Motivation

From the first day we begin teaching, one of the most difficult and perplexing challenges we face is how to motivate our students.

Or put a different way, what do we do to help our students become self-motivated? There's probably nothing I think about more as a teacher.

So how do we inspire, encourage, and even implore our students to engage in what we hope will be the accomplishments and joys that the work of school has to offer? How do we design experiences that invite them to explore and create their own meaning of the things we want them to learn? We know academic success and achievement is rarely easy.

Deep and enduring learning is hard.

It often involves struggles, mistakes, confusion, and it requires persistent effort and engagement on the part of our students.

What makes our students persevere in the presence of that discomfort to achieve learning? Our challenges amplify because school isn't always intrinsically interesting or of obvious relevance to our students lives.

But their biggest challenge is that each learner is unique.

They come into our classrooms with an incredibly diverse array of hopes, dreams, fears, capabilities, experiences, problems, and ideas of themselves as learners that make each their own motivational puzzle.

This helps explain the emotional roller coaster that often characterizes teaching.

We revel in the exhilarating times when a child, or an entire class, glows in the excitement and discovery of learning.

And then there are the days when a lesson falls flat or we head home pondering ways to reach a child who's disengaged or frustrated.

In this session, we'll discuss some key findings emerging from the cognitive science research about what motivates students to learn.

The literature is vast and complicated, so we won't cover it in an comprehensive way, but we do hope the insights we provide will be helpful in informing your own teaching practice.

Distinguishing between extrinsic and intrinsic forms of motivation is often problematic because they are inextricably linked and the difference is not always clear to the learner.

No doubt there are external factors that motivate children in school.

Praise, grades, rewards, and personal relationships among them.

In fact, the initial motivational hooks or sparks for learning are frequently provided by important people in students' lives and other supportive outside influences.

Likewise, praise and rewards can have their place in motivating students in positive ways, but we need to be careful about how they are deployed.

We'll say more about that near the end of this session.

That said, we do know that students tend to be more consistently and strongly motivated when the desire to learn comes from within, rather than from mostly external sources.

What are some factors that help students become more intrinsically motivated? The motivational framework we'll discuss here focuses on personal self-determination and the need we all have to grow and be fulfilled.

At least four factors are involved.

Competence, autonomy, relatedness, and purpose.

Let's talk briefly about each one.

I love hearing in my classroom, I'm really getting better at solving equations, or now I can have a real conversation in Spanish.

Our students need to believe that they are gaining competency in doing their school work.

They should see improved performance and have a meaningful sense that their efforts had a lot to do with their gains.

This involves not only helping kids develop the growth mindset, as we discussed before, but also getting feedback and instruction to be sure that their hard work and effort is effective.

Research shows when students believe that their intellectual abilities can be developed, they are more likely to seek challenges, exert sustained effort, and learn from setbacks.

In a later session we'll talk about ways to help our students become self-regulated learners and be thinking about ways to improve the quality of their efforts.

In other words, to do the stuff of learning.

Aligned with a developing sense of competency is the opportunity for our students to act in more independent ways.

This means their sense of control is more internal and directed by them, rather than being too strongly influenced by others.

In other words, their growth as learners is increasingly under their control and these feelings of growing autonomy will foster a sense of agency and self-efficacy.

Having our students think, I can do this by myself, is hopefully the outcome of the class environment we create that is feedback rich and fosters a sense of risk taking and exploration.

In this sort of classroom, mistakes are embraced as learning opportunities and a student's first move after making a mistake is to ask, how can I learn from this? It's therefore important that this happens in a network of personal relationships that are supportive and encouraging.

This means scaffolding challenges in ways that students experience incremental success in the context of a growth oriented community where students and teachers work together and learn from each other.

Challenge with assurance typifies this sort of learning culture.

In this classroom, it would not be uncommon to hear, this is going to be difficult, you will struggle, but we know that you will figure out how to do it.

It goes almost without saying that students are motivated to devote more time and energy to those activities in which they expect to do well, especially if their success is due to their own effective effort that they are striving to improve.

