3

Motivation and Self-Direction

Learning environments give learners a great deal of freedom and control to manage their own learning. They can access performance support as they need it, get quick skill pointers in the flow of work, pop up from their desks to consult with a colleague, and access all manner of resources and activities for ongoing development. Learners determine what they want to learn, which resources and approaches they want to access in order to learn, when to engage in learning activities, and how and where they are going to apply their learning.

In contemporary workplaces, this is exactly what is required. We have come to understand that many learning needs do not require formal solutions; in fact, formal solutions can be a waste of time. In The Power of Pull from the Deloitte Centre for the Edge, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison have suggested that informal learning is necessary in the workplace because the knowledge and skills that people need to be effective are continuously emerging. By the time knowledge is captured and repackaged for formal training, it’s out of date. New knowledge and skills often need to be developed in the flow of work. These thought leaders assert that successful workers will be the ones who develop an exceptional ability to pull information as needed and share knowledge and skills as they emerge.

It’s a powerful vision, and one that needs to inform our approach to supporting learning in the workplace. But there is a caution. This kind of self-provisioned, in-the-workflow learning requires learners to have specific learning skills, and many employees do not know how to learn in this fashion. Many are accustomed to getting guidance from teachers, trainers, and coaches; they may not have developed the capabilities that lead to self-directed learning success. They may not even recognize that they don’t employ effective learning skills. A 2014 CEB study found that only 20 percent of learners were engaging in effective learning strategies.

It is important to note, then, that the foundational element on the learning environment chart is learner motivation and self-direction; it underpins the ability to take advantage of every component in the environment, including formal training and education. If that element is weak—if employees lack motivation or are unskilled at managing their own learning—a learning environment strategy may fail.

So while a learning environment strategy fits in with a futuristic vision, some employees may not be quite ready to take advantage of a set of materials and activities for self-directed learning. This does not imply, however, that learning needs to be controlled and monitored. Instead, learning leaders can incorporate a number of supports into the learning environment that smooth the way for learners who are not used to these more informal and in-the-moment approaches.

To be effective at designing a learning environment and promoting a productive learning culture, designers should understand the capabilities necessary for effective self-directed learning, and they should reorient some of their design skills toward building learning capability in the workforce.

Motivation and self-direction are as important to the success of a learning environment as sunlight is to the growth of a garden.

SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING PILLARS

Learner motivation and self-directed learning have been topics for research and theorizing for decades, and many useful models and recommendations have come out of those studies. According to the research, adults who engage in self-directed learning start with a recognition of a discrepancy between expectations and reality, or a recognition of a need to learn. This prompts an individual to analyze and identify the knowledge and skills needed to move forward. Once needs are identified, self-directed learners usually access and use whatever is most convenient in their immediate surroundings as sources for learning. People are often a go-to option; learners ask questions, seek experts, and ask for recommendations. The digital world has greatly expanded what may be quickly available, but it also provides such an array of choices that learners tend to choose from among only the first few things they encounter. In making their selections, learners look for relevant resources that capture their interest and prove most useful. They often judge the quality of the learning resources on how engaging they are, and how specifically relevant they are to their own context. If there is too much of a leap between the content and the application, learners may miss the connections.

Learners go further afield only when their needs can’t be adequately satisfied with at-hand resources. You can imagine, then, why providing curated resources in a learning environment would be a boon. Self-directed learning processes also involve some degree of self-monitoring, because the learners determine the degree to which they have learned from the material they access. And while learners often attempt to learn in the middle of the flow of work, it is helpful for them to pause work in order to engage with learning resources and activities and to process what they are learning.

A synthesis of articles and books on self-directed learning (and other research on successful learning attitudes and skills) suggests a number of key factors that need to be inherent in any effective learning environment: motivation, intention, attention, self-awareness, engagement, relationships, and space and time. These might be considered the seven pillars of self-directed learning (Figure 3-1).

Motivation

People pursue self-directed learning when they are motivated to do so, primarily because they have noted some gap in their knowledge or skills related to things they want to do. In the workplace, people are motivated to learn in order to:

• Attain increased job competence.
• Improve potential for career growth.
• Make progress on a goal.
• Support a cause.
• Avoid failure.
• Belong or be part of something.
• Demonstrate autonomy and independence.
• Meet a challenge.
• Gain stature or respect.
• Attain a desirous lifestyle.

FIGURE 3-1. SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING PILLARS

People are motivated because they believe learning will help them do something that will produce an outcome they value. Learners may unconsciously (or consciously) ask themselves: Can I learn this? If I do, what will it get me? Do I value what it will get me?

When you are gathering information about your learners, it’s important to get a sense of the degree of motivation they have toward learning the knowledge and skills that are at the center of the learning environment you are designing. If you are concerned that their motivation is weak (or may be overpowered by motivation toward other goals), then a first task is to determine what (if anything) you can do to increase learner motivation (in a positive way).

