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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
Hey, y'all. It's Jacob with Transform Your Teaching. We have our survey still going in the show notes, and we have another winner. Congratulations to Micah Russell on winning a copy of Uncommon Sense Teaching. If you haven't already, you should fill out our survey and enter for a chance to win just like Micah.
Jacob:Thanks.
Betsy Linnell:I can't force a student to be motivated. We think if we can just master this motivation, we can force it and we can make them all just love our class. That's not gonna happen. And so we have to ask ourselves, how do I do my best in motivating the majority and recognizing, is there something I can do for these few over here that aren't doing well?
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching podcast. The Transform Your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with Betsy Linnell, assistant professor of psychology at Cedarville University. They discuss some of the psychological factors that influence motivation.
Ryan:Thanks for joining us.
Rob:Well, Jared, I am looking forward to our conversation today with professor Betsy Linnell. She is here with us, and we have been talking about motivation, Betsy.
Betsy Linnell:Hi, Rob. How are you? I'm kinda motivated to stay in this room except it's a little chilly in here.
Rob:Yeah. Today, what is the we're recording in our studio. And Yes. And outside, I think with the wind chill, it's, like, negative 20 some.
Betsy Linnell:Oh, I thought it was negative seven.
Rob:Is it negative seven now?
Betsy Linnell:Like, 20, but I think it's negative seven. I see a nice little heater over there, but I'm afraid it makes too much noise for the podcast. So we just have to be cool. We're gonna have to we're gonna have to chill. So I'm motivated to hurry this along.
Rob:The more we talk, the warmer it gets.
Betsy Linnell:Okay. Fill the room with hot air. Yeah. Let's go.
Rob:So we talked about several theories in our introduction, doctor Piles and I did, and we wanted to bring someone in who has experience, obviously, in psychology, educational psychology, and we thought of you. Well, thanks.
Jared:Betsy, here's the thing. I am completely lost with this idea of motivation theory. I was thinking about this interview, this morning and I'm like, okay, we're we're doing this we're doing this series, these very high level motivational theories, and the thing that I want to make sure we do is give the practical aspect of it. My my issue is, like, we're I'm afraid we're gonna be so high up in the cloud. So is there just before we go into the theory specifically, are there just some takeaways that educators should know about motivation as far as their students' motivation?
Jared:And if you could give one practical aspect before we get into self determination and value expectancy and achievement goal, interest, all those other things that we've already talked about. What do teachers need to know overall about motivation?
Betsy Linnell:One of the biggest things, and I even put it in a sentence, is that educators misunderstand that motivation is something applied to students. In reality, motivation emerges with the interaction between the student and the learning environment. So we wanna help them recognize that meaning has to come over compliance. A lot of times when we're trying to motivate students, we're trying to get them to do exactly what we want them to do. But in reality, we need to motivate them to understand the meaning or the significance or why this is pleasing.
Betsy Linnell:I mean, here at Cedarville, why this is pleasing to the Lord. Why are we teaching you this material? What is the purpose behind the material? And so a lot of the motivational theories are all based on the concept of getting the student to engage and to become oriented towards the goal that they're moving towards. At Cedarville, we wanna be bigger picture.
Betsy Linnell:We want them not just to be moved towards that goal. We want them to see that goal as a movement towards glorifying God. We wanna see them looking at how do I engage with this material even if it's calculus, even if it's O chem, even if it's biology when I think it's just a stupid gen ed. We wanna help motivate them to see that using my mind in this manner can be glorified to God even though I may not use this material in the future.
Jared:And I'm assuming based on that that the goal you're talking about is moldable and it's not like set in stone before they
Betsy Linnell:get there. Correct.
Jared:Okay.
Rob:So it's saying it seems to me that we're really talking about what we we've talked about before, like with Wiggins and McTeague, you start with the end in mind and you work backwards from there. But what you're saying is that even the end in mind has to have some sort of eternal or god glorifying value to it. We need to be able to bridge the two. Yes. And if we can bridge those, then we've done our jobs?
