Instructional Design
Self Regulated Learner
When I was a kid I believed, as many kids do, that one could wish upon the first star visible in the evening sky. As far back as I can remember my wish was for infinite knowledge and infinite wisdom. I continued making that wish long after I knew that wishing was not exactly the most effective strategy. Compared to many of my peers, I have made some modest progress on the knowledge. My students, and sometimes my friends, comment that I am like a walking encyclopedia.
The wisdom is coming at a somewhat more leisurely pace.
I still make that wish when a wishing occasion arises. These days that wish functions more like an affirmation about myself; I want to know. Knowing is deeply satisfying, like putting another puzzle piece in its right place. At the same time, every new piece reveals that the puzzle was far more complex than my limited mind had previously imagined. Some parts, however insignificant, may have become clear and provide moments of clarity among the overwhelming unknowableness that comes with being alive. More than clarity, each new part provides new pathways to new questions as well as another repeated affirmation about myself; relative to the infinite knowledge that I had called down from the stars, I know little more than when I first made that wish.
In the most basic sense, I am a self-motivated learner. “Motivation has been defined as a desire or disposition to engage and persist in a task” (Schunk, Pintrich, & Meece as cited in Park, 2018.) I have yet to find a subject that does not interest me and simple curiosity drives me to learn more about any person, place, thing, or event that I encounter. I have a deep need to know and to understand. Further, I am persistent beyond that simple curiosity. The inability to grasp something gives me fits and I keep trying. Those fits come from a high level of self-efficacy (Talks, 2019). I do not know where I got it from, but believe that while we all have different gifts and some things may take more work, there is nothing that a person of average ability cannot learn.
I will talk about learning to speak Spanish as an instance of my approach to self-regulated learning, variations of which I have applied to learning many other things. In high school I made a D by one point each semester in Spanish. In college French I worked much harder and made a C by one point each semester. Rather than accepting that those grades said something about me or as confirmation of the often repeated myth that languages need to be learned at a very young age, I made a conscious choice to both believe that I was capable and that I would succeed at learning a second language. I had a suspicion that many aspects of education are flawed and that language education is particularly so. Those suspicions were strengthened when, not very much later, my classmates who had made higher grades in those language classes could not remember much of the language, a clear indication that grades, as extrinsic motivators, can and often do “lead to less productive learning behaviors and low-quality engagement” (Seifert & Sutton, 2018). I thought about how I learned my first language and I realized that it was not by developing knowledge of it, memorizing conjugation tables, or practicing for conversations that I was unlikely to ever have in real life. We all learn our first language through being surrounded by it, using it to communicate about things that we find meaningful, and developing a feel for it. So, I developed my own approach based in that thinking. Somewhere between a year and eighteen months later I was pretty fluent in Spanish and had a fair understanding of French, Italian, and a little Portuguese (all related languages).
Through that experience, I had stumbled upon the elements of self-regulated and effective learning. Paris and Paris define effective learners as “self-regulating, analyzing task requirements, setting productive goals, and selecting, adapting or inventing strategies to achieve their objectives” (Paris & Paris, as cited in TEAL, 2010). In self-regulating, I simply committed myself to the task, but in a way that makes sense for me. I know that I do not do well with routines. Rather than something like studying one hour every day, which was likely to last about three days, I changed my entire life so that it became something like a situated learning environment “where learning occurs relative to the teaching environment” (Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, 2012). I was not exactly forcing myself to actively participate in an unfamiliar environment, but forcing the filter of an unfamiliar language onto my normal environment and interacting with it in a new way. I was as close to being immersed in the language as possible and which enabled me to generate “meaning from the real activities of daily living” (Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, 2012).
