How Do You Weave Motivational Strategies Into Your Instructional Design?

Over the past two weeks, I have been focusing on the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching developed by Wlodkowski and Ginsberg. This framework is presented in its entirety in Wlodkowski’s book, Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn: A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults*. I have personally found this book to be inspirational and it provides 60 motivational strategies for helping adult learners get the most from a lesson.

Wlodkowski and Ginsberg incorporate four essential elements to building motivation to learn. In previous posts, I have focused on each of these elements:

• Establishing inclusion
• Developing attitude
• Enhancing meaning
• Engendering competence

It is now time to explore methods for weaving these strategies into your instruction. As Wlodkowski points out, motivation must be intentionally planned into your lesson. The strategies are to be mixed and matched, they complement each other and help to strengthen your lesson.  These strategies can be used when designing a new lesson plan or when enhancing an existing plan.

Wlodkowski encourages selecting activities based on the motivational strategies. The strategies can be used linearly; for example, including strategies from establishing inclusion and developing attitude at the beginning of the lesson, enhancing meaning during the body of the lesson, and engendering competence towards the end of the lesson. However, any strategy can be used where appropriate. Depending on the length of your curriculum, you might have to use inclusion strategies at multiple points. You might have to use assessment strategies to close different sessions throughout a workshop.

Just to provide a frame of reference, Wlodkowski spends about 20% of instruction time on inclusion strategies. In his book, he provides five examples of lesson enhanced with the motivational framework. The lessons range from 3-hour sessions to a two-day six-hour per day workshop. In the examples, Wlodkowski weaves in 10-18 strategies per day, or roughly 3.3 strategies per hour. The key is to become familiar with the strategies, understand the objectives of your lesson, and be able to assess the time for activities. It is then a matter of selecting the right activity with the proper motivational strategy to plug into the lesson.

Thanks for following along as I take a hard look at this great book. Once again, it is book that should be on every adult educator’s desk.

For more information on Raymond Wlodkowski and the motivational framework.

* In the spirit of full disclosure, this is an affiliate link, which means that if you purchase this item through my link I will earn a commission. You will not pay more when buying a product through my link. I only recommend products & systems that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.
Plus, when you order through my link, it helps me to continue to offer you lots of free stuff. 🙂 Thank you, in advance for your support!