Development of Under Motivated and/or Under Prepared Learners

Today we are talking about the development of under motivated and or underprepared learners um this is a huge issue i think for a lot of us regardless of the setting um and i think one of the biggest gifts that we can give to our learners in addition to feedback that's what i like to say about feedback um is helping them to increase their motivation we all know that every single learner that comes to us is not going to be motivated to the same level um but there are different approaches that we can take in helping them to develop their motivation level um and dr dain is here to talk with us and guide us and how to do that dr dain is professor of psychology at radford university carilion and and i think most of us know him i won't do much further of an introduction but if he wants to share anything i will allow him to do so again for those of you just joining if if you have any questions throughout the discussion please feel free to open your chat box and type them in there we will try to monitor them and dr dain will as well so thank you for everybody for joining us and um thank you frank if you want to go ahead and take it away we'll go from here okay uh thanks for the introduction uh i'm gonna share my uh screen and uh go ahead and get a check i've got a little [Music] am a social psychologist so this could be a fairly heavy psychological emphasis to the talk uh and just remind everybody if you ask a question in the chat and i don't um necessarily notice it and get to it uh do please feel perfectly free to unmute your microphone and say hey frank i have a question because i just as soon have you asked questions along the way even though we will have time at the end for questions if you have a question that occurs as a result of something i'm saying at the moment and uh and you'd like your question to be answered at that time uh please do feel free to interrupt and ask your question um i know what it's like to have to try to hold off on a question and then um you realize about five minutes later that the question's gone and so uh please do feel free let me start with a story uh a story about someone who's stuck at the bottom of a hole and uh as they see somebody go by they yell up to the out to the top of the hole uh excuse [Music] uh [Music] the person at the top of the hole sends down an entire self-help book and uh president paul begins to read it and actually realizes that the self-help book is not very powerful at all and so after a while the person feels as though they're in a much evil smaller opening at the top and looked up and noticed to get another person called i can help you a great deal and sends a whole list of resources and the person begins to go through the list of resources and realizes that the list of resources is not particularly helpful and eventually feels like they're at the bottom of a much deeper and much greater hole and the individual feels in much worse situation than ever before and another person goes by the top of the hole and the person calls out somewhat more faintly this time help i'm at the bottom of the hole can you do something for me and the person looks down and says as a matter of fact i can and jumps down to the bottom of the hole and the person said are you crazy now we're both at the bottom of this hole and the other person says yes i know but i've been down here before and i know the way out and so other than that i've seen a particular episode of the west wing can we learn from the civil story the only way that we're going to help the students who need extra help is to jump down into the hole with them and it really doesn't matter which theoretical perspective you want to adopt the answers going to be the same we can pay attention to the gsj and his theories of cognitive development for children and adolescents and we find out that in order to create development you need to challenge individuals but you need to change the tools by being there with them by presenting and changing the environment to them and i know you're all sitting there or maybe standing there and thinking but my learners are not children and adolescents and that's okay because lev vygotsky says the same thing and that in order to develop learners you need to be there and provide scaffolding for them and [Music] and his theory of planned behavior says that in order to get people to engage in behavior you need to interact closely with them and convince them to develop plans to for planned behavior changes and if you don't like isaac eisen maybe you like alvin dura social learning and in social learning not just the theory but all of the research that followed it yes i am so sorry to interrupt you but we are uh losing your audio again and again and i just sent to you through chat a phone number to call in is this better that is perfect all right great so uh talking about um al bandura's social learning theory and how we're learning through observation and modeling and so part of what we need to do with the learners who need more attention is in part show them what we want them to do and as well uh we also need to deal with the work from muzaba sharif and what became known as social judgment theory and this may perhaps be the most important of the research areas that will come into play and what sharif showed us as well as the colleagues who worked with him and all of his graduate students is that change doesn't happen dramatically unless there's a traumatic situation and so if we're talking about uh changing someone's attitude or changing someone's skills saying on a scale from one to ten they don't shift from two to eight they shift from two to three and then they shift from three to four and then they shift from four to five and that's why when we find people who are in opposite ends of a continuum either on a death penalty or an abortion or red state blue state kinds of issues and they get into an argument they just end up on opposite sides of the room yelling at each other because they're not going to shift from two to eight they're not going to convince each other that attitude change or cognitive development happens gradually and we also learned from the work of fritz hyder and what became known as balance theory that when development