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The lesson on Motivation and Demotivation from the Software/Data Carpentry Instructor training is a very interesting reading on the topic. Here is a list of strategies for motivating learners from this lesson:

Strategies to establish value:
  - Connect the material to students’ interests.
  - Provide authentic, real-world tasks.
  - Show relevance to students’ current academic lives.
  - Demonstrate the relevance of higher-level skills to students’ future professional lives.
  - Identify and reward what you value.
  - Show your own passion and enthusiasm for the discipline.
Strategies to build positive expectations:
  - Ensure alignment of objectives, assessments, and instructional strategies.
  - Identify an appropriate level of challenge.
  - Create assignments that provide the appropriate level of challenge.
  - Provide early success opportunities.
  - Articulate your expectations.
  - Provide rubrics.
  - Provide targeted feedback.
  - Be fair.
  - Educate students about the ways we explain success and failure.
  - Describe effective study strategies.
Strategies for self-efficacy:
  - Provide flexibility and control.
  - Give students an opportunity to reflect.

The techniques that can be used to keep motivation up in an audience are called engagement.

Examples of techniques that you can use to promote engagement in training:

The seven principles of learning

See also: Brent R and Felder RM (2011)

  • Principle P1: Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.
  • Principle P2: How students organise knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.
  • Principle P3: Students motivation determines, directs and sustains what they do learn.
  • Principle P4: To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned
  • Principle P5: Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning
  • Principle P6: Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning
  • Principle P7: To become self-directd leaners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

Instructional strategies that collectively address all seven principles (P1-P7):

  • Strategy S1: Collect data about students and use it to design instruction (P1,P3).
  • Strategy S2: Be explicit about your learning goals, learning objectives and expecations (P3, P5, P6). Make your learning goals challenging but attainable by most of the learners in your course. Write detailed learning outcomes that spell out what the learners should be able to do (define, explain, calculate, model, critique, design,…) if they have aquired the knowledge and skills you are trying to help them to develop, and share your objectives with the learners.
  • Strategy S3: Scaffold complex tasks (P2-P7). Teach and test at a level that is challenging but not too far above the learners’ current klnowledge and skill levels.
  • Strategy S4: Help learners learn to funcion like experts (P2, P4, P7). Have learners formulate solution strategies before beginning to work on new problems, and when they complete assignments have them reflect on what they learned and what they will do differently in the future.
  • Strategy S5: Establish a supportive class climate (P3, P6). Learn and use learners’ names and encourage them to interact with you in and out the course. Collect anonymous learner feedback and investigate and respond to any complaints related to class climate.

Integrating active learning strategies into your course. Learning by doing.

Consider ways to set clear expectations, design effective evaluation strategies and provide helpful feedback.

We quote from Richard M Felder and Rebecca Brent:

If you think of anything a teacher might ask students to do — answer questions in class,complete assignments and projects outside class, carry out lab experiments, or anything else other than sitting passively in a classroom — you will find people who would classify it as active learning. We find that a more restricted definition limited to in-class activities is more useful:

Active learning is anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do other than simply watching, listening and taking notes.

You are doing active learning in your class when:

  • you ask a question, pose a problem, or issue some other type of challenge;
  • tell your students to work individually or in small groups to come up with a response; give them some time to do it;
  • stop them, and call on one or more individuals or groups to share their responses.

You are not doing active learning when:

  • you lecture,
  • ask questions that the same few students always answer,
  • or conduct discussions that engage only a small fraction of the class.

We are not about to propose that you throw out lecturing and make every class you teach a total active learning extravaganza. You know more than most of your students do about your subject, and you need to spend part of your class time teaching them what you know - explaining, clarifying, demonstrating, modeling, etc.

What we are suggesting is that you avoid making lecturing the only thing you do. If a lecture or recitation session includes even a few minutes of relevant activity — a minute here, 30 seconds there —the students will be awake and with you for the remaining time in a way that never happens in a traditional lecture, and most will retain far more of what happens in those few minutes than of what you say and do in the rest of the session.

