Capturing The Student's Mood

Capturing the mood of the student is essential to capturing a mind. Sometimes, even before setting up the course objective, the professor must first respond to students’ moods. For example, one day you might notice that the students are unusually tense. You become aware of a change in rhythm, or the way they entered class. Perhaps it is body tension: sitting with heads down; talking abruptly, loudly; and ignoring your presence. Maybe you overhear the chatter when the students walk in to the classroom.

You ask a question and learn, perhaps, that they just came from an incident in the previous class: a difficult midterm, the announcement of the new business 100K winner (for a startup), once, a (seemingly) unfairly challenged student. Perhaps, with only 10 minutes between classes, they will not have had time to digest news, or commiserate about an especially difficult test. (In some institutions where departments plan with each other, the professor will have a calendar showing all scheduled exams and papers and can anticipate student stress points.)

Instead of commencing that day with your material, begin explicitly with the students and their mood. Invite them to discuss, briefly, their fears, or the facts, or their excitement. The professor simply acknowledges this mood, hears what is going on, and, perhaps, reflects on it. This moment, in effect, reverses the physiological changes that had occurred in the students’ nervous systems. Their reactions have been quieted by their own examination and evaluation In a facilitator’s guide, it is a checking-in activity. By acknowledging the pressures they feel, or whatever they are feeling, and providing witness to their moods before putting them into the task at hand, the professor will help them put aside the previous incident. From brain research, we know, in effect, that hyperarousal takes over the bulk of a frontal cortex’s resources. Once freed up, the frontal cortex can focus on something else. And information obtained in the process of discovering your students’ moods will add to your understanding of their needs, your knowledge of who they are, as well as what else is occurring in your institution. It may even lead you to make new connections in your course to the students’ interests.

Motivation
Having attended to the mood, the professor will want to explore student motivation. It is not enough to tell students they need to know your subject matter, or that you have some unique slant on what they already know. Telling them the subject is useful is not even enough motivation for the student who already realizes its relevance. The student will need to understand two things: why the material is relevant and what knowledge they are missing.

When dealing with adult students who are professionals, this is especially important. Some courses may lend themselves more towards motivating learning than others. For example, a student’s interest in Futures and Options may be obvious. The student may know very little about the subject, and may be totally unfamiliar with the language. This makes it easier to get them to acknowledge that they are missing information.

However, they can guess scope and context in order to relate the subject matter to what they intuit or have experienced in their jobs as relevant. In some courses, Human and Organizational Behavior, for example,
students tend to take their knowledge for granted. The language is familiar; the solutions posed may sound like common sense—all adding to their sense of competence. Still other courses may seem unique but not fulfilling of a pressing need. One MBA required course, Conceptual Foundations of Business, essentially a course in business ethics, consistently received low course/faculty evaluations. But when alums were asked, three years out, which core course was of most value to them, this one received the highest ratings. The students had by that time experienced the ‘startle factor’—its relevance to their security and success. Still, involving the student during the semester proved difficult.

Motivating students to learn
To create an urgent need to learn is a little like trying to arouse someone from sleep. You want to increase alertness. Our brains attend to multiple stimuli, from within and without. ‘Novelty and reward are the two primary forces that direct the selection of where to focus our attention. The novelty system takes note of new stimuli. The reward system produces sensations of pleasure, assigning an emotional value to a stimulus, which also marks it for memory’ (A User’s Guide to the Brain, John J. Ratey). An ‘emotional’ value—key to long-term memory as well as motivating attention—means actively involving the students. The professor will help students ‘experience’ their needs, or help pinpoint more precisely where they are ignorant: through a case, a
discussion, a problem set, an example, or a role play. Recognizing in a graduate level course that some in the class are novices and others are experienced, the professor will acknowledge this difference implicitly or explicitly. The professor’s meta-communication, communication about the communication, to the knowledgeable will make clear the relevance of this material to them. Or, she will explain that for them this review and their involvement can be useful to those who are inexperienced. If possible, she will show how their knowledge might need refreshing or updating, or at least, invite them to bring their related practical experiences into discussion.

