Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn: A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults

Wlodkowski. R. (2008). Enhancing adult motivation to learn. (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. INTRODUCTION Make space for another "must have" adult education desk reference! Wlodkowski's 3d edition of Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn spotlights recent neuroscience research on how people think, decide, and act. He reinforces that "...learning and motivation are inseparable from culture" (p. 6). His presentation of recent research of neuroscience and brain function enhances a richer appreciation of how to shape motivational conditions for improved adult learning. MAIN ATTRIBUTES Wlodkowski illuminates his practical adult education guide with concrete ways to make meaning in a complex contemporary world. The interdependence of seeking inclusion, searching relevance, sharpening experience, and sharing expertise describe a positive tension among knowledge acquisition, self direction, and real-world application. His concept of adult motivation and learning offers much more than just constructing knowledge or achieving vocational skills. He invites a humanist perspective of creating environments for whole-person learning and self-worth in an ever-changing social context. For those students and practitioners who want to better understand the connections to learning among explicit intelligence and cognitive sensation, logic and intuition, and exploration and experimentation, Wlodkowski presents a cogent merging of adult education strategies, critical thinking, adaptive decision making, and experiential learning. Complementing practical aspects of scaffolding, repetition, and critical reflection on experience episodes, an equally interesting area is the outcome of embodied meaning in an educational process. This interaction among psychological and physiological systems suggests that tacit sensation and intuition are especially significant when a learner grapples with an ill-defined or complex issue. Problem solving success can combine the independence and accountability of self direction with the interdependent validation of thought and deed in an environment of learner and teacher or novice and expert. CONCLUSION Both student and practitioner are well served to study the neuroscience and art of adult education in motivation and learning. I highly recommend Wlodkowski's 3d edition of Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn. His motivational and instructional designs for adult learning declare a simple yet profound opportunity for each of us: "When it is very good, instruction is technical excellence under the command of artistic expression" (p.377). Enjoy Wlodkowski's ability to merge proven adult educational principles with emergent evidence from neuroscience, interpersonal communicative talents, and adept techniques for improved intrapersonal awareness and professional growth in the science of learning and art of teaching. J. MOILANEN

Raymond J. Wlodkowski's Enhancing Adult Motivation To Learn is an excellent resource for anyone working with adult learners. It is comprehensive, clear, and easily applied in a variety of learning situations. Wlodkowski explains the affects of motivation on learning and on the instruction process, and how to develop strategies to enhance meaning, competence, and attitude, all of which affect the learning process. This is a book one can return to repeatedly, as I do, for help with designing curriculum, lesson plans, and a wide variety of situations that precent themselves in a class of adult learners, many of whom have other responsibilities that often interfere with their ability to focus on learning. Although I only work with adults, I think many of his strategies would with with youth, as well.

This was a great book for it's purpose. There is a lot of valuable information and I would suggest it to anyone that is involved in adult education.

A professor had given us a small section of this to read in our coursework, and I was so impressed by it I decided to buy the book. Well worth the money!

"Before people can learn, they must be motivated to learn." This is the main thesis of the book that I enjoyed to read and discuss for our Class AHE 581, Enhancing adult motivation to learn: A comprehensive guide for teaching all adults, by Raymond J. Wlodkowski(revised edition in 1999). I selected this book because I am very interested in a number of theories about the learning process and a model of motivation in action what are relating to my Human Services worker at the American Red Cross and Puget Sound Community.As a Red Cross instructor, I must look for some ways to enhance or maintain students' motivation to learn. I need to motivate learners to acquire new information, remember it, and apply it. When disaster strikes they must know how to come through the disaster safety and be equipped to cope with such an emergency. Therefore, people need to understand the worth of a subject and be motivated and ready to learn. "Effective learning does not occur without motivation" (Wlodkowski, 1999, p. 3).First at all, and most important, throughout his book Wlodkowski provides us with a wide variety of detailed strategies for increasing learner motivation so that instructor can choose from among them based on the subject being taught and the learning situation. Wlodkowski is an extraordinary individual. For me, the more I read and learn about the book and his life experiences, educational challenges, and cultural background the more I respect his efforts and desire to become an adult educator.Next, Wlodkowski also provides us the eight chapters in his book with an understanding of the important ideas and information about the learning process and styles of learning in which includes three types of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor (motivating skills).1. Cognitive: Chapter One through Three are organized to describe the cognitive as the first type of learning: facts, concepts, and application skills. Facts and concepts are taught and learners are provided opportunities to apply these information. They also present the theory and research supporting how motivation contributes to competent adult learning.2. Affective: Chapter Four through Seven discuss the comprehensive treatment of major motivational condition: attitudes as they affect behavior. These chapters can help people examine attitudes that affect behavior and change attitudes that may result in undesirable behavior, which regards human experience, intelligence, and communities as ever-evolving mechanism.3. Psychomotor: Chapter Eight explains two methods of instructional planning and guidelines for assessment of learner motivation. It is emphasized the unity of among worth, meaning, and joy in the process of learning. Learners can go through decision-making steps before beginning their learning and its consequences. One step is to make a decision about what they want to learn.Learning can be defined as a process of change through which people