internal reward systems is better. How do we do this? By persuading the participant of the benefits. Because we are complex creatures this is not a simple selling job. Some of us are motivated towards success, others away from failure. For some external material or peer reward is best - short term - whilst for others there is value and pleasure in the experience itself: flow.

Motivation theory summarised

The motivation of a child differs in some ways from that of an adult. A child's motivation can be viewed as maturing through four phases. The child moves from self-interest to pleasure to competition to immersion, whilst at the same time retaining vestigial aspects of each stage.

• self-interest and security then,
• desire to please another and/or
• need to avoid displeasure of another then,
• drive to compete with peers and/or
• drive to compete with self then,
• immersion through pleasure

Motivational theory takes the above dimensions and packages them into sophisticated models. Pintrich and Schunk identified six.

Expectancy and value

Expectancy represents the key idea that individuals will not choose to do a task or continue to do a task when they expect to fail. The value component refers to the different beliefs an individual may have about the worth of engaging with the task.

Lead Learner Strategies

a) Structure tasks to be challenging but achievable
b) Foster the believe that ability is changeable, controllable and part of development
c) Decrease the amount of relative student ability information published
d) Discuss the utility value of the work. Sell the benefits and encourage buy-in to the benefits
e) Model motivational and process engagement as well as content engagement and provide accurate educative feedback
f) Provide choice and control over choice

Attribution

Attribution suggests that individuals are driven by a need to understand and make sense of themselves and the world around them. It also suggests that individuals attempt to understand what causes their behaviours and those of others around them. They do so, it is suggested, in categories or dimensions. They are the locus dimension, the stability dimension and the controllability dimension.

Lead Learner Strategies

a) Be professionally curious about determinants of behaviour
b) Avoid attributional bias and invest in positive beliefs about student capability and about learning
c) Accurate feedback is ultimately better than 'esteeming feedback'
d) Help individuals re-frame maladaptive attributional patterns

Social cognition

Social cognitive theory suggests that individuals are influenced by what the see around them. They then act based on their thoughts, goals, beliefs and values which are shaped by their observations. This process is called modelling. By observing models, people learn skills and strategies that they may not demonstrate at the time of learning, but rather later when they are motivated to do so and believe it would be worthwhile. Self-efficacy and goal setting are important features of the social cognition model.

Lead Learner Strategies

a) Be aware of inhibition and disinhibition modelling. Inhibition modelling: 'because you have not finished you work you have to stay in', everyone also who has not finishes notices and also stay in without being asked to. Disinhibition modelling: 'let me tell you now, late work will receive a lower grade'. Several students hand work in late and do not receive a lower grade. Soon many others are handing work in late.
b) Response modelling. Historical artefacts of rural life are laid out at the back of the room. Nothing is said about them but as students arrive they go there and look rather than sit at desks.
c) Proximity modelling. Use role models whose abilities are only just ahead or slightly beyond the ability of the student.
d) Coping modelling. Use role models who demonstrate coping strategies
e) Multiple modelling. Demonstrate and reinforce different methods of approaching learning challenges.

Goal orientation

Goal orientation theory focuses on needs and goals. Needs can be understood through the context of homeostasis. Unfulfilled needs generate a tension which then leads to some approach or avoidance behaviour to release the tension and satisfy the need. Goals can be looked at in terms of goal content - what is the desired outcome - and goal processes - what strategies do we use to secure the goal. Multiple goals, when not in conflict, can create a synergy.

Lead Learner Strategies

a) Positive personal goals have more impact long term than negative or avoidance goals.
b) Utilise direct evidence. Focus on a direct problem of personal agency rather than a generalised one related to self -esteem. Provide opportunities for esteeming the learner through task achievement rather than rehearsing platitudes.
c) Just do it! Many individuals' negative self-concept and limiting beliefs are so embedded they inhibit any attempt to engage with a task. Success breeds success
d) Focus goals on individual improvement, learning, progress and mastery
e) Use heterogeneous co-operative groups to foster peer interaction; use individual work to convey progress.
f) Time line progress towards goals and teach students how to timeline their goals

Intrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation theory refers to motivation to engage with an activity for its own sake. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation is motivation to engage with an activity for some sort of betterment. Each is a separate continuum and not necessarily linked. Each is time and context dependent.

Lead Learner Strategies

a) Intrinsic motivation can be enhanced by providing students with learning which is challenging, which engages curiosity, where they have a degree of control and where there is a game-like or fantasy dimension
b) Use rewards to convey information and not to control behaviour. When students perceive rewards as a means of controlling behaviour, they are less self-determining and 'lapse' when the reward is removed
c) Encourage students to evaluate their goals and to share their evaluations

Engagement and emotion

Engagement and emotion theories include those to do with emergent motivation and what is called 'flow', constraints on learning performance such as test anxiety and concepts of self-esteem.

Lead Learner Strategies

a) Create a positive emotional climate in the classroom
b) Rehearse positive patterns of test behaviour
c) Teach and practice coping techniques in advance of tests
d) Use spaced testing
e) De-brief all tests for cognition and emotion components. How did you do? How did you feel? Embed opportunities for cognitive and emotional reflection.

Explaining human motivation is a complex and messy business. The booklist below might help you begin to find further ways of making sense of it all.

(Excerpted from The Best on Motivation and Learning, ed Simon Percival, Alite Ltd)

The first 11 - great recent 'reads' on motivation and learning

1. Bandura, A. (1997) Self-Efficacy: The exercise of control, New York, Freeman
2. Brophy, J. (1998) Motivating Students to Learn, New York: McGraw Hill
3. Covington, M.V. (1998) The will to learn: A guide to motivating young people, New York: Cambridge University Press
4. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow, New York: Harper and Row
5. Dweck, C.S. (1999) Self theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development, Philadelphia, Taylor and Francis
6. Gilbert, Ian (2002) Essential Motivation, London, Routledge
7. Goleman, D. (1998) Working with Emotional Intelligence, London: Bloomsbury
8. Harter, S. (1999) The construction of the self: A developmental perspective, New York, Guildford Press
9. Morrell, Capparell and Shackleton (2001) Shackleton's Way: Leadership lessons from the great Antarctic explorer, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
10. Pintrich, P and Schunk, D. (2002) Motivation in Education: Theory, Research and Applications, New Jersey, Merrill Prentice Hall
11. Smith, A. (2002) The Brain's Behind It, Stafford: Network Educational Press

Ten great classroom motivators

1. Sell the benefits. Explain what we all gain from the outcomes of the learning. What makes us better off by doing this?
2. Share the process. Explain the methodology for learning.
3. Being esteemed by an influencer. The basic unit of motivational currency is the interest of another human. Show your interest.
4. Educative feedback. Give specific bullet points for improvement that can be acted on there and then.
5. Praise that is private and personal not public and paraded is the best for many - especially truculent boys.
6. Proximity modelling. Role model close at hand. Don't pretend we can all bend it like Beckham if we try hard enough. We might be able to bash it like Bloggs and take it from there.
7. Chunked challenges. A little and often is the best way to improve. What 1% improvement steps are available for our GCSE coursework. Identify the 1% steps.
8. Little acts of kindness. Give something of value away to the most difficult student and expect nothing in return. A copy of the Angler's Mail may be enough to change the relationship.
9. Security of a ritual. In threat, a ritual makes us feel safe. In high challenge, ritualised, shared moments help you cope.
10. Two-dimensional debriefing. Debrief tests and mock exams for knowledge and feelings. This lets students know that everyone gets stressed in an exam. And besides, they are more interested in the feelings dimension.

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