Betsy Linnell:If you can bridge them and if you can build a relationship so that the goals you have in mind, whether those goals are the end of your class goals, whether those goals are ways that this material can link to the future, if those goals can transfer from the professor to the student and the student can start to own those and carry those and have that autonomy, we recognize that the age of college students is all about moving from agency to authorship. And authorship means that they are now writing their own goals. They are now motivating their own future. And so we have to kind of meet them in that psychological stage of agency where I want to make a change. And I see value in what you're saying to me.
Betsy Linnell:I see value in what you're teaching me. I now want to own that for myself and start to move towards some of my goals, and they recognize what the professor is teaching them has value towards that.
Rob:That sounds like self determination theory to me to some degree.
Betsy Linnell:To some degree, is.
Rob:But it's there's a nuance. Right?
Betsy Linnell:Yes. There's a nuance in which as believers, they start to become submissive to the Holy Spirit. And so the Holy Spirit is hopefully motivating them and guiding them and helping them set those goals in a way that is not self determination so much as it is achieving what they feel God is calling them to do.
Rob:So it's a Romans eight twenty nine that we would be conformed to the image of Christ.
Betsy Linnell:Absolutely.
Rob:So as a professor then, as a teacher, that's my focus. That's my bridge regardless of my content area. I have to always be thinking about how do I bridge this between what I know and what it is that we are as believers to become, which is conformed to the image of Christ.
Betsy Linnell:Absolutely. And then helping the students believe that whatever you're teaching, even if it is something that they are not super happy about learning, that that can also help them to become more like Christ, whether it is through studying, whether it is through submitting themselves and doing something difficult, whether they wanna look at it as facing their trials, or whether it is just showing excellence, that each of those steps can be motivating in the fact that it makes them more like Christ.
Rob:It sounds like you have some thoughts, sir.
Jared:It's just a huge assumption. We're we're assuming that students want to be more like Christ. Right? I mean, outside of Cedarville, what motivation do students let's say we have a a listener who this isn't necessarily in that field specifically. They're in, at a big state school or whatever.
Jared:How does that if that motivation's not there, then what's what's the goal then for that?
Betsy Linnell:Everybody is motivated by something.
Rob:Mhmm.
Betsy Linnell:And we at Cedarville would like to believe that that motivation is the true one God. However, a lot of our students may be motivated by their own self image. They may be motivated by a desire to have something that they lacked in childhood. We talk about in counseling, what is your purpose for going into counseling? And for many students, it's because I want to be someone that I didn't have.
Betsy Linnell:I want to do it better, or I to present something that I didn't possess before. And I think that's where we help students find the meaning. And the meaning, I said, obviously at Cedarville, we would hope that that meaning would be to glorify God. But I think in other places, the professor still has the job of building a relationship and such that they know what their students are trying to achieve and tweaking their courses and saying, okay, this is how you can recognize it. So a very practical example, I currently, for whatever reason, have multiple majors taking my psychology core professional counseling class.
Betsy Linnell:So I have some occupational therapists taking a class in professional counseling. And I said, I'm like, I'm not sure what your purpose for this class is, but help me understand that. And they were able to articulate, I want to know how to do one on one care. And I know I'm not going to do actual professional counseling, but I'm going to be doing some counseling with my people that are there for occupational therapy. And so we're tweaking the class, my assignment, their licensure assignment, they do an occupational therapy licensure assignment instead of professional counseling.
Betsy Linnell:And so it's kind of matching with the students and saying, okay, your presence matters to me. Your performance, yes, it's important, but I wanna match your performance to why you're here. I want to give you an invitation to make this class what you want it to be. Now, not all classes can do that. You can't do a whole lot of change to core classes like calculus or O chem.
