Getting the Buggers Motivated in FE by Wallace Susan;

Author:Wallace, Susan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

The learner who walks: getting Jaz motivated

You’ll remember Jaz. He was the only learner in Chapter 4 whom Amy failed to get motivated. He was left isolated after she got his mate to join one of the working groups on the understanding that they could leave when the task was completed. Jaz, however, having tried and failed to disrupt the others, and having done no work himself, got up and left before the end of the lesson.

In an incident like this it’s worth reflecting on what the key issues were, both for the teacher and for the individual learner. You might find it useful to go back for another quick look at Chapter 4 and do this for yourself. The points you come up with will probably include the following:

Jaz hasn’t responded positively to the No-Nonsense Respect approach. In fact it may even have antagonized him.

He’s a demotivated demotivator. This is a nice way of saying that he doesn’t just sit there being ‘bored’ or refusing to work; he actively tries to undermine the motivation of the other learners, first by distracting them and then by making a nonsense of the ‘work hard and leave early’ deal.

A situation that started out with a teacher attempting to motivate a learner (where success means that teacher wins and learner wins) changes into one where they are in direct conflict (success for one means the other loses). Because if the learner succeeds in leaving early without having worked, he’s ‘won’ and the teacher has ‘lost’; if the teacher succeeds in making him stay, the teacher ‘wins’ and the learner ‘loses’. In other words, where there was potential for the teacher and learner to have a shared goal – successful learning – the situation shifts to one where they have directly conflicting goals.

We can’t say that Jaz is entirely unmotivated. He may not be motivated to learn, but something is clearly motivating him to avoid learning and to get out of that classroom.

From this analysis we can identify a number of questions that we need to answer before we decide which tactics to try.

How can we prevent Jaz from undermining the motivation of the other learners?

At what point did the possibility of a shared goal turn to conflict?

How and where can we intervene to avoid this happening?

What’s driving Jaz? How can we best discover which of the Four Big Demotivators we’re dealing with here?

So which alternative approach will be most useful in helping us to answer these questions? We already know he won’t respond to the promise or withholding of Reward by the fact that he ignores the deal struck with the rest of the learners. At this stage, trying to engage his interest with a bit of Razzmatazz seems like a long shot. Based on what we know about his behaviour and responses so far, our best bet is probably the Relationship approach. Even if we can’t engage him in work at this stage, we may be able to engage him in conversation. This is the simplest way to find out what’s driving him.

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