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

Given the recent flurry of new books on teaching and assessment, this particular volume represents a seasoned third edition, a text that has shown its enduring value and viability for practitioners. Like the second edition, it focuses strongly on enhancing adult learning environments through key intersections of intrinsic motivation, adult learning, and culturally relevant experiences. In addition, it offers a new frame of understanding through the inclusion of neuroscientific understandings of learning and motivation.

For instructors committed to quality learner engagement, this volume will be one of their more valued resources, providing a supplement for graduate courses in adult learning and college teaching, as well as insights and strategies for designing and implementing faculty/staff development and train-the-trainer workshops.

Wlodkowski’s Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn provides a comprehensive discussion of the complex worlds of motivation and adult learning, incorporating research findings supporting enhanced learning designs and instructional strategies. I particularly value this book for its orientation to the instructor’s world. It eloquently provides insights into learning designs that build on learner motivation and culturally responsive learning; its text features accessible language and understandings of ideas and actions, as well as practitioner-oriented approaches that are very practical in their application. Its format, organization, and examples are meant to aid both the novice and experienced instructor to develop insights, strategies, and more refined perspectives on the complexities of creating effective learning environments.

In particular, Wlodkowski’s motivational framework and strategies will aid instructors in crafting optimal learning environments, given the growing complexities of diverse learners in the classroom and diverse instructional/self-directed learning strategies. Thus, this book offers a broad perspective of the changing world of postsecondary learning and teaching and the importance of quality instructional designs, strategies, and assessments for instructors, trainers, and professional development designers in higher education, in corporate and industrial settings, and in community organizations.

The book is organized into nine chapters, with the first four chapters providing foundational understandings. Chapter 1 considers motivation, specifically drawing on neuroscientific research on motivation and learning. Chapter 2 focuses on the impact of aging and culture, with key discussions of characteristics of adult learners and the aging process, including different orientations to adult intelligences. In addition, this chapter presents the key assumptions grounding this volume: (a) “if something can be learned, it can be learned in a motivating manner” (p. 46), and (b) instructors should design a “motivational plan” as well as an instructional plan.

Chapter 3 focuses on the key characteristics and performance criteria of the motivational instructor, incorporating a brief discussion of learning oriented to Friere’s critical consciousness. Chapter 4 provides a helpful introductory discussion to the four conditions for motivational learning environments: inclusion, attitude, meaning, and competence. This chapter also presents an in-depth discussion of the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching, which systematically delineates key understandings and instructional practices to enhance adult learning and motivation.

The key premise of the foundational understandings presented in these first four chapters is to promote respect for and the value of the learner and to build “bridges between what adult learners know and their new learning” (p. 21). Although typically modest in his work, Wlodkowski does note that “factors of this motivational framework have been significantly associated with higher grade point averages and higher performance among adult learners” (p. 28).

The core of the book, Chapters 5–8, explicates the key motivational conditions in his framework, providing 60 chronologically enumerated strategies that impact the motivational climate of the learner and the instructional learning environment. Throughout these chapters, he provides illustrative and informing discussions, rich examples, case studies, key methods, and checklists.

Unlike more cookbook-oriented instructional guides, Wlodkowski focuses on the complexities of the learner and relevant life and cultural experiences that significantly impact the learning. He further considers the potential expectations and demands imbedded in specific instructional situations, including assessment strategies...