Betsy Linnell:But recognizing what is important to this student and trying to interject some of that even into your lecture is motivational. I think we can look at all of the motivational theory theories. As Jared said, you know, you can get lost in a lot of the concepts, and underneath a lot of them is that relationship. Does our student feel seen, understood, known, and is there a purpose for them to engage? And I think that that is kind of the simplistic takeaway of how do I help them feel seen, understood, known, and believe that whatever I'm teaching, whatever they're here for is gonna matter in the future beyond tomorrow.
Jared:How would you answer a instructor who says, yeah, but I teach a gen ed course with 200 students. How am I supposed to make sure that all of them are felt like they're seen, heard, and understood when I I have that many
Betsy Linnell:think sometimes doing it with that big of a class, you do it in clumps. And so you really can take the group and kind of overview and see, okay, what are my majors? Let me make sure that I touch on something for this group of majors, touch on something for this group of majors. And then I would pay a little bit more attention to anybody that's an outlier because then you will instead of having 200, you might have seven groups and three outliers. And that's way more manageable.
Betsy Linnell:You're much more able to say, okay, I can tweak something and make an application. So I'm doing this example or case study, and I'm going to apply it to this group of majors this week. Next week, I'm going to do this group of majors. And so at least at one point throughout the semester, maybe two, those individual majors have felt like, Oh, this professor actually, like, called us out and, like, paid attention. We laugh, but it's always great fun when you, like, hear even from the stage someone acknowledged in chapel from your major or from your group or from your team, the athletics.
Betsy Linnell:Like, they love it, and they all feel seen when one person is recognized like that. And so I think sometimes we make it harder than we need to. Yes. Cedarville's getting bigger. It's harder with larger classes for students to feel seen and known, but there are definite ways that you can do that and that you can create places where that is there.
Betsy Linnell:Sometimes it's the turn and shares, or it's the opportunity for students to interject. Not all students are going to interject or volunteer, and you have a couple that'll monopolize class, being able to like see, okay, who's in my classroom? And we get that. At the beginning of the semester, we have a list of names and it tells us their majors.
Jared:Reminds me of my senior year, in college here at Cedarville. I took an intro to math course because I needed to have one math elective so I could graduate. Spring semester, senior year. I was a senior broadcasting. There was another senior that took it with me, senior history major.
Jared:And the rest of the class was full of freshman elementary education majors. And I mean, I took the class with no motivation just just just for the credit. And there was one assignment we had to do. I didn't see the value in it because he wanted us to track our four year plan using some sort of I think it was Euler, some sort of math thing. You see how much of an impact it made on me because I don't remember the theory part, but I remember the next part of this, which is I didn't actually do the assignment.
Jared:I just sent him a one page thing that said, I'm a senior. This is my last semester. I've already finished all four years. I could do this, but it would be a fruitless thing and it'd be a waste of time and blah, blah, blah. And he totally took it.
Jared:I was scared to death. Like I had never done anything like that. Like I was a good student, all this other stuff. I was afraid of my professors. And I'm like, this really doesn't seem like a good idea.
Jared:So I turned it in and I got it back through campus mail and I was terrified of what grade I would get. And he gave me an A on it. So I mean, would like that little bit, that little bit of motivation or that little bit of like recognition, like you said, of like, here's my goal, right? I don't, I mean, I respect the content. I don't value the content.
Jared:It doesn't really apply to me. I'm taking it for this credit. But because he saw me in that way and validated my goal, I was motivated the rest of the semester. I mean, I was set. I mean, I had like you know, it was like in the midterm, I think is what that was.
Jared:So I was set for the rest of the semester. So something as small as that is like recognizing who the student is can be very valuable for sure.
Betsy Linnell:I think that's really a good example because he didn't see you as unmotivated. Some of us as professors, we could have seen that as, oh, here's this guy. He's a senior taking this class. He's just not motivated to do it. But he was able to read your explanation and see, like, oh, this guy is motivated.