Learner motivation theorists tell us there are ways facilitators can promote learner motivation and persistence. Tactics include ensuring the relevance of the material, pointing out the real benefits of learning (what learners will be able to do as a result), helping learners feel like they are part of a community, and respecting the learners’ experience, contributions, and intelligence (Wlodkowski 2008). Not surprisingly, these are some of the same factors that come up as important to self-directed learning.

Intention

Intention drives learning, and more importantly, it drives the application of learning to specific tasks and roles. Intention is similar to motivation, but much more specific—it’s about having explicit objectives with an application context in mind. Learning is deeper and longer lasting when people consider where they can apply the learning while also engaging in learning activities.

Intention is focused by an understanding of how the learning is relevant to achieving goals and accomplishing tasks. The more context-specific and relevant materials are, the more likely that learners will see exactly how their new knowledge can be applied. Transfer of learning research suggests that managers can play a role in promoting intention by helping employees recognize the connection between knowledge and skill development and work achievements (Burke and Hutchins 2007). They can help learners set goals, and they can follow up to support application.

Attention

In a world full of distractions, attention has become a precious commodity. We mislead ourselves into thinking that multitasking makes us more efficient. However, studies have shown that multitasking, which is an act of constantly switching attention, tends to degrade the quality of the attention we are giving to each task.

People need to pay attention in order to learn, and they need to be able to determine exactly what they are supposed to notice or discern. Learning from others requires us to carefully observe specific behaviors and notice the ways in which our behaviors are the same or different; grasping meaning requires us to read and listen closely, taking in the entire message and drilling down on the important parts. Focus, concentration, attentiveness, and vigilance often play a role in learning, and these are qualities that need to be nurtured and developed.

In self-directed learning people have to decide where their attention will be focused, which often requires a longer-term commitment to seeking specific opportunities to learn more about the targeted knowledge base or skill.

Self-Awareness

Knowing one’s self—strengths and opportunities—is often a precondition for learning. The process of self-directed learning typically begins with recognizing a gap in a knowledge base or skill (which is needed for current responsibilities or anticipated for future roles or tasks). Identifying these development needs is an exercise in self-analysis and sets the stage for motivation, attention, and intention.

Later in the process, as learners apply their new knowledge or skills, they often need to monitor whether their actions are producing the desired impact or are in alignment with the image in their minds. The critical processes here are reflection and feedback, which further inform and deepen self-knowledge. Learners need tools for self-assessment and models for comparison in order to deepen their self-awareness. They also need the capacity to receive and interpret feedback.

Engagement

To learn, people need to be actively involved in the process, either intellectually or physically (or both). Emotional engagement also promotes learning by adding extra intensity to the experience. Only active engagement can power the brain processes that allow people to retain knowledge and skill.

Engagement is certainly facilitated through experiential learning practices, but other components in the environment are more effective when they are engaging as well. You can engage people through effective writing and solid design skills that ensure that material is interesting, compelling, and memorable. Readings that are emotionally resonant, people who tell great stories, team practices that are highly productive and bonding are all examples of how all kinds of learning activities can be engaging.

Instructional designers, in particular, have developed many strategies to engage learners, which include giving them relevant challenges, letting them see their own progress through repeated practice, minimizing passive activities like reading and listening, and providing frequent opportunities to interact in a variety of intellectually challenging ways (not clicks or movement without learning purpose). Gamification techniques have also been shown to increase engagement in learning. These techniques include crafting learning around a story, introducing challenge and mystery, rewarding learners with advancing levels, ensuring intrinsic and contextual feedback, and giving learners the opportunity to repeat practice in order to get better (Kapp 2012).

Relationships

While we think of self-directed learning as being an independent activity, the truth is that a complete learning process often relies on trusted relationships—people who provide feedback, point out resources, act as role models, and discuss problems. Relationships may be relatively casual (following people on social media) or quite deep (relationships with supportive mentors). We learn from others through questioning, instruction, coaching, observation, reflection, storytelling, and more.

It’s important that every learning environment identifies people who can engage with learners as subject matter experts, facilitators of learning, or fellow learners and collaborators. Learners need to have a diversity of perspectives to widen their points of view, and developing trusted relationships is a boon to deeper learning.

Space and Time

It has become common to say that we learn in the flow of work, and some learning through experience is indeed impossible to separate from work. But the kind of development for which you would consider creating a learning environment is usually development that takes time. Not only do learners need to persist in engaging a variety of learning components over time, they also need the head space to reflect, study, and make plans.

When employees worry that they don’t have time to learn, it’s possible that one of the problems is that they don’t have time to waste looking for learning resources. Your work in curating a learning environment provides substantial help in this regard. By minimizing the time spent trying to identify materials and activities to support learning, employees are able to maximize the time they have to dedicate to productive learning.