We do want to acknowledge, however, that not all students feel at home in school and feel they readily fit in all the time.

We therefore don't want to discount or underestimate the demotivating aspects of students feeling that they don't belong are not understood by their teachers or are considered different in their social and academic context.

Feelings of not belonging based on social interactions and societal messages having to do with race, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, and other similar aspects of our identity can have an important defect on student motivation and performance.

Working hard to create inclusive classrooms and school environments will be essential for all students to thrive and be motivated to succeed.

Finally, the last factor we'll discuss that can influence motivation is a sense of purpose.

This can be a huge motivator for young learners.

Helping them see their relevance of what they are learning and it's meaning in a larger personal context can powerfully influence their willingness to engage in academic tasks.

Again, research has demonstrated that something as simple as pausing periodically to have students ponder how what they are studying might have relevance for their future lives can significantly influence their subsequent performance.

Now what about the role of rewards and praise in motivating young learners? This is not the time to review this extensive and complicated research, but what we do need to include are some observations as part of our discussion about student motivation.

Let's start with rewards.

The first observation is that rewards can have both positive and negative effects on student motivation and performance.

Rewards can definitely improve performance in the short-term, but the problem comes when they go away.

Will a student being rewarded continue the desired behavior once the reward is no longer given? In other words, will the motivation for the desired behavior become internalized? If not, reversion to the prior not so desired behavior may happen.

Worse, rewards can actually decrease motivation.

This is especially the case for tasks that learners initially like and find intrinsically interesting and the rewards are known ahead of time.

Feeling controlled, coerced, or manipulated is part of the reason young learners find rewards demotivating under these conditions.

However, this isn't necessarily the case for dull tasks.

A rule of thumb about rewards is not to use them if you can find an alternative.

This means thinking of ways to motivate learners more intrinsically as we previously discussed.

If you must use rewards, do so for a limited time and for very specific reasons with the endgame in mind.

What's the plan when the rewards cease? And now what about praise? Praise is usually distinguished from rewards because most rewards are known ahead of time and therefore expected.

In addition, rewards usually don't impart much information to the learner, but praise often does.

What are some tips about providing effective praise? It needs to be sincere and earned.

Dishonest and unearned praise is immediately detected by most young learners and can send a variety of unfortunate messages.

By praising substandard or mediocre work with all good intentions to boost the motivation and confidence of a student, it can send just the opposite message and backfire in terms of impact.

Insincere praise can be interpreted as you tried hard and while it's not that good, for you it is.

Being honest in a way the student can respond to productively is always better.

It just needs to be couched in a supportive way so the student can hear it and respond with opportunities to improve.

Brianna, your first paragraph would be even better with a specific quote.

Praise that is intended or interpreted to be controlling is always potentially problematic.

Saying something like, great job, Tina, you revised that essay just like I wanted you to, is praise worthy but sends an external locus of control message, do as I say.

It's better to provide informational praise whenever possible.

Terrific work, Jamaal, your revision provided much better supporting evidence.

Finally, praise should emphasize process and not ability.

Saying to a student, you're such a good science student can boost confidence and be motivational in the short run, but it can reinforce a fixed mindset in terms of ability being the primary reason for high performance.

This may mean that when a student encounters difficultly later, a fixed or ability focused mindset can cause problems in terms of how they respond as we discussed previously.

Instead, it's better to say something like, you did such a good job on that science project, you must've worked hard at carefully collecting that data.

This emphasizes that it's the student effective effort that has caused the good results.

Motivating the students in our classes will always be a challenge.

It takes knowing students well and developing a relationship with them that is supportive while encouraging them to meet high standards and challenging themselves.

It also means that students need to meaningfully feel that we believe in them to succeed and keep growing and getting better.

Experiences that help them feel more competent and independent, as well as helping them see the purpose and meaning of what we ask them to do, will go a long way to develop in them an internally driven motivation.

In this way, our students will be on their way to deeper engagement and fuller involvement with directing their own learning in meaningful ways.