Week 3: Motivation

In reading Small's article on motivation, particularly the section on the ARCS Model of Motivational Design, I was able to identify practices that I already incorporate into my teaching practice as well as get ideas for new practices and sequencing of practices that might have the most beneficial impact on students in my classes.  One example in the reading was something I'd planned to pilot this upcoming term when I teach a credit course again, and that was in the category of "Relevance - Familiarity: presenting content in ways that are understood by and tied to learner's experience and values."  Related to the activity I discussed in my other week 3 post, I was going to "challenge" students at the beginning of each of our in-person sessions with an information problem, and have the students draw on their own experience to recommend an information source.  So, for example, the day of our first class, I plan to ask students to imagine that they need to recommend an information source to a friend that will help their friend find the location of our campus. Students will then recommend their favorite "map" information source, whether it is an app on their phone, a website they use, a trusty Thomas Guide in their car, some sort of way to navigate by landmark, etc. Then the students will be asked to explain the pros and cons to using the information source they've selected.  My hope is that this will get the students in the practice of thinking critically about information sources, including those that they've incorporated into their day-to-day lives. As the quarter progresses, the information queries will get more complicated, but still be "fun" or not too serious, so students can practice thinking critically (selected a source to recommend while weighing pros and cons) in a non-evaluative way. My hope is this will translate into them being more critical with the sources they select for the final project for the course (fingers crossed).  But, there were many more elements of the ARCS model that I plan to implement in my course, but I won't go into all of them here!