If your identified learner group is not encouraged (or able) to take time out to reflect and learn, to engage with one another to think over problems, or to take breaks that allow creative energies to recharge, then a learning environment may not be helpful to them. When schedules are tightly packed and employees are required to be engaged in the work nearly every hour of the day, time for learning is hard to find. They may learn from doing the work, of course, but some of their learning goals no doubt require time to engage and process. When workspaces are distracting, concentration may be compromised. While it is often advised to let learners choose their time and place for learning, sometimes clearly allocating time and space is the best support you can provide. This may be especially important in jobs that have no natural lulls, such as call centers and manufacturing.

SHORING UP SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING PILLARS

You can get a sense of how strong and stable the pillars for self-directed learning are among your learner group by considering the quick assessment in Worksheet 3-1.

Be cautious about giving the assessment directly to learners in a survey because it may be hard for them to self-assess some items (they may not have the background to know) and it may be difficult to admit disagreement with some items. You may know the learner group enough to make an estimate, or you can ask your project sponsors and subject matter experts to help.

If fewer than 60 percent of your learners would agree with a particular statement, then it is probably important to do something deliberate to strengthen that pillar. While what you can do is dependent on your learners and context, you may get some ideas from the short list of recommendations in Table 3-1.

WORKSHEET 3-1: PILLAR STRENGTH ASSESSMENT

TABLE 3-1. TACTICS FOR STRENGTHENING MOTIVATION AND SELF-DIRECTION

DESIGN TOOLS FOR LEARNER MOTIVATION AND SELF-DIRECTION

When learners are deeply self-directive, they are fully capable of managing their choices in a robust learning environment. If your learners are capable of self-direction, but not necessarily experienced at it, then you might want to provide some scaffolding in your environment to help guide them along. Rather than simply hoping for the best, a learning environment designer can apply specific design tools that amplify learner motivation and self-direction: curating, contextualizing, connecting, scaffolding, mapping, and assembling.

Curating involves applying judgment to ensure that the materials included in a learning environment are relevant and high quality. Curation also includes looking for the specific types of materials you have ascertained will be most welcome and useful for your learners. Effective curation supports the pillars of attention, engagement, and motivation. For more detail, see chapter 2.

Contextualizing means taking action to point out the relevance of the resources available in the environment and to highlight the ways that learning can be applied. Contextualizing is especially helpful for strengthening intention, and also supports attention and motivation. Contextualizing is part of the curation process in learning environment design.

Connecting encompasses all the ways the environment promotes social learning. Actively connecting people strengthens the relationship pillar, and often provides a strong support for learner motivation. Connecting is what the people component is all about.

Scaffolding involves giving learners active support for completing learning processes. It is a way of strengthening most pillars, but is vital for self-awareness, attention, intention, and space and time.

Mapping provides specific direction for building a knowledge base or skill—organizing a series of learning activities for maximum impact. A map can be like travel directions, suggesting a specific order for engaging a series of activities. Or it can be more like a sightseeing guide, pointing out not-to-be-missed highlights that can be accessed in any order. Mapping props up motivation by giving learners a sense of progress and it supports attention by pointing out exactly why each piece is on the map. Often, learners are also given space and time to complete a map of learning activities.

Assembling is the process that organizes all the learning materials and resources in an accessible place. The format of the access point (webpages or resource list, for example) helps to focus learners’ attention, and it saves them wasted time looking for resources.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

To say we should support self-directed learning sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? There has also been talk of formalizing informal learning, which seems equally contradictory. But a strategy that counts on self-directed learning does not necessarily require learning leaders to step back and leave learners to their own devices. We can endorse “agency”—learners’ capacity to act, make choices, and define and satisfy their own learning needs—without abandoning them to the quirks of a browser search. Recognizing the depth of potential resources on the Internet and the irreplaceable personal support obtained from peers and experts does not necessarily mean that we must therefore discontinue providing active support for learning.

Jane Hart, Randy Emelo, and others in the field have advocated for learning professionals to become learning coaches and one-on-one advisers, but that model is not scalable in many situations. Learning environment design provides the strategy to “marry structure and freedom to create something altogether new” (Thomas and Seely Brown 2011). It provides direction and support without forcing learners through a specific path or timetable that isn’t right for them.

Many of our educational institutions are still using 20th-century teaching strategies, so professionals in the workplace and in institutions of higher education are schooled in more passive, compliance-based approaches to learning. Supporting the development of self-directed learning skills will set learners up for a lifetime of acquiring new knowledge. The energy you may put into shoring up the self-directed learning pillars to enable a learning environment strategy will pay off when learners take those skills and apply them to their next learning need.