Having complete freedom with analyzing task requirements and setting productive goals made the experience so much more approachable and enjoyable. Instead of the contingent, extrinsic motivator, that “I need to make a grade,” my motivation was autonomously developed (Pink, 2009). I felt that all I needed to do was take in the language as close to constantly as possible and to make myself understood when it was my turn to speak. The time frame was simply to do this in the present and continue doing it. Equally free to develop my own strategy, I only watched movies in Spanish or with Spanish voice over. I bought Spanish language tapes and removed all other tapes from my car so that I had nothing else to listen to. I put labels on every object in my home so that every time I looked at them I saw their Spanish name. I made my own vocabulary lists based on topics that interested me or that came up in conversations with Spanish speakers. I looked up verbs when I needed them, but I did not worry about conjugation. I let that come to me naturally, through hearing it and reading it. I bought and studied a book of Spanish slang from all over the world and used that as my text book so that I would be able to express myself in a way that felt genuine. I found Spanish versions of books that I enjoyed and piddled my way through them, looking up and writing down every unfamiliar word. When it was my turn to speak, it made no difference if I made mistakes, sounded like a two-year old, or had to repeat things a couple of times. If I could make myself understood, the goal was met. From there, the objective was simply to continue. Even improvement was not an overt objective. Because I was immersing myself as much as possible, improvement happened on its own.
Of course, that is not the entire story. Paris and Paris go on to explain that “These learners also monitor progress as they work through the task, managing intrusive emotions and waning motivation as well as adjusting strategies processed to foster success. These are the students who ask questions, take notes, and allocate their time and their resources in ways that help them to be in charge of their own learning (Paris & Paris, as cited in Shuy, 2010). I did not really monitor progress. I knew that progress was happening and that was good enough. But, there were definitely intrusive emotions. It is hard to repeatedly make people listen to toddler babble from an adult. People laugh, they get frustrated, they might not want to deal with you. That was definitely hard. It is easy enough to laugh at myself. But, I do not take rejection well and that sometimes threatened to undermine my motivation. However, I made a choice to treat it as motivation. I decided that I had to keep working at it so that I could be less annoying. To some extent, that became a part of adjusting my strategy. People were annoyed by my pronunciation, so I worked on it. People used words or phrases different from the ones I had come across, so I learned those. Throughout this period, I reminded myself that I was meeting my goals every day. I kept taking in as much Spanish as I could, and it kept getting clearer as it came back out of me. Eventually I was not annoying and even started to receive compliments. Of course, those compliments provided more motivation. It was only at that point, when the compliments began to come, that I went back and started working on more of the things that I had encountered in classrooms. Even at that point, the primary goal was to make myself understood more clearly, maybe with a little interestingness thrown in.
Motivation for learning new things is not a problem. As I said above, I have yet to encounter anything that I cannot find a way to be interested in. The issue is that my interest tends to be “triggered situational interest” which is “sparked by environmental features such as novel, incongruous, or surprising information” (Seifert & Sutton, 2018). If I am more invested in a subject, it is easy to have “maintained situational interest, which involves focused attention and persistence over a longer period of time” (Seifert & Sutton, 2018). Sustaining interest beyond mastery, beyond a honeymoon period. At that point, things begin to feel repetitive and repetitiveness feels pointless. I suppose this is where the wisdom comes in and having a better understanding of performance oriented goals. While I am not motivated by doing better than others, demonstrating competence is important as a reminder to myself that sometimes the motivation is simply the small pleasure in doing a thing well, no matter how mundane it may seem. Those actions reverberate through an organization and rub off on others. Maybe dedication to something larger than oneself represents the intersection of intrinsic and extrinsic goals.
References
Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (2012). Situated learning. In Instructional guide for university faculty and teaching assistants. Retrieved from https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide/situated-learning.shtml
Park, S. (2018). Motivation Theories and Instructional Design. In R. E. West, Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology: The Past, Present, and Future of Learning and Instructional Design Technology. EdTech Books. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations/motivation_theories_and_instructional_design
Pink, D. (2009, August 24). The puzzle of motivation. Ted.com; Ted Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation
Shuy, T., OVAE, & Staff, T. (2010). TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 3: Self-Regulated Learning. LINCS Community, Courses, and Resources for Adult Education. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://lincs.ed.gov/sites/default/files/3_TEAL_Self%20Reg%20Learning.pdf
Seifert, K. & Sutton, R. (2018). Motivation theories on learning. In R. E. West (Ed.), Foundations of learning and instructional design technology: The past, present, and future of learning and instructional design technology. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations/motivation_theories_on_learning
Talks, T. [@TEDxTalks]. (2019, May 29). Why self-efficacy matters | Mamie morrow | TEDxFSCJ. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agwsjYg9hJ8