Continuing from last week’s motivation theme; we split into 2 groups and played a game of boggle. This illustrated how competition can be a form of motivation, and one that we can artificially add.
We had a QA session and drew a mindmap that collected our ideas about motivation. We considered last week’s question about building motivation in areas where we are not naturally attracted to. This grew into a discussion about being motivated in school, the use of praise and rewards.
We then moved on to the communication part of the workshop. We started by playing a game where blindfolded people were led to a part of the room and had to be guided back to a chair by their sighted partners. The aim of the game was to get people into the space of really listening and being guided to a destination. In communication we can often assume we know what the other person means, and we may miss their real message.
We had a QA session on ‘what is good communication like’ and had some interesting answers, including some great metaphors like airport control towers and airline pilots. I introduced the idea of the listener summarising the communication back to the talker to check that the communication was on target.
To practice this, we split into 3s and each 3 rotated around the roles of coach, talker and listener. It was the listener’s job to clearly summarise what the talker’s issue was.
The homework question this week was “Where would better communications be useful in your life?”
Our 3rd session started with some warm up name games. I asked if people had thought about the creativity question from last time and we found that a lot of people had forgotten about it. Someone suggested using email as a reminder so this week I’ve emailed those present with the homework question.
We continued from last week’s creativity theme with a look at conformity. Often conformity is useful (driving on the left), but in solving problems (as one of our participants put it), if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
One way of challenging conformity is to turn it on its head. We played a game where everyone wrote down an issue that bothered them, and we put these into a hat. The hat went round and everyone pulled a paper and had to ‘turn it on its head’. So if I had written traffic jams, then the person pulling that out could have said “traffic jams are good because they slow the cars down and there will be less accidents”.
We used a physical feedback method so I could get an understanding of how people found the workshops so far in terms of value (people said medium to high), pace (slow to medium) and fun (medium to fun).
We then moved on to the second part of the workshop: motivation. To start we played a game of paper, scissors, stone to pick who would go first. The 2 teams took a story about motivation and had 5 minutes to prepare a bit of theatre to illustrate the story. This was a lot of fun!
We then split into small groups to discuss how motivation can be increased in schools - an answer a lot of us are interested in! Suggestions from the groups included:
- using praise, allow everyone to solve problems in their own way,
- finding a way to make the learner need the understanding,
- for the learner to know why they are learning,
- find a way for the learner to experience in different ways the material.
The homework question that we finished on was “How can we get motivated to do things we don’t want to do naturally - and is this even possible?”
An interesting quote I heard while speaking to a friend the other day. We were talking about learning, and what he felt was the most important parts of his personal learning process.
Focus. Yaz says that the greatest skill is knowing how to block unnecessary information. This is where the seemingly paradoxical quote “knowledge is the loss of information” comes from. With the huge amount of information available to us every day, how do we filter out the valuable stuff? All information has its value when it is needed, otherwise it is just a distraction.
Motivation. Yaz has to know why he is doing something. Then when he hits a problem or gets stuck, he can easily jump up and keep coming back to it. He knows why this is important to him, and can justify it. This is how he can spend 12 hours a day learning new material.