Esteem Needs & Learner Motivation

Learner Motivation – What exactly it is, and how do you achieve it?
Those of you with some bit of management background would easily recall the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy (Yes, I know that he added two more later, but the purpose for which I am drawing a reference to the hierarchy is solved with the use of levels given in the older pyramid – and so I’d stay with the five-level hierarchy that I studied about two decades ago.)

Maslow’s hierarchy is the much-criticized yet wonderful device that gives us a complete view of the driving forces that humans experience. It divides human needs into five levels and professes that humans move up the hierarchy by fulfilling the needs at each level. So, when a person’s physiological needs are met, he or she begins to experience the safety and security needs. After meeting the safety and security needs, humans begin to look for love and belongingness. When they find love and make a family, they begin to worry about esteem needs, which are fourth level needs. The fifth level needs and the sixth/seventh level needs that were added later, aren’t very relevant to our discussion, and so let’s not worry about them.

Now, you may ask me the question that’s been bothering you. Why am I talking about Maslow’s hierarchy and what does it have to do with learner motivation? Ask away. I am ready with the answer.

Human needs are the reason behind whatever humans do – including learn, and so Maslow’s hierarchy gives us an excellent starting point for our discussion on learner motivation. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself – why are you reading this article? Did you say – to increase your understanding of learner motivation? Okay, so why do you want to increase your knowledge/enhance your understanding of this concept and not of nano-engineering? Oh, because it’s relevant – and how would it help? It could help you conduct better training sessions – and you want to make those sessions better for two reasons – 1. You want better participant feedback leading to a stronger position in your organization (if my audience persona is right – you are trying to meet your esteem needs at level 4,) or 2. You want your learners to respect you as a good trainer (again, you are trying to fulfill your esteem needs.)

If you look closely, all learning is an outcome of human needs. Depending on the learner’s current level, the output of learning fulfills a deeper human need.

Here are two stark examples:

A vocational training course taken by an undergraduate/graduate:
(Need Level: Safety & Security Needs)

The main aim of the learner enrolling for this program is “to find a job”. Such training courses would be advertised with “placement guarantees” and the learner’s satisfaction would depend on “getting a job” rather than “having learned what the course promised.” Real-life examples abound – we just need to look around ourselves. Thus, if an institute is willing to negotiate placements with companies and work out models that would allow their students to find a job, it would not need to ensure learning. The learners at this Need level would consider a certificate a tool to find a job, and would not be concerned about the competencies or their lack, and that they need to fulfill the role-requirements of a job.

A professional training program taken by individuals who wish to enhance their knowledge:
(Need Level: Esteem Needs)

The aim of this learner is to burnish his or her existing skills, or acquire new skills for an immediate need. This learner is looking for enhancing his or her image/professional value, and so is concerned more about the knowledge/learning gained from the learning program. A certificate is a feather in this individual’s cap, only when it is supported by the capability it promises. Training programs aimed at meeting the needs of this learner are promoted on the basis of their instructional strengths and appeal only to those individuals who have crossed the level 3 in Maslow’s hierarchy. These programs don’t promise jobs and thus they have to stand on their own merit – they thrive or die depending on whether or not they meet their instructional goals.

The second type of programs should only be designed by such people who can “apply” the principles of instructional design. Knowing what Bloom’s taxonomy is, or listing Gagne’s Nine Events correctly in no way makes one an instructional designer. Anyone can memorize them. If you want to create training programs that are lauded by professionals, you have to mix instructional logic with your blood and let it course through your veins. Instructional logic should become the only standard that should exist for you. Only then would you be of some use to the learners who learn for fulfilling their esteem needs.

Let me return to learner motivation. For this discussion, I concern myself with the second kind of learning providers, because only they would bother with motivating the learner to learn.

My thumb rule for ensuring learner motivation is simple. The first step is to let the learners know that you are genuinely interested in their learning. Now, that’s easier said than done. Of course, you don’t walk into a classroom and make a statement, “I am genuinely interested in your learning.” That would be a bit…corny, and I don’t think that would go down well with the audience, especially as they hardly know you. So, let your work speak for you. If you’ve worked hard to make learning happen, it would become clear to them within a few minutes.

Your preparation, your belief in the concepts that you teach, your ability to connect with each learner individually…all this will confirm to them your interest in their learning. You win half your battle when your learners begin to trust you – when they know that you aren’t someone picked off the shelf to “conduct a two-day training program” because of your communication ability and/or your personality. This practice of “hiring” trainers who have little or no subject-matter expertise is becoming common in our industry. It may work with the safety-security needs kind of learners, who are more interested in the non-learning outcome of the training, but it doesn’t work with the elite esteem-need conscious learner, who is spending two days of his or her precious time in your company; and who expects learning as the end-result of the program.

When your participants place their trust in your intention and capability, you’ve won half your battle. For winning the next half, you have Keller’s ARCS model. Some can rattle off the expansion of this abbreviation in one breath – but if you want it to transform your training program, you need to run further with it. I am not going to take you through the usual details of the model – you can find them on a lot of wonderful sites – I’d rather give you a crisp summary of its usage.

1. Remember that the ARCS model isn’t a single-use, use-and-throw tool. It is multi-purpose, multi-use equipment, which finds continuous use in content creation and deployment.
   
   
2. Gain the learner’s attention for every new topic, ensure that whatever you present to the audience is relevant to the topic and that the relevance is visible to the audience, don’t close the topic until your audience has had practiced enough and has begun to feel confident about it, and don’t close the topic, until all the objectives for a topic are met.
   
   
3. Don’t kill your learner of boredom. Once as a greenhorn professional, I had naively recommended to an academician friend, that he shouldn’t change the colors used in his PowerPoint presentation after every group of slides. “It kills the theme,” I said. “But it keeps my learner’s awake,” he replied. I understood what he meant when I conducted my first training session. So do whatever, but don’t let your audience be bored.
   
   
4. Arouse curiosity, satisfy it; arouse curiosity again, satisfy it again! I don’t think that this needs further elaboration.
   
   
5. Engage learners through interaction. The adult learner doesn’t want to just sit and listen – the adult learner wants to contribute, wants to tell all others that he knows so much! (Another manifestation of Maslow’s hierarchy – level 4 Needs.) It’s a win-win situation – so why not make it a feature of your training programs?

Of course, this list is but the tip of the iceberg called learner motivation. Motivating our learner to learn is one of the two most important jobs that a trainer has to do, the other is to transfer and reinforce learning – and while dealing with the adult audience that comes to your training program for fulfilling its fourth level needs, we need to remember that the ARCS is complete only when learning is imparted as promised.

Author: Shafali R. Anand