What Motivates Powerful Learning

Hard Fun

“70% percent of children drop out of sports by their early teens. Why? Recent studies show it’s often because playing sports has ceased to be fun.”

This report is essentially critical of coaches who over drill children and treat sport as a must win activity. This of course ‘kills’ motivation for many of our young people. The report goes on to say, “A good youth coach ensures that every practice, every competition, every communication is focused on all of the athletes having a positive and enjoyable experience. Youth sport should be about having fun while learning to work hard for a common goal, to prioritise developing skills over winning, to persist in the face of adversity, to be a good sport, and to be competitive. If all coaches got the proper training and supervision, many more kids would continue playing sports throughout their teens.” (1)

The reality is, this is the same for any learning. Sadly, many children are turned off school when it is repetitive, pitched to the middle of the class, drill orientated and boring.

The best education is ‘hard fun’---we all learn better when there is a bit of tension and stretch combined with enjoyment. This fits so well with the important concept of ‘learner agency’ where the aim is support learners incrementally to take more control over their learning. “When learners move from being passive recipients to being much more active in the learning process, actively involved in the decisions about the learning, then they have greater agency.” ( Core Education: http://www.core-ed.org/thought-leadership/ten-trends/ten-trends-2014/learning-agency )

Personalising learning (giving learners more ‘choice’ and ‘voice’) as much as possible is a powerful way of connecting students’ passions and interests (hard fun) which of course will help drive their learning.

This isn’t some woolly notion. It has to have rigour and struggle running through it.  I know it is a bit of a cliché but ‘no pain, no gain’. As you know this applies to all of us and we would be doing our students a disservice if we didn’t foster resilience in them.

As teachers we must have high expectations for our students and communicate these to them. This should be done in a positive fashion inviting and expecting students to be active in their learning and to be able to reflect on their efforts and talk about it. Making learning goals shared and explicit to students gives the learner a sense of ownership which of course is very motivational.

Praise and feedback is central to levering the best from the students. Some students will metaphorically need their ‘hand held’ more than others until they have the confidence and skills to ‘walk alone’. The need for this scaffolding and example prompts will vary enormously across any one class.

The concept of ‘learner agency’ is huge, complex and powerful in the learning process. Best practice here transforms children’s learning and is central to this idea of ‘hard fun’. In time students will become more confident and active in their learning. This intrinsic engagement / motivation creates powerful and deep learning.

(1  (  “Our Kids’ Coaches Are Doing It Wrong” by Jennifer Etnier in The New York Times, March 12, 2020 (reported in Linda Braun’s Hippocampus, April 7^th 2020)