Curiosity, Carrots, and sticks

Learning is primarily driven by Curiosity, Carrots, and sticks. Self-image and expectations also play a big part, and it affects all three.

Sticks

Sticks refer to verbal or physical punishment for the work not done.

While popular, it doesn’t work all that well, leaves physical and mental scars, and is bad for long-term motivation.

Since this motivation is coming from the outside. As soon as the sticks stop or stop to be a threat, we see a sharp decline in performance.

Carrots

Carrots are external rewards for completing a goal. For e.g., a candy, a car.

Carrots are better than sticks but still a lower form of motivation as the motivation is coming from the outside, not the inside.

Curiosity

Curiosity is the internal motivation to learn without any external pressure.

In an ideal world, a child would be curious about everything that you want to teach them.

Won’t that be nice?

Well, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Children are naturally curious. Wherever possible, we should use that curiosity to propel their learning. Some children are curious about one thing, and others about different things.

But…

You should try to generate curiosity about what you want to teach.

So try this…

If you want to teach someone something, don’t just start lecturing.

Instead, start with a question – some sort of puzzle – which can only be resolved by learning what you want to teach.

This will engage students, improve focus, and lead them to learn faster and deeper.

However, this is difficult. It requires creativity and effort on the part of the teacher/parent. 

So here’s an example to help you think about it: if you are going to teach gravity, it would be fun to ask students to guess the time for objects to fall, then do the experiment, and only then go to the formulas.

If you have any more examples, please mention in the comments.

Self-image and expectations

We do things that are consistent with how we see ourselves. If you can do and say things to a child which builds their self-image as a learner, it will go a long way in their learning journey.

When a child sees themself as someone who likes to learn, they will grind it out even when they don’t feel like it; and doing things when they don’t feel like doing them takes people farther than most other qualities.

Similarly, people do things that are in line with what people expect of them. So, if you can your child/student that you expect great things from them, they will act accordingly.

Some things you can say to develop self-image and high expectations:

• I am proud of how hard you work.
• You are a good girl. You are so focused.

Even if they aren’t behaving as you want, you can still show the expectations in form of:

• You are such a good kid. I didn’t expect you would do something like that.