The Role of Support: Cultivating Intrinsic Motivation Series with David P. Langford (Part 3)

In this episode, Andrew and David discuss one aspect of cultivating intrinsic motivation: the role of support. Cooperation and collaboration don't just happen, and leaving a group of people - particularly kids - to just do as they please isn't cultivating motivation. So how do you support intrinsic motivation?

0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is The Role of Support in Intrinsic Motivation. David, take it away.

0:00:29.5 David Langford: Thank you. So we're working through five factors that lead to high levels of intrinsic motivation. And we started off with control, autonomy, ownership, however you want to think about that, but that's number one. And then we had a discussion around that you have to develop levels of cooperation. And today I want to talk about the idea of support. So I'll never forget a kindergarten class, so students was giving a presentation to the State Board of Education and they were telling the state board about all the ownership they had in class and how they cooperated and how they did all these things on their own and they just knew what to do and had high degrees of ownership. And one of the board members said, "Well, if you're doing all these things, what's your teacher doing?" And without hesitating, I'll never forget this little boy grabs a microphone and he says, "The teacher is not in the closet, you know."

0:01:39.7 AS: My gosh, insightful.

0:01:42.1 DL: Oh yeah, the room was, there was probably 300 people in the room, at this state board meeting, and you could, the whispers were just, "What did he say? What is he talking about?" See, he knew intuitively that he was being allowed to do these things and supported to do these things and to work together and have a real community in the classroom. And that just didn't happen by itself.

0:02:12.4 AS: That's interesting because in that case, you sometimes would think, oh, the teacher's just, you know, letting the class go free or something like that. But it takes a lot of work. I mean, just as you talked, I was thinking about how confrontational America is in the world. You know, here I am in Asia and most people outside of the world do not think that America is a cooperative partner. In fact, people around the world oftentimes say, you know, they don't know whether it's better to be an enemy or a friend of America. And there's that just competitive. There's just not that cooperative. How do we work this out? How do we work together to get a better result for all of us? So continue on. Tell us more about support.

0:02:57.6 DL: Yeah. So if you if you want to see more intrinsic motivation emerge, you need to take a look at what you are doing. And you know, when you point a finger there, what is it that saying, there's three fingers pointing back at you? So yeah, what am I doing and how am I managing in such a way to not have a high degree of cooperation or a high degree of performance in a group? And so there are some very key factors that I've learned over the last 40 years that will either hinder or help intrinsic motivation to come out. And the first one I want to talk about, how do you support people is the area of feedback. So feedback versus evaluation.

0:03:53.9 DL: So you know, we always think that our job is to evaluate people, evaluate performance, evaluate a paper that you write and then give it back to you, put a grade on it, etcetera. People don't respect evaluation very well. There are just so many opinions in it, etcetera. Performance evaluations, Deming talked vociferously about getting rid of performance evaluations, but they do respect feedback. So when I'm in a classroom and I hav