Betsy Linnell:He did all four years. Here he is doing this senior class, and maybe there's even a little bit of embarrassment that he's in this class. He's annoyed with this class. Let me look at this guy and see, okay. How are we gonna engage him?
Betsy Linnell:He's gonna if he had made you do that assignment, you would have been so disengaged
Jared:and so different story.
Betsy Linnell:You would have not been motivated to continue. And so whoever that professor was, kudos to him to see that. It's hard for us to do that with 200, like you said, if you have a big huge class of 200. But really reading your emails and prayerfully considering, okay, what is the motivation of this student and how do I match with his needs? How do I recognize that I can't force a student to be motivated?
Betsy Linnell:I think that's probably one of the places where the motivational theories fall short is we think if we can just master this motivation, we can force it and we can make them all just love our class. That's not gonna happen. You're never gonna have all 200 students motivated to be there to do well, to do their best. And so we have to ask ourselves, how do I do my best at motivating the majority and recognizing, is there something I can do for these few over here that aren't doing well? Sometimes that's an extra credit opportunity.
Betsy Linnell:Sometimes that's office hours saying, hey, come by and see me, getting to know those ones. I don't believe that we have to have a personal relationship with all 200. I think some of them are gonna
Rob:be impossible.
Betsy Linnell:It's impossible. Some of them are gonna be motivated. I just wanna say that out loud. We don't have to we're not asking professors that personally know all 200 students, but Yeah. We get opportunities to look at the at risk students.
Betsy Linnell:Those are the ones we need to probably try to, like, touch have some touch points on, figure out, okay, what's the story behind this kid? How do I help them? And kind of, like, move through.
Rob:One thing that I can see here as we have talked about motivation and and, Jared, you have shared and and, Betsy, you've shared is that all of the theories that we've looked at, expectancy value theory, self determination theory, interest theory, achievement goal theory, do come back to some sense of ownership of self actualization of some sort. Like, they own not only do they see the goal, but they own the goal. They own their own learning or they they value it. Autonomy. They're interested.
Rob:But you might be able to if they're not interested, you might be able to get them to interest. Mhmm. If you connect to what I like to call eternal reasons or those eternal motivators. And and you mentioned that early on in our conversation, Betsy, when you said, you know, at least for here at Cedarville, we wanna connect them to what helps them understand this content in light of glorifying God. You know, I do understand that we have students here who probably, even though they've given a profession of faith, they're probably not believers or walking with Christ or maybe they're new in their faith.
Rob:And I think as teachers, we have to continually keep that in mind and offer those opportunities up every chance we get to make those connections and say, where are you at? Mhmm. Put it back on the student. And I know that's something that that I definitely do try to do in my class. It's a little bit easier for me because, I mean, it's business ethics.
Rob:So, I mean, you know, I can Yeah. Get there I can get there a lot faster
Betsy Linnell:than most. To get to the heart faster.
Rob:Yeah. That's why I like it.
Betsy Linnell:For mine. Psychology, you definitely have to look at who you are first before you can look at other people. So I think I think one of the other hard pieces, like you said, you know, we can assume that they're trying to move towards Christ, but again, that's an assumption because not all of them are there. Motivation is also just really hard to explain because it's not just the person. It's the person, it's the task, it's the environment.
Betsy Linnell:There's so many different factors at play in the motivation. And so one would hope here at Cedarville that all of our professors would be on the same playing field too. But the truth of the matter is that even professors are at different levels of their sanctification journey. And so, where the professor is and how to help the professor be motivated to improve their ability to weave the gospel into their courses, to integrate more fully, to follow each of those can be difficult. And so, think one of the big picture pieces is just trying to figure out where as professors do we feel we are good at motivating our students along the path, and then how do we first become motivated even to change ourselves in order to then model for students how we want them to change?