happens when that change occurs from three to four that it takes a while for the individual to essentially rebalance um their cognitions the related cognition so as they come to change their mind about a particular topic the related cognitions need to change as well and a certain amount of reframing has to happen to bring other cognitions in mind uh and if if you like you could think of it in terms of settling some cognitive dissonance uh was the hydra's balance theory was the was the basis for a fair amount of work in terms of cognitive dissonance and as well we also need to pay attention uh to the work of susan fisk and her work in terms of de-individuating or individuating categorized others and treating the learners as individuals and so i actually want to argue with the title of my own talk instead of talking about under-motivated individuals or underprepared individuals talk about students who need to grow in motivation or students who need to grow in terms of their preparation because we need to get away from labels if we're going to work very well with the kinds of individuals that we're talking about in fact we need to get away from talking about kinds of individuals and just talk about individuals period and one of the ways in which we're going uh to be able to do that i'm sorry i've lost the uh the chat um [Music] one of the ways in which we're going to be able to do that is to work with psychological mindset concept that was developed and made possible by carol dweck and you probably uh familiar with psychological mindset in terms of a static versus a growth mindset but i'd like you to get rid of the notion that it's a dichotomous concept uh it is in fact a continuum uh and for the most part there's almost nobody who is at either end of the continuum unless uh they're um having uh clinical difficulties hardly anybody thinks of themselves as completely unchangeable and hardly anybody thinks of themselves as completely changeable most of us are somewhere in the middle and in fact most of us uh have mindsets plural that vary depending upon the situation of the context in which we're in most of dweck's work was done with respect to intelligence and thinking that intelligence is flexible and is capable of growth but psychological mindset applies to not only intelligence but also to skills and motivation and a number of other concepts in fact applies to most most concepts including self-esteem we tend to think of self-esteem as something that's fixed but it is also something that is capable of growth so one of the things that we need to think of in terms of dealing with learners whether they're medical students or residents or faculty faculty or learners as well is in terms of working with them as individuals with a growth mindset as well as um ourselves developing the concept of growth mindset when we're thinking of them as learners so not only do we need to work towards convincing others that they have they should adopt a growth mindset but we need to keep cis and fisk's work in mind and de-individ de-individuate our learners and begin to treat them as individuals and to to treat each of them separately excuse me you have to change your own mindset and avoid thinking of them as under-motivated learners or under-prepared learners and thinking uh think of the learner as someone who is capable of growing in motivation or someone who's capable of growing in the amount of preparation that they have someone who is becoming more motivated someone who is becoming better prepared and avoid the stereotype thinking that tends to come with categories it tends to come with labels and that's not as easy to do as we might think because one of the things that research keeps pointing out to us is that humans are really really good at stereotyping in fact there's a fair amount of research that is consistent with the notion that our brains may be in fact hardwired to engage in stereotyping that as soon as we are capable of developing a category we start thinking of the members of that category in categorical terms and in a few minutes i'm going to talk about some of the research that's that's involved in that and so it appears that we're not able to stop stereotyping what we have to do instead is to avoid engaging in acting upon the stereotypes once they're activated in our minds so as soon as we think of a category we think of the stereotypes associated with the category and what we have to do is not allow those stereotypes to engage in our decision making and so i apologize but i'm now going to automatically make you think of elephants while i take a sip of water and all the stereotypes that you have about elephants automatically were engaged and i would be willing to bet that none of you who are listening were unable to think about all that you know about elephants and so now your task is to not allow your knowledge of elephants to get in the way of paying attention to the other things that we're going to talk about because elephants are pretty much irrelevant to anything else that we're going to talk about so one of the things that we do have to talk about is the fact that our students are learners because they're not all students for the most part changing have just recently changed the levels at which they're operating medical students were not long ago undergraduates our m3s were not long ago m2s our residents were not long ago medical students or our fourth year residents were not long ago second year residents or our faculty were not long ago residents or our faculty were not long ago graduate students and one of the difficulties in getting students to engage in that growth mindset is getting them getting learners to engage in the growth mindset is getting them to understand that at this new level at which they're operating they have they may have to change the way in which they behave they may have to change the processes that they have been using at the previous level and that what worked at the previous level may no longer work and that they may have to become good all over again at this new level and so they were outstanding undergraduates and they've become average medical students well they were outstanding medical students and they've become average residents they were outstanding residents and they become average