Facilitating Intrinsicly Motivated Learning
Many of us chose to homeschool because we wanted our children to be able to learn without the constant prodding of rewards, threats and punishments.
We wanted our children to cultivate a love for learning that is driven by heir own interests, passions, and sense of self-satisfaction; we wanted them to grow their motivation intrinsicly.
But how can we faciliate this kind of learning at home? How do we create an environment that fosters intrinsic motivation rather than external rewards and punishments?
It begins with understanding your role as a home educator.
Often when parents think of homeschooling, they envision the home as the school and think that the parent's role is to be both the teacher who plans and provides direct instruction, and the principal who motivates through various rewards and punishments.
The reality of homeschooling though is that the parent's primary role is to be a Parent.
Home education is not a different hat you put on for teaching lessons and then take off when you want to go back into parent mode. Home education is an extension of your parenting, and your child learning at home will always see you/need you/learn from you you first as mom and/or dad.
After that, the role of a homeschooling parent is a Facilitator.
What does a facilitator do? They encourage, they support, they provide opportunites, and they help point the way. This is different from deciding, planning, preparing, and managing all of your child's learning for them. Instead, a facilitator allows the child to make decisions and learn from their experiences, while providing targeted support as needed to help them reach their goals.
It's nutured by the learning environment
To cultivate intrinsic motivation, environment is everything.
Curate an environment that encourages intrinsic motivation by:
offering a variety of choices in activities and resources
encouraging independence and a growth mindset
creating spaces that allow for child-led exploration, investigation, and play
offering opportunities that fuel your child's interests
supplying your child with more beneficial tools than toys
allowing your child to make mistakes and learn from natural consequences
It's grown by praising process and effort over specific results
When a child is learning to build their intrinsic motivation, how you praise them matters.
Praise that is focused on final outcomes can send the wrong message to the child: that their efforts are only vauable when the desired result is achieved.
However, praise that is focused on efforts acknowledges the child's progress along the way and sends the message that growth is possible even when the results may not be 100%.
The latter helps build intrinsic motivation because it helps validate the child's experience and process during the learning. This in turn helps drive them to want to continue thier learning process for learning's sake, rather than simply acheiving a set result.
It also helps that when you choose to praise, you do so in a sincere and targeted way.
Vague, general statements of praise such as "good job drawing", do not help as much to build intrinsic motivation as targeted, specific statements like, "I can see you worked hard to draw your lines straight."
Click here to read about 42 other ways to help build intrinsic motivation, the Montessori way.