Type: Workshop
Format: Live Online vía Zoom
Duration: 2 hours
Dates and times:
Details:
Understanding Students’ Motivations in the Classroom
Motivations provide a critical link between what we do and the outcomes we achieve. Positive forms of drive – those shaped by a sense of value, interest, and enjoyment – are linked to deeper learning, better performance and retention, and increased critical thinking and creativity. By contrast, motivations tied to extrinsic pressures or rewards can lead to surface-level engagement, poorer performance and persistence, and negative emotions. Our day-to-day motivational responses, however, do not fall neatly into the intrinsic or extrinsic categories. In a given work or classroom situation, we might simultaneously experience several different types of motivation, such as the joy of learning and a fear of failure.
This session provides an introduction to Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory (SDT) for motivation alongside a set of practical tools that enable educators to characterize students’ motivations in different learning activities. Through a series of hands-on workshop activities, participants will apply motivation theory to their own classroom contexts, and consider how different individuals may express different levels and types of motivations, and how these complex motivational responses may dynamically shift over time during the academic term.
Intended Audience:
This workshop is designed for educators, administrators, and students who would like to better understand and explain students’ motivational responses in classroom settings, and to create learning experiences that support positive forms of student engagement.
Facilitator: Jonathan D. Stolk, PhD
Jon Stolk is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Education at Olin College. He arrived at Olin in summer 2001 – before the College had students, a campus, or a curriculum – and experienced all the joys and struggles of imagining and creating an unconventional engineering program and learning culture from scratch. Over the past 20 years, Stolk has designed numerous project-based courses in engineering, applied science, and design, and co-designed numerous integrated courses with faculty from humanities, social science, STEM, and entrepreneurship.
These days, Stolk continues his quest to design and facilitate extraordinary learning experiences, by collaborating with an amazing group of colleagues to design project-based and interdisciplinary courses and programs that invite students to take control of their learning, grapple with complex systems, engage with each other and the world in new ways, and emerge as confident self-directed learners.
As a researcher, Stolk strives to understand how learners develop and express motivations in the classroom; how students become self-directed learners; how faculty members’ beliefs and values influence pedagogical choices; and how educators initiate, negotiate, and sustain change processes. Stolk consults and collaborates with institutions around the world to translate research to practice, equip educators with useful curricular design tools and frameworks, and support faculty in testing educational prototypes and driving educational change.
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Pricing: Q250 for individuals.
*Please contact us to get our special group pricing