Our experience suggests that there are activities that should be reduced and activities that should be carried out as much intensively as possible.

Activities and attitudes the instructor should keep to a minimum:

Activities and attitudes the instructor should promote:

See also: The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation

###Gamification Using games in training may be an effective technique in many aspects. Games promote:

Games should be designed/chosen accurately and have specific goals, should not last too much and shouln’t be too frequent. Possible games are:

Carpentry teaching practices

Very effective teaching practices are described in the [Teaching practices lesson] (http://swcarpentry.github.io/instructor-training/15-practices/) from the Software/Data Carpentry Instructor training.

Here is a short extract:

Sticky notes: We give each learner two sticky notes of different colors, e.g., red and green. These can be held up for voting, but their real use is as status flags. If someone has completed an exercise and wants it checked, they put the green sticky note on their laptop; if they run into a problem and need help, the put up the red one. This is better than having people raise their hands because:

  • it’s more discreet (which means they’re more likely to actually do it),
  • they can keep working while their flag is raised, and * the instructor can quickly see from the front of the room what state the class is in.

Minute cards: We also use sticky notes as minute cards: before each coffee or meal break, learners take a minute to write one positive thing on the green sticky note (e.g., one thing they’ve learned that they think will be useful), and one thing they found too fast, too slow, confusing, or irrelevant on the red one. They can use the red sticky note for questions that haven’t yet been answered. It only takes a few minutes to cluster these, and allows the instructors to adjust to learners’ interests and speed.

One up, one down: We frequently also ask for summary feedback at the end of each day. The instructors ask the learners to alternately give one positive and one negative point about the day, without repeating anything that has already been said. This requirement forces people to say things they otherwise might not: once all the “safe” feedback has been given, participants will start saying what they really think.

Minute cards are anonymous; the alternating up-and-down feedback is not. Each mode has its strengths and weaknesses, and by providing both, we hope to get the best of both worlds.

Things that an instructor shouldn’t do in a course

From: Motivation - Software/Data Carpentry Instructor training

  • Tell learners they are rubbish because they use Excel and/or Word don’t modularize their code, etc.
  • Repeatedly make digs about Windows and praise Linux, e.g., say that the former is for amateurs.
  • Criticise GUI applications (and by implication their users) and describe command-line tools as the One True Way.
  • Dive into complex or detailed technical discussion with the one or two people in the audience who clearly don’t actually need to be there.
  • Pretend to know more than you do. People will actually trust you more if you are frank about the limitations of your knowledge, and will be more likely to ask questions and seek help.
  • Use the J word (“just”). This signals the learner that the instructor thinks their problem is trivial and by extension that they therefore must be stupid for not being able to figure it out.

The role of wrap-up sessions

At the end of sessions (or a day course, or the whole course), it is important to devote a few minutes to wrap-up and collect feedback. Wrap-up should be carried out by participants. In a course lasting more than one day, the wrap-up of one entire day, can be carried out as the first thing on the day after. The various topics of a day can be assigned to a few participants (it is advised to identify max 4/5 main topics each day and assign each to a different participant), who will stand on the stage before the class and briefly summarise what was done the day before. The instructor may decide to give the participants who have to present a bit of time to reflect and organise a bried speach. If you mean to use this type of wrap-up, it is important to inform the participants at the beginning of the course about your intention: many people don’t like to be exposed and may feel uncomfortable if not irritated by knowing they have to do something they don’t like with short or no notice. Usually they accept talking in front of the class if they have time to adapt to this idea and you explain them what are their benefits in doing this.

Feedback at the end of each session should be quick and simple. One example approach is the fist of five voting, which is described in the session on assessment.

Challenges: discussion

Challenge 2:

What makes a good trainer?

  • Knowledge of subject
  • Clear aims for session outcomes
  • Confidence in delivery
  • Appropriate delivery
  • Listens to trainees
  • Flexible – can change pace / depth if required
  • Approachable
  • Engaging

Challenge 3:

According to experiment described in (Willingham, 2009), effective teachers have two qualities: they are able to connect personally with students, and they organise the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand (the class is well organised).

Key Points

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