I’m breaking my self-imposed blog silence. I have to. I can’t keep quiet any more.

I happened to see a tweet from Lisa Parisi about her summer to do list. I scanned through her blog which I hadn’t spent much time on and came across a notice about her being involved in a new EdTechTalk show called Conversations. That note is at the end of the post I referenced a moment ago.

This is what I said…

Are you really going to talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?

Please oh please go read everything by Eccles and Wigfield.

Then go read a fantastic book called Motivation in Education by Schunk et al.

And then, make sure you’re familiar with B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.

Bottom line, there’s no such thing as intrinsic or extrinsic motivation.

There are lots of amazing theories that surround motivation, such as the Expectancy-Value theory and others.

I’d almost rather you chat about motivation in general and get out of the specific question of extrinsic or intrinsic, it’s a false dichotomy.

Motivation in education is a much larger topic than solely that, in fact there is a large body of research that indicates that this dichotomy is totally wrong.

Lots of folks are doing great work in the arena of motivation. Please go search them out and involve them in your conversations. I dare you to contact Schunk, Eccles, Wigfield, Feldon or any of the other major names in Motivation and ask them to appear on your show.

If you do, you’ll surely learn a lot and get beyond the echo chamber of intrinsic v extrinsic and what we all do in our classrooms. Let’s get some outside info from folks who have been researching this very topic for many years and can shed some real, research-proven tactics and theories with us.

Just my thinking..

Chris

I know I am going to be accused of being academic and uppity. I know I’m going to be accused of being snobby or something.

Either way, there is a lot more out there than solely the intrinsic versus extrinsic discussion. MUCH MORE.

A topic that has been running around in my head for a long time is the disconnect between the research being done at the University level and what is considered best practice on the K-12 level. A lot of what we consider best practice is not so good after all. I suppose that’s another post.

Man I wish I had more time to blog. Honestly, there’s little value in it right now as it’s not going to keep this roof over my head. I’m prepping for a sick course load next semester, so less blogging (not that I do much anyway).

NB: I didn’t link to the book in the comments to her post. I did in this note. Here it is again if you missed it the first time.