faculty members partly because all of the outstanding residents were hired into faculty positions and so they look around and they've been accustomed to being the ones who stood out and were the ones who had you know three publications as a resident and we're engaged in four research projects and we're the ones who everybody looked to for advice and suddenly as a faculty member everybody had four publications last year is expected to do five publications this year or everybody had a grant last year and everybody's expected to submit three grand applications this year every time we change a level uh every time we change a level chances are we're much more likely to become average than we are to continue to stand out and that's a redefinition of our self-concept that often leads to the appearance of not having sufficient motif motivation or the appearance of not having sufficient preparation but it turns out it's just a matter of having to accept the challenge of saving of of redefining the self-concept all over again as they had to do at the previous step change i always tell folks sorry for the interruption i always tell folks there's always a curve there's a curve at every new level there's a curve for every different concept and so when you're used to being far to the right of the curve that uh it's very disconcerting and it you take a big hit to your ego when you're a little bit more towards the middle maybe to the left side and that can be uh very traumatizing for folks and kind of stymies them for a little bit so it puts them into that static mindset whereas they may not have been or the rest of their life or they wouldn't have needed to consider that yeah it moves them further to the to the static end of the continuum in that um they have in the previous step they became comfortable and so that the tendency as with all of us is when things are working we keep doing what worked we keep doing the same thing that got us to where we we are and so once we've moved to the new step we're going to continue doing what got us to the new step even though the context in the environment has changed and so it takes a while to adapt to the new environment and that that time it takes to adapt to the new environment it's going to make us appear to be awkward it's going to make us appear to be doing the wrong thing it's going to make us appear to be unprepared but it's very likely that we're not unprepared it's very likely that we're not unmotivated what's more likely for those who appear to be under-motivated is that they have not prioritized all of their responsibilities in the way that they should if we're talking about medical students the admissions committee has probably not screwed up they've gone through a rigorous undergraduate curriculum to get into medical school of course they're motivated if we're talking about residents they've gone through a rigorous medical curriculum to become residents of course they're motivated if we're talking about faculty they've gone through a rigorous graduate program or residency program and they've made the nearly irrational decision to opt for a faculty salary instead of a salary outside of academia they're not unmotivated right the problem is they have lives and they haven't prioritized them well and the problem is probably not that they're underprepared the problem is that they haven't figured out how to change the way they do things to fit the new environment now it is entirely possible that they're under-motivated for clinical reasons perhaps they're depressed or perhaps they've become depressed and it may be time for some sort of uh to convince them to to seek clinical treatment of some sort but barring that it's very unlikely that they're under-motivated it's also very unlikely that they're underprepared it's entirely possible that the admissions committee screwed up it's entirely possible that the search committee screwed up and that they really don't belong here but odds are that they do belong here that they're not underprepared it's just that whatever processes of preparation of studying or practice or other relevant processes that got them here are no longer working or the way i like to think about it they finally hit the wall and that what got them here no longer works and they have to find a new way to study a new way to keep up with all the reading a new way to keep up with the physical skills and excuse me they haven't figured out that that's the case just yet and so what they're probably doing is doing more of what got them here doing it longer or doing it more frequently or trying harder and so what we have to do is convince them that what got them here isn't working and they need to do something different or if it's an apparent motivational problem that the way they've structured their priorities isn't working they're not allowing enough time for what we want them to do and they need to figure out a different way to structure their priorities that need for growth and motivation is probably not a need for growth and motivation it's a need for restructuring their time again it could be a clinical program a problem they may be under motivated but that's probably not likely so typically what we do is head for peer support groups we want them to help each other and the problem is in all of these situations in medical school and in residency and even among junior faculty peers are in competitive situations support is tricky and although there's not research specifically on how much competition might get in the way of peer support um i think it is competition that may well be the reason why the research on peer support both in medical school and in residency is quite mixed sometimes peer support programs work sometimes they don't sometimes they actually turn out to be less than neutral shall we say and as much as we like to think that medical students help each other and residents help each other and faculty help each other and they do there are also times when medical students are competing for residency programs when residents are competing for jobs when faculty are competing for grants at least for grant money or for tenure positions or for promotions and so the problem is figuring out when it is then when when it is that individuals when individual peers are competing and