Motivating Resistant Students

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How can you apply our six strategies to a typical adult learner in one of your classes? Here’s an example from my work as Training Consultant with CMP Media, a publisher of top-flight technology magazines.

Mary-Ann was a middle manager who was required to upgrade her computer skills.

Like most adult learners, Mary-Ann’s first reaction involved her attitude: in her case, she was fearful, because her previous experiences with computers had been negative, and she resented that this training had been imposed by her supervisor in an arbitrary way. (“He doesn’t realize that this is the worst time for me to be away from my desk.”).

But Mary-Ann was also smart enough to know that she needed to upgrade her skills in this area, to meet the emerging challenges of her job.

So, I advised her instructor to take time at the start of the training, to understand “where she’s coming from”, and work with (rather than ignore) these attitudes and needs she brought to the task.

To help you address these two issues of Attitude and Need, I suggest that you develop a questionnaire and/or discussion (group or individual) which ASKS your students about their positive and negative attitudes towards your class, and about their real needs in taking it.

Once the learning was underway, I knew that Mary-Ann would react positively or negatively depending on whether the learning tasks her instructor provided were stimulating – whether they struck a balance between the boringly simplistic and frustratingly overwhelming. (I refer to this as finding the Flow Zone – the place between the Drone Zone and the Groan Zone, where learning is bracingly challenging, but neither tiresome nor daunting.)

The emotional factor also comes into play in the course of learning – Mary Ann will hunger for relief from the technology, through human contact, humor, etc. Here I advised the instructor to build in break-out sessions, where Mary-Ann could share problems and successes with other students, as a human relief from technology.

Finally, in the final phases of instruction, Mary-Ann predictably wanted to be assured that she really had learned, and that she can use her new capability successfully. She welcomed the opportunity to do a project of her own using the new skills, but with continued support.

If you do this for your students, you will confirm their confidence and reinforce their learning, motivating them to continue learning beyond the course.

I’m sure you are already doing many of these things. This little scheme merely strengthens your hand by organizing them comprehensively. Once you have become accustomed to the system, the six principles will be second nature. Motivational Planning will then have become an integral part of your personal process of designing instruction.

Want over 100 specific strategies to implement the six principles? You can find them in the following books:

Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn by Raymond Wlodkoski (Jossey-Bass, 1984), from which this approach developed.

I Won't Learn from You by Herbert Kohl (New Press, 1993)

Peak Learning by Ronald Gross (Tarcher, 2002)

Roadblocks to Learning by Lawrence J. Greene (Warner, 2002)

Wlodkoski sets us a stirring goal for our teaching – to not only motivate students to learn what we are currently teaching, but to acquire the tools for motivating themselves. He expresses the high hope that one day we will no longer ask ourselves whether learners are motivated, but whether they have the skills to motivate themselves. Thus we will give students something even more important than the specific knowledge and skills we convey – we will have given them the tools for true lifelong learning!