At this year’s Innovators Retreat, we continued to develop a core concept in successful Jewish education: intrinsic motivation. The journey towards intrinsic motivation begins with recognizing the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. If the choice to undertake an activity arises from an external source, such as the carrot and stick model of motivation, research calls that extrinsic motivation. If the choice to undertake the activity arises from an internal source, such as curiosity or developing trust, research calls that intrinsic motivation. 

Unlike many other models of education, this understanding of student behavior stems from fMRI and PET scans that graphed dopamine and serotonin cycles. Intrinsic motivation (IM) and extrinsic motivation (EM) physically live in different parts of the brain. This explains why IM and EM function differently. An IM choice that goes well causes the brain to want to engage in that activity or similar activities more often. When a person chooses a task because of EM, the reward attracts the person to the choice. Without the reward, the person likely does not make that choice. Additionally, the more the EM motivates the choice, the more any pre-existing IM to choose the same decision becomes weaker. 

Imagine a concerning scenario that happens all too often in a Jewish studies classroom. The student who is encouraged or threatened by grades develops a cycle of learning our sacred and ancient wisdom that is generated by EM. In real life, away from teachers, the intrinsic motivations that bolster embracing Jewish ideas were not part of the student’s training. We cannot expect students to continue behaviors established by EM.

To further build out this point, the timeline from Mount Sinai to the present stretches 3,300 years. During that span, Jews transferred our kadosh information, rituals, and lifestyle from generation to generation. About 100 years ago, we introduced grades as an integral part of our formal learning system. For the first 3,200 years since Mount Sinai, we managed without using grades to produce the next generation of Jews, showing that grades are not an organic part of our system. We relied on IM.

To be fair, IM comprises only part of the picture. Last year, JEIC built out the six pillars of IM in a format that Jewish studies teachers could use to plan lessons. While this deserves its own deep dive, the six pillars do not explain the entirety of what happens in a classroom. To understand the rest of the picture, we need to follow the research.

In the late 1980s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, AKA “the father of flow,” studied the motivation of creativity and play. With the correct amounts of interest and challenge to one’s skills, one could enter a flow state. A flow state occurs when a person, totally immersed in an activity, loses a sense of time and resists distractions that would lead away from the activity. In a flow state, a person learns, retains ideas, and initiates creativity at a high level. While this works for hobbies and untimed tasks, this does not transfer well into schools trying to utilize the flow state in class from 10 to 10:45 each day for math. Education researcher Philip Schlechty solves that issue.

Schlechty introduces the idea of engagement in the late ‘90s. While people attach multiple definitions to engagement in education, we focus on Schlechty’s vision of a near flow state. Engaged students exhibit attraction to their work, persistence in it despite challenges, and taking visible delight in their accomplishments. This happens when students focus high levels of attention and find that the challenging task connects to one of their IMs causing high levels of commitment. The combination of the two attributes, attention and commitment, appear this way on a chart:

Our ancient wisdom already speaks to this. At the Seder on Pesach, we speak about the chacham (high commitment/high attention), the rasha (high commitment/low attention), the tam (low commitment/high attention), and the she’eino yodei’a lishoel (low commitment/low attention). Each asks questions that stem from their persona. Each one deserves the proper measured response to reach engagement.

Circling back to the previous point, Jewish day school education needs to embrace methodologies that avoid EM and foster IM. We improve that design when the student enters a near flow state called engagement with high attention and high commitment. In schools that teach through compliance, the classroom experience engenders anger, resentment, cheating, and retreatism; schools that teach through engagement do not. To reach the level of independent, interdependent, driven, committed Jews with self-efficacy, schools need to see the goal of yearly teaching as engagement in God’s word rather than covering the chapters in one of our holy books.