What motivates us to learn (disclosure)?

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My disclosure.

If you have followed this blog, you should have picked up on two ideas.  Two models.

As a science guy, here is the disclosure moment: Hypothesis, theory, law, and model.  What is being discussed in my blog, is a model.  We live in a time where people seem to be confused by what each of these mean.

In education, it can be a bit worse.  When we look at development in education, happening by teachers within their own classrooms, it is not a very scientific process.  If it were scientific, there would be control sets of students.  Students would be selected by random for various subsets.  While universities may run scientific studies on students, it is a process most teachers (in my humble opinion) consider too slow and unfair.

What I mean is, if a teacher thinks she has a good idea, and it is showing progress in her classroom, she is not going to stop and decide which kids are going to be in the control.  She is not likely to ask the teacher next door if he would consider setting up a study to see if this idea works.  More likely, she will share this idea, and possibly both implement it, and they will make qualitative and other quantitative studies (yes, teachers today do use metrics) through the year or two to decide if it was a good idea.  Quasi-scientific at best.

This would suggest the teachers are working to develop a model, or a tweak in their teaching model.

A model is not perfect, and please do not fall in love with it.  But in the science word, in my opinion, it is the fun part of what we develop and generally the best we can do.  Don't bring up the, "Is it true?" statement.  Things like truth and laws are far off targets.  Which "law" of science is not currently an item up for debate?  With Higg's bosons, gravity waves, and what is this dark matter and energy, is it not apparent we are from knowing definites?  And if the biologist or chemist would think they are on more solid ground, they should remember that physics is deep under their feet.

The neat thing, is sometimes you don't have to know it all.  Even if a new computer process is not completely understood, if it is based on a model which has incredible stability, it may be an amazing new machine!

When discussing motivation and children's learning, I am suggesting models which make sense, have provided a series of positive results over numerous uses, and have been part of a very qualitative ongoing evaluation.  Thankfully, my introduction to the subject was at the beginning of my career, and there were twenty-five years to evaluate, process, and discover.  And, yes, I was much more like the two teachers mentioned above, than the research scientists I have enjoyed working with in the lab and online.

To that point, I really like my model, but am not in love with it, and invite discussion and insight as we work to help education move forward and upwards.

-John

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