when they're not competing because when they're competing there's a potential for implicit bias and implicit bias is not reserved only for prejudice only for underrepresented underrepresented minorities well excuse me jenny xiao and j van babel have demonstrated not just in this study but in a number of studies that group favoritism was known as in-group favoritism can shift very suddenly and quite easily as a function of in-group versus out-group identification and in fact in-group versus out-group identification can shift very suddenly depending upon what group membership is brought into context all of us are members of a lot of different groups i mentioned i'm a social psychologist i'm also a statistician i'm also a radford faculty member i'm a btc school of medicine faculty member i'm a mercer university school of medicine faculty member i'm also a drummer i'm also a resident of south roanoke i'm a resident of the commonwealth of virginia i'm bald i'm overweight i'm members of lots of different groups which one of those groups comes into play is is a matter of the context of the situation right now faculty member ed radford and social psychologists are the most important ones who's a member of my in group and who's a member of my out group changes as a function of which group membership is most important and in-group favoritism is another one of those social phenomena that seem to be hardwired into our great into our brain we are always better than they are and it doesn't matter who we are and it doesn't matter who they are we like us more than we like them they are not always bad but we are always better and so when peers are in competition the opportunity for implicit bias is always there and so peers may not always be as supportive i think it's best to allow peer support to occur organically provide support for it but i don't think it's a good idea to officially organize it sanction it and certainly not to force it upon our learners i think instead what we need to do is jump down in the hole with them engage the stages of behavior change we all know them well and reach out early and catch the learners at the pre-contemplation stage make them aware of the problem preferably before they are monitor our learners and when they start apparently running the problem jump down the hole with them and ask them tell them we think they seem to be not doing very well they seem to be not doing as well as we would like them to be doing ask them do they not have enough time to do all the things that they want to do in terms of what we want them to do if they seem to have it if they think they have enough time ask them what kind what are what are they doing in terms of of studying is it if we think it's studying if it's practice if if we think they're going home early why are they why why do they not seem to be staying as long as we would like them to stay what's getting in the way of staying we need to have that difficult conversation we need to do it as nicely and kindly and gently as possible but we need to jump down in the hole with them as soon as we see them in the hole and easily important at that point frank to ask them if they feel as if if they're recognizing that they're in the hole or if they're sort of oblivious to this so sort of how do you think things are going how do you think you're doing are you fully aware at this point that they recognize that i think i think well i i think we start off by saying we're we think they're in trouble we think they're not doing as well as we would like them to and make them aware that we think there's an issue and then find out from them if they're aware of it or not but i don't i don't think it's a good idea to start with are you aware that there's a problem because that question however we phrase it already makes them aware that we think there is so it sets them up for the impossible question well if i say no i look like i'm dumb if i say yes then i look like i don't care because i haven't gone to you for help yet so just start with you know there's an issue we need to talk about let's talk about it i've noticed that you're you're not putting in as much practice time as i was as i would like i've noticed that you're not putting in or you're not scoring as high as i would like on the exams and put it put it on us you know put it on yourself you're not doing what i would like you to do and move on from there because you're setting the standards for the learner let the learner know that they're not reaching your standards and then we go back to carol dweck's work and we've got to convince them that they need to in her terms embrace the challenge to accept that they need to come up to our standards and so we word that initial discussion in terms of you're not meeting my standards you need to try to reach my standards and recognize that they are going to fail to mute our standards from time to time and they need to bounce back from that we need to help them develop some resilience and that's part of that growth mindset as well that just because they don't meet the standards doesn't mean that they won't ever meet the standards and just because they try and fail from time to time doesn't mean that they won't ever reach it and we need to convince them that effort is how they're going to reach mastery that it is going to take a lot of tries and that they're going to have to learn from criticism that we are going to give them feedback and i don't think we should be trying those old techniques of saying something good and then being critical and then saying something good again we all know the epithet kind of sandwich that everybody refers that uses to describe that process and and it's not particularly effective because as soon as you say something good then everybody's sitting back and they're ignoring the good you say and waiting for the middle of the sandwich and then they're paying attention to the middle of the sandwich and they don't hear the good thing that you say afterwards instead provide constructive criticism and say this is where you need to grow too they're at three explain to them how they can get to four don't even begin to tell them about eight explain to them how they can get to four let them get to four let them begin to feel comfortable at four then move them to five