Betsy Linnell:And I think that that's something that kind of weaves into each of our courses of we meet them at the beginning and we see, oh, this is what you guys are asking for from me. Whether that's an initial survey at the beginning of the class or whether that's throughout the coursework of some of our classes. Have like a midterm. I know Kevin Jones does this with his education classes. He'll give them an assignment about a third of the way into the course and ask the students to engage with the professor of this is what I'm learning, this is where I feel like I would be more motivated, or this is what I would like to do differently.
Betsy Linnell:And so it's hard for us to see really where that interaction emerges and how we best make that environment.
Jared:We you know, achievement goal, we've talked about that in our previous episode, achievement goal theory. And you have mentioned like trying to identify that goal for students. What are I know you said, you know, maybe a survey at the beginning of class. Is that your preferred way of doing it? Or are there other methods that maybe instructors could use to try to identify that goal from their students?
Betsy Linnell:I think the survey method is good. I have also, at the beginning of class, just with their get to know you, I always do a note card for my students so I can pray for them throughout the semester. And at the bottom of that, I'll say, what are two things you're hoping to gain from this course, or why did you take this course? Getting them information like that. A lot of times, it really has to be one of those pieces where they can think about it and write down a response.
Betsy Linnell:Another course that I've taught in the past was actually learning a memory, which is where some of this motivation theory I learned even deeper was about a third of the way through the course, I would say, what have you learned so far? What will you remember from this course? What were you hoping to learn that we haven't touched? And so I would ask, what are some things that you thought you were gonna get out of this class that you didn't? And so I think survey is probably one of the best ways to do that because you just don't get a lot of those responses in other ways.
Jared:That has to be taken with humility as well on the part of the instructor because they could be saying things where you're like, I taught that already, or these these kids don't know what they need, that kind of a thing where it's like, no, you think you know this, but I know what you need. You need this instead.
Betsy Linnell:Yeah. And that's where those course surveys at the end of the semester can be helpful. If you can read through and say, oh, they thought I didn't do this.
Rob:We're motivated based on the things that we need or we perceive we need. Like, you asked some of my students, why are you taking this class? Well, I have to. I said, okay. Well, then what do you want?
Rob:Like, well, I want a high GPA. Why? Because I need it. Why do you need it? So it'll help me get a good job.
Betsy Linnell:So what you just described, that need, goes back to what I was calling relationship.
Rob:Mhmm.
Betsy Linnell:So I think when I said relationship, you automatically jump to the student's relationship with the professor, and it isn't. It's the relationship with whatever that need is. Mhmm. Their relationship with a high GPA, their relationship with the future job that they want, whether those things become their idol. And so what's difficult is as professors, we cannot play the role of God.
Betsy Linnell:No. And oftentimes, the motivation is finding what's is motivating them, whether that's the true God, whether it's glorifying God, whether perhaps it's an idol. And so there are times when truly doing what secular theory would consider to be motivational would actually be sinfully leading a group of students in the wrong direction. And so we have to be very careful, and I think that's where kind of you were feeling that tension with me at the beginning of like, wait a second. We can't assume that they're all following God.
Betsy Linnell:I'm like, no, you can't.
Rob:Yeah.
Betsy Linnell:But if I teach you how to motivate the way the world motivates, we're also leading some students away from God. Mhmm. And so that's where Cedarville, I would hope, would be a little bit different of, okay, so how do we help make our content that we're modeling, that we're doing this to glorify God, and hope that most of the students follow along recognizing that we're not gonna be able to motivate them all.
Jared:That was excellent.
Rob:Well, Betsy, thank you for coming. It's this has been a really great conversation. I'm sure we will continue it. Every time we have a conversation with you, it always leaves me with more things to ponder, and, and I mean that in a really you know, the best way possible. It's very fruitful, and it's it's a pleasure to serve alongside you here at Cedarville as we hopefully do things to the glory of God.
Betsy Linnell:Well, thank you so much for having me.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments, you can feel free to reach out to us at CTLpodcast@Cedarville.edu. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. And finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.