There are many theories and arguments around what motivates us, and in fact when it comes to education and teaching the arguments seem to become more complex (I challenge any person to take a room of 30 or so hormonal teenagers and apply a simple theory to what motivates them!)
When you strip motivation back to its irreducible minimum people are motivated to avoid a pain or make a gain.
That being said, one of the things that I love to do is to take concepts, in this case motivation and see if I can take it right back to an irreducible minimum.
When you take the many facets of motivation and strip them right back I believe that the one fundamental driver of motivation – that is to make a gain or avoid a pain.
Once we understand this fundamental aspect of motivation we can then build all our strategies around it.
In the next post we will look at how this applies to our students
