Roudebush Hall
Roudebush Hall, home of Miami's administrative offices

Annual Address 2015

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David C. Hodge
September 9, 2015

Motivation (Passion)

Marty Neumeier, in the summer reading book The 46 Rules of Genius, declared that “passion is the engine of creative genius”, a sentiment that is widely shared. When a project is seen as a passion rather than a task to be done, creativity or innovation will flourish. This observation reflects the differences in outcome from people who are reacting to intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivations are those that are offered by others, for example a reward for achieving a specific goal. Intrinsic motivation comes from the passion within a person. Teresa Amabile has written insightfully about these differences. She notes that extrinsically motivated people will take the shortest, and most obvious path to the goal line, whereas “the desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business.” (quoted in Pink, p. 114).

Jane McGonigal, whose book Reality is Broken was the summer reading book two years ago, highlights the impact of motivation with a graphic picture of a “gamer” on the verge of an epic win. The young man projects a sense of urgency, intensive concentration, and a deep focus on tackling a difficult problem. He is experiencing what Csikszentmihalyi termed “flow,” that incredibly positive moment of being completely absorbed in what one is doing. While we cannot realistically expect to see such a vivid expression on our students in our classes—it might actually be scary! —having students absorbed in their work, essentially being intrinsically motivated, can contribute significantly to their learning and love of learning.

To create that experience, students respond best when there is a sense of purpose. Millennials tend to want to know “why” what they are studying matters. We also understand from gaming that it is important to have the right level of challenge, avoiding the boredom of a task too easy or the frustration of a task too difficult. Finally, an active task where students are “doing” something that contributes to a meaningful goal can dramatically increase the possibilities for flow to occur.

At Miami, this perhaps happens most often when students are involved in group projects. I love to stop into the meeting rooms at King Library to talk with students. Most of the time they are diligently working on class projects (and eating pizza), but occasionally I will run into a group of students who are really into the project. The project is typically open-ended, interesting, and requires both research and creative thinking. It is a joy to see that they have lost track of time and sometimes view my appearance as a distraction to be minimized! Often, though, they eagerly share what they are doing.

On a more individual level, this moment of flow seems to occur when students transcend the boundaries of a class. As one of our former student trustees put it, she finally understood what Miami and learning are all about when, while studying one night, she realized that she didn’t know what class the material was related to. It was the issue, the idea and not the class that mattered, because it was interesting to her and stimulated her curiosity. She was intrinsically motivated. Our Humanities Center is a great example of encouraging this thinking by creating focal points around themes that transcend classes and draw students into a larger and more engaging intellectual world.

So the challenge before us is to seek to create learning environments that encourage intrinsic motivations. How can we create more dynamic learning in our curriculum, building on the efforts of the Top 25 Initiative to create more active classes? How do we embed a sense of purpose into a project or a course? How can we organize learning around questions or goals that challenge our students and stimulate their curiosity?

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