Motivating students can be simple and practical. One professor I know always brings extra copies of the assignment given out, and when asked about it by someone who missed the previous class, states, ‘Would I forget about you?’ In other words, her administration and housekeeping role is personal with her students. It is simple awareness, for example, that after 50 minutes of class, students need a stretch break. We can do many things that make it easier to help them manage the learning process.
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Goal Theories In Education

Behavior reinforcement theories and need theories both depicted motivated actions as reactive to pressures, either from extrinsic incentives or from internally felt needs. Gradually, motivation theories began to acknowledge that in addition to being pushed and pulled in this manner, we are sometimes more proactive in deciding what we want to do and why. As biological organisms, we are naturally active (except when sleeping), so motivational concepts usually are not needed to explain the energization of behavior (why we are doing something instead of nothing). Th ey are needed, however, to explain the direction, intensity, persistence, and quality of behavior. Th at is, given all the possibilities that a situation affords, why does the person choose a subset of them, to the exclusion of the rest, and pursue those possibilities in a particular way?

Reflecting this evolution in theorizing, most motivational researchers have shifted from talking about needs to talking about goals: the objectives or intended outcomes of planned sequences of behavior. Most human activity is purposeful, although not necessarily from its inception (when free from pressing needs, we may seek “down time,” although even then we usually make action decisions that imply goals, such as taking a nap or a bath to refresh ourselves or reading or watching television to inform ourselves or enjoy entertainment). Implied goals are built into activity settings, such as workplaces, gymnasiums, or classrooms. In classrooms, students are expected to engage in activities with the goal of achieving their intended learning outcomes. However, they may pursue other goals in addition or instead.

Goals vary in scope, from primitive or concrete goals (grasping an object) through somewhat more abstract goals (seek out activities that you enjoy) to highly abstract goals (try to be the kind of person you want to be). Whatever its scope, the existence of a goal indicates that the person has made a commitment to achieve some state or outcome, that progress in doing so can be monitored and assessed, and that the person can use the resulting feedback to make any needed adjustments in the strategies used to pursue the goal.

Many goals subsume complex activities played out across extended periods of time. For example, the goal of climbing a mountain implies not just wanting to experience standing on top, but experiencing all of the things involved in doing the climbing. In this case, the “going” is the main goal of the activity, not the “arriving” (Carver & Scheier, 1999).

Martin Ford (1992) developed a theory of human motivation that included a taxonomy of 24 goals arranged within six categories:

1. Affective goals: entertainment, tranquility, happiness, pleasurable bodily sensations, and physical well being
2. Cognitive goals: exploration to satisfy one’s curiosity, attaining understanding, engaging in intellectual creativity, and maintaining positive self-evaluations
3. Subjective organization goals: unity (experiencing a spiritual sense of harmony or oneness with people, nature, or a greater power) and transcendence (experiencing optimal or extraordinary states of functioning that go beyond ordinary experience)
4. Self-assertive social relationship goals: experiencing a sense of individuality, selfdetermination, superiority (in comparisons with others), and resource acquisition (obtaining material and social support from others).
5. Integrative social relationship goals: belongingness, social responsibility (meeting one’s ethical and social obligations), equity (promoting fairness and justice), and resource provision (giving material and social support to others)
6. Task goals: mastery, task creativity, management (handling everyday tasks with organization and efficiency), material gain, and safety.

Ford’s list is unusually lengthy. Goal theorists usually work with simpler taxonomies that contain just a few categories of goals that are more convenient and flexible to apply. However, longer lists are useful as reminders of the many competing agendas facing teachers who seek to motivate their students to focus on learning goals. To do so successfully, teachers need to make it possible for students to coordinate their goals so that many different goals are being satisfi ed, and few if any are being frustrated, as they engage in classroom activities with motivation to learn.

Many of the concepts and motivational strategies discussed in chapters 3–5 were developed within goal theory frameworks that have shift ed focus from quantitative aspects (strength) of motivation to qualitative aspects of the goals that people adopt in achievement situations and the strategies they use to pursue those goals. When students adopt learning goals (also called mastery goals or task-involvement goals), they focus
on trying to learn whatever the activity is designed to teach them. In contrast, when students adopt performance goals (also called ego-involvement goals), they focus on preserving their self-perceptions and public reputations as capable individuals more than on learning what the activity is designed to teach. Finally, when students adopt work avoidant goals, they refuse to accept the achievement challenges inherent in the activity and instead seek to minimize the time and effort they devote to it.

Goal theorists have developed information about situational characteristics that predict people’s tendencies to adopt these different goals. Other motivational researchers have explored related cognitive and affective experiences (success or failure expectations, self-efficacy perceptions, attributions of performance outcomes to causes), and the ways in which these motivational factors infl uence the quality of people’s engagement
in activities and the ultimate levels of success they achieve. Classroom applications of goal theories emphasize (a) establishing supportive relationships and collaborative learning arrangements that encourage students to adopt learning goals and (b) minimizing the sorts of pressures that dispose students toward performance goals or work avoidant goals.
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