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Margreet Docter
Contact me if you'd like your teaching assistants to incorporate strategies for promoting intrinsic motivation. Whether you have effective practices to share or are interested in exploring new ones, I'm here to collaborate.
Updated 9 July 2024
Background
Margreet Docter is a research technician and teacher at the department of Bionanoscience of the faculty of Applied Sciences. In the past, Margreet did a lot of work on the development of single molecule fluorescent microscope setups. Currently, Margreet focusses most of her time on teaching and education initiatives. To name but a few examples, Margreet collaborates on the BSc Nanobiology curriculum renewal and has worked on several education innovations, such as VR and the development of a new learning platform: ALPACA. In her SUTQ project, Margreet focussed on training teaching assistants, who are important partners in educating students to foster students’ intrinsic motivation and learning agility.
Towards IDEE
Margreet applied for the SUTQ project and the IDEE theme Students taking responsibility for their own learning process at the same time. The reason that she chose this theme is because, for Margreet, student responsibility and intrinsic motivation are intimately linked. “At TU Delft, we are very good at teaching technical content and hard skills. But students also need meta-cognitive skills, like planning, dealing with setbacks and perseverance, and therefore we should be paying more attention to these skills as educators. For students, I think this would shift the focus from passing their exams to learning, thus tapping into their intrinsic motivation and enabling them to take more responsibility for their learning.”
As part of IDEE
What Margreet finds particularly appealing about IDEE is that it offers the opportunity to examine what is already happening at TU Delft in terms of student responsibility, and check what works, what does not, and why. Most importantly, however, to examine what changes need to be made to the things that work in one setting such that they can be used in many more, and different, educational settings. “At TU Delft, we teach a very diverse group of students including scientists, engineers and designers. I see IDEE as an opportunity to develop tools that will be helpful for all these different kinds of students, supporting them as they become life-long learners.”
Did you know that … ?
- In addition to her packed work schedule and family schedule, Margreet enjoys playing bassoon in 2 orchestras and more!
Increase motivation through agile learning: what to say or not to say
The goal of this project is to motivate students to invest in their learning (attitude, habits, and skills), in order to move away from memorizing for passing exams and forgetting directly afterwards. I see motivated students in my class, each one of them wants to pass my course. However, be able to use that motivation and start acting, i.e. engaging in well-scheduled learning activities and tackling possible hurdles, is yet to be learned (and taught).
I would love to increase the intrinsic motivation of my students by working on their learning agility. The result I expect is that students become more resilient, more motivated and less easily setback, not afraid to engage in challenging tasks and not afraid to make mistakes. I want them to welcome challenges as an opportunity to learn.
My personal learning goal is to go far beyond transferring contextual knowledge, and be able to teach and convince students from a really powerful view of life: that a challenge is an opportunity to learn, to improve yourself, and to do better next time.