and then probably the most difficult thing to help them to develop is to find an appreciation for and inspiration from the success of others we need to if we're going to develop learners we need to help them understand that other success is not their failure that the only standards that they need to compare themselves to on their own that they need to be better than they were last week or last month and the fact that other people may be moving faster is not particularly relevant for their development so um and so that's what i've got to say about the students who may need additional attention from us so let me unshare and or stop sharing the screen and ask if you have any additional questions or comments or would like to argue with me about anything that i've said and if you all don't mind when you are going to ask a question if you will just make sure to unmute um yourself and then feel free to also share your video when you're going to ask a question um anything is fair game he's a psychologist he can handle it i just wanted to say that i really appreciated your approach to how to um help people um recognize that they're having an issue i think perhaps in my teaching i have started by saying gee do you have an issue or gee i think you have an issue um hopefully a little bit nicer than that but um i think that's a good approach to that um and um also helping them move past that i thought was a good approach yeah thanks um yeah it really helps to uh to sort of accept the responsibility that we have for setting the standards and to own that that the standards are ours and let them know that they're not meeting the standards that we have set thank you so much for that talk um there's a lot that you give to think about um because i do sort of in um my job with a lot of different learners and different levels of learning and um the feedback sandwich um is something that i struggle with like every day because it used to be the old way of doing things and super interesting because i we had talked about this sandwich in detail with a lecture that i did and um the interesting part was that the research that i was looking at is that with giving some praise stashing in with some constructive criticism and then giving praise again there are some learners that only hear the praise right so i wonder if depending on where the learner is because you had said that sometimes the learners just ignore the praise and they just look at criticism and so i think it i think that kind of depends a little bit on sort of where the learner is and i think um what i found that's super helpful is also um asking them so give me a little idea of what you took from our meeting like just almost like a debrief afterwards just to see sort of where what did they actually get from this because i never know i never know who's going to be focusing on the negative and who's going to be focusing just on the positive so i i kind of asked that and then the other thing that you mentioned that i adored that you mentioned is having a plan like i think that um whatever it is then as a senior you know kind of learner you can always give them a plan and sometimes i find that if i say well this is what works for me or this is what worked for me you have to find what works for you but you could try my method to see if it resonates with you um is another is another thing this is not sort of an easy topic so thank you so much um there's a lot that i have to reflect on from what you said oh well thanks for the feedback appreciate it i think going along with um frank's uh initial statement of um here here's what i expect and you're not quite meeting those expectations i think whenever i talk about giving feedback it's it's a it's a continuum so you you start with feedback never given in isolation right i always feel it's unfair to give feedback or or evaluate anybody on something that um for which the expectations have not been made very clear so at the beginning of whatever your activity is your rotation or what have you um i always like to make the expectations and the learning objectives very clear and that's one of the reasons why i harp on everybody loves when i harp on those learning objectives so much because it's really setting them up with an idea for what they should get out of the learning experience and if they're not at this point that's where you can say okay well remember at the beginning of the session we talked about um the learning objectives where you should be from this experience um so you're not meeting quite meeting the learning objectives how can we help you to get there and i love love carol dweck's work and one of the reasons why um i really love having a psychologist present for us is because psychology and education overlap so dramatically in a lot of ways and um and carol dweck's work about you know a growth versus a fixed mindset really involves both um really uh puts some boots on um on the psychology of it and how we can incorporate that within um the educational realm um let's see i made some other notes oh we also had a um an education grammar on speakers scheduled interestingly um scheduled for august um dr mcallister was coming um and this actually is august so she was supposed to come this month um but we will reschedule her for next year so we'll get into much more um elaboration um due to travel restrictions she wasn't able to come but um when travel restrictions open up a little bit we'll learn a lot more about um some of carol dweck's work and how to apply that to our um educational settings does anybody else have any um additional questions product or name or comments this has been lovely frank thank you so much and thank you all for attending um if you have further questions uh frank it's always open um i i hope i'm not telling i'm alive frank um no no no i'm always there yeah frank is always open for questions or comments or additional discussions um about some of the things uh that he knows best so feel free to contact him at any time for further information i forgot to uh to put it on the slide but my email address is fdane radford.edu and i can put that in the uh in the chat as well that would be great and then we will update your slides before we um post them online we'll update your slides with your contact information as well.