Motivation Applied – What Drives Your Professional Learning?
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #67
Hi there! And if you are new(ish) to these updates, a warm welcome.
A shorter update this week after my lengthy post on motivation last week, but an important one: motivation doesn’t just apply just to our students, but also to us as professionals.
I reflected a bit on last week’s topic, and considered what drives me to engage with cognitive science, and more specifically, to write about it every week.
I think it fits with self-determination theory (see the previous post):
Autonomy: I have free choice over what I write about and how. I’m not told to do these updates for my job; it’s my free choice.
Competence: I’m comfortable sharing my thoughts on these topics—much more than I would have been a decade ago, for example.
Relatedness: there’s a social element. I’m not writing just for myself! And importantly, I am sharing them with fellow educators. My in-group!
Your motivation
What motivates your engagement with cognitive science. Can you make similar points to the ones above? Have a think!
If there are aspects where you are drawing a blank, it might be worth tackling these. For example, if most of what you do is socially isolated, perhaps you could form a local network. And if your engagement is largely driven by school management, perhaps you could offer to lead on a specific area where you have expertise.
Motivation is valuable. It helps to sustain productivity (as mentioned last time), and there’s also a connection between motivation and burnout.
It’s therefore worth tackling anything that undermines it. And that should be important to workplaces… if they value staff engagement with professional learning.
Talking of which… before signing off, I’ll share a book called Flip the System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto which sets out to tackle loss of motivation and de-professionalisation among school teachers. I have a chapter about how engagement with cognitive science can help; the book as a whole is a great read. Link below.
Flip the System UK (Amazon link)
Hope you have a great week!
Jonathan
Last week: The Motivation to Study
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