My Learning Reflection on Motivation - TLT 401

I found that almost all teachers including me myself, regardless of how much we understand about the word "motivation" and its types, always speak about motivation whenever we find our students do not follow the explanations or instructions given to them. All teachers will say the same idea that the students have no motivation or are not motivated at all.

After reading some passages and watching several videos that talk about motivation, I now can understand much more clearly especially about the two types of motivation, which are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Teachers should always bear in mind that these two types of motivation are totally different and hence, they demand different strategies to deal with them. When students do a task for an A grade or for a promised present, they are being extrinsically motivated. When students do a task because they like it or they think it is important and so forth, then they are being intrinsically motivated, and this is exactly what teachers should expect from students.

The candle problem presented by Pink (2009) gives us a message that no matter how abundant the supporting resources that we have, which are surrounding the problem that we encounter, if we do not know how to make use of them in order to create a good solution for the problem, we will always get stuck in the same situation. Teachers should be able to grasp this meaning in every teaching and learning situation and circumstance in order to be creative and innovative as an example for students in dealing with problem-solving.

An intrinsic motivation tends to be more difficult to deal with in terms of raising it, but once it is risen up, it becomes the most powerful source of every kind of achievement in the human life. It cannot be risen up by an extrinsic kind of rewarding only. For most of us, promising materialistic rewards, which is associated with extrinsic motivation and not the intrinsic motivation, to make students willing to follow our command like to clean their classroom is always easy. We might hope that it is not going to be forever. But the thing is, no matter how much the materialistic rewards, say like a pack of snack, we give to students, it does not change their way of thinking. It does not make them think that cleaning their classroom is a good thing and important.

Well, another discouraging fact, especially when you deal with bigger kids or teenagers in secondary schools who show a state of being more experienced or more informed and are growing up as individuals compared to preschool or elementary school students, is that they tend to see a materialistic reward as a type of bribing and they do not seem to like to be bribed just to make them willing to study a certain subject, for instance. That is exactly why teachers must know the difference between the two types of motivation.

The kind of tasks given is a determinant factor to know which type of motivation should be risen up. Pink (2009) noted from a study finding, that “when the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. But as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance (p. 60).” In an educational learning environment, teachers are assigned to pay attention to the development of two kinds of skills in students namely cognitive and motoric skills. By knowing the difference between the two types of motivation and the two types of skills mentioned above, teachers can make adjustments to what students need in their teaching and learning process.

What is more important in understanding the difference between these two types of motivation; intrinsic and extrinsic, is that teachers with a strong intention will be able to create a lifelong learner, a true learner. We can learn this from one of Pink’s quotes from the findings he put in his book entitled “Drive” published in 2009, “The less evidence of extrinsic motivation during art school, the more success in professional art both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later (p. 43).” So we can conclude that extrinsic motivation may work for a short-term goal while intrinsic motivation may highly potentially work for a long-term goal.

Reference

Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.

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