Steps toward Intrinsic Motivation

This posting is a continuation of an earlier posting on intrinsic motivation. In Ryan and Deci’s paper, Figure 1, the Self-Determination Continuum, presents a very useful model of different sorts of motivation. I’ll describe it briefly here — putting my own spin on it, I’m sure. If you want it in their [...]

Self-efficacy

Albert Bandura has an article about self-efficacy that I have read over and over again. I’ll summarize my own take-aways from it with the hopes that you’ll be interested enough to go see what he REALLY said.
Self-efficacy is a sense of personal effectiveness, a belief that I have the power through my performance to [...]

Motivation and Self-determination Theory

This is the first part of a two-part series.  Part 2 is called Steps Toward Intrinsic Motivation.
A friend of mine sees that the success of her work depends on actions taken by others — specifically others over whom she has no organizational control. She works with two different groups, one of which appears to [...]

The Great Brain Series

My children loved The Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald starting in the 2nd or 3rd grade. I enjoyed reading them out loud immensely.
There’s a good Wikipedia article about this series, so I’ll only give a brief summary here. Each book is a series of episodes about a Catholic family living in southern [...]

Reflections on Voting

We just got back from voting in the North Carolina primary. Voting is an activity that brings back lots of memories…

About my paternal grandfather who claimed that he never missed an election, not even a local school board race, in his long adult life. As we face the difficult questions about how to [...]

The Ark and Rowan Farm

When I was growing up, I was attracted to books about children facing very difficult times and finding a way to thrive. There was a fair amount of change and insecurity in my growing up — my father died when I was two, my mother moved her three preschool children to New York City [...]