Why does a student stop learning? The obvious answers come quickly. Perhaps they lack ability. Perhaps they are lazy. Perhaps they are distracted, badly behaved or simply “not academic”. Or perhaps, in the more sympathetic language of education, they are “disengaged”. But what if we are asking the wrong question?
Instead of asking, “What is wrong with this student?”, we might ask something quite different: What is blocking the learning? That small change of question can produce a surprisingly large change of perspective. For learning rarely stops because intelligence has somehow stopped. More often, something has got in the way: confidence, relationships, meaning, opportunity, environment, skills—or motivation itself. And if we can identify what is blocking the learning, we have a much better chance of releasing it.
In our forthcoming book, Mapping Motivation for Students (...read more