Motivation + Magic Circle, 3/16
What ideas are you proposing for the learning experience you’re designing based on Ambrose’s Model of Motivation and Salen/Zimmerman’s Magic Circle? What role might form play in your ideas?
On Tuesday, our group presented our progress towards knowledge and skills acquisition for our learners. We got a lot of feedback that helped us to view our learning objectives from yet another lens, one that’s not just about overcoming the negatives (failure) but actively building towards positives (success). The learner’s journey is away from risk-aversion and fear of failure and towards confidence, a term multiple other students mentioned. This language is helpful in making our ideas more concrete, and it echoes some of our desk research. We’re hoping that this constructive habit/mindset-building around confidence will be easier to document and visualize for learners to celebrate. Moving forward, we plan to combine the insights from class with Carol Dweck’s research on ‘mindset’ (thank you Anjali and Krista!) and our own research into stakeholder perceptions of failure v. success.
During a group session this week, we developed a framework for how to derive opportunities for change from current definitions of failure that will inform our stakeholder research. We’re in the process of getting a broader range of insights into this activity, since we’ve been sourcing solely from design students so far. By this weekend, we expect to have findings from non-CFA CMU students as well as some family members! In probing the mindset of people with more life experience, we may be able to uncover intergenerational insights that can positively impact our learners’ progress.
Following the readings, we started to dig deeper into our learner’s motivations, and the factors that might influence it. Ambrose’s model really helped us to identify different values! There are so many subjective values that learners will likely bring to the experience, from attainment to intrinsic to instrumental. When it comes to instrumental goals, we want to be mindful that they don’t feed right back into the cycle of external/societal approval that can limit learner’s growth. These values will also be really important to counteract expectancy. If our stakeholders have experienced imposter syndrome, or struggled to overcome failure on their own, they may not have high hopes of attaining the learning objective. One way to approach this is to emphasize the community aspect of success and resilience; for those who lack self-confidence, taking away sole responsibility for outcomes may be a welcome change of pace. We’re also constantly thinking around how this experience might have to be replicated or revisited. Lifelong learning by nature will take time, so how can we develop acceptance around that for our learners and also for ourselves as the educators?
There’s a lot of opportunities in where we go from the Magic Circle readings as well. Many of our learner’s problems in the current state are rooted in the real world doubts and fears they have. Our approach to the synthetic world isn’t to shy away from that, but instead to take away some of the barriers to create genuine vulnerability and safety in sharing. We’re still really interested in the We’re Not Really Strangers card game and how it stays within reality while inviting deeper conversations. One element we want to add in our experience is the affirmative response to sharing; talking about failure and fears can feel negative and intimidating, so we need to build in opportunities for constructive dialogue and positivity too. The form of our final experience will likely be a more open or integrated system (culture or play) as opposed to a closed one (rules). By eliminating some of these strict rules and guidelines, we hope to empower participants to see their own worth beyond the metrics of success/failure imposed by society.
