Motivated Teaching: Harnessing the science of motivation to boost attention and effort in the classroom: 3 (High Impact Teaching)

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Calvert, L. 2016. Moving from compliance to agency: What teachers need to make professional learning work. Oxford, OH: Learning Forward and NCTAF. Some studies show that intrinsic motivation and academic achievement share significant and positive correlates (Pérez-López & Contero, 2013). Intrinsic motivation can direct students to participate in academic activities to experience the fun, challenge, and novelty away from any external pressure or compulsion and without expectations of rewards (Ryan & Deci, 2000). The grading systems used in most schools further discourage them from self-directed learning that is borne out of enjoyment of the process and passion for the subject matter.

Li, T., & Lynch, R. (2016). The relationship between motivation for learning and academic achievement among basic and advanced level students studying Chinese as a foreign language in years 3 to 6 at Ascot International School in Bangkok, Thailand. Human Sciences Scholar, 8(1). Providing a quality education for all lies at the heart of the Education 2030 Agenda. Achieving this goal will require ‘well-qualified, trained, adequately remunerated, and motivated teachers’ (UNESCO, 2016: 30). However, global trends indicate that teacher motivation has been falling in recent years, leading to teacher shortages (Crehan, 2016; UNESCO IICBA, 2017). With motivation playing an important role in teacher performance, reversing this trend is critical to maintaining quality teaching and thus positively impacting student learning outcomes (TTF, 2016; World Bank, 2018). Motivating teachers with the proper incentives is key to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 targets 4.1 (ensuring all girls and boys complete a quality education) and 4.c (substantially increasing the supply of qualified teachers) (United Nations, 2015). What we know Mccrea’s new offering is a pithy and powerful book that makes the slippery topic of motivation in the classroom accessible and achievable, says Sarah Barker

Motivation in Education

A study designed to test an intervention to increase a growth mindset showed that adolescents who embrace a fixed mindset, a belief that people cannot change their personalities, would be more likely to be aggressive than adolescents who adopt a growth mindset. Biweekly observation of the teacher’s classroom by a member from the research team to provide a post-class consultation to refine and improve the teacher’s delivery of the Emotions Course and Emotion-Based Prevention Program

Fostering student motivation is a difficult but necessary aspect of teaching that instructors must consider. Many may have led classes where students are engaged, motivated, and excited to learn, but have also led classes where students are distracted, disinterested, and reluctant to engage—and, probably, have led classes that are a mix. What factors influence students’ motivation? How can instructors promote students’ engagement and motivation to learn? While there are nuances that change from student to student, there are also models of motivation that serve as tools for thinking through and enhancing motivation in our classrooms. This guide will look at three frameworks: the expectancy-value-cost model of motivation, the ARCS model of instructional design, and self-determination theory. These three models highlight some of the major factors that influence student motivation, often drawing from and demonstrating overlap among their frameworks. The aim of this guide is to explore some of the literature on motivation and offer practical solutions for understanding and enhancing student motivation. Mixing things up is also key. If you’re doing the same thing all the time, it’ll start to become boring and repetitive. Look at the materials you’re teaching and think about how you can put a new spin on them. Perhaps you turn something into an acting activity or maybe you can turn facts or figures into a song that will help to make it more memorable. Perhaps you can get students working together on a group activity – this is a great way of helping students motivate each other. Be creative – use posters, offer visual aids and diagrams, show movies and play games. Setting expectations The right level of challenge, adequate skills, sense of control, curiosity, and fantasy are some key factors that can trigger intrinsic motivation. When combined with willpower and a positive attitude, these elements can help sustain motivation over time.Education Commission. 2019. Transforming the education workforce: Learning teams for a learning generation. New York: Education Commission. The third intervention speaks to the role emotions play in motivational states. Students with unsophisticated emotion knowledge are at risk of developing maladaptive behavior problems such as interpersonal conflict, classroom disruptive behavior, aggressive behavior, and the absence of social competence. Without this, motivation will forever remain a mystery for schools. An elusive art that some teachers serendipitously develop, but many don’t. And the potential of our impact will remain limited. Its three components explain the mechanism for how helplessness is learned and how it often leads to depression. The contingency component explains the link between action taken by a person and its subsequent outcome, ranging in degrees of objective control available to a person.

Mastery goals and performance goals represent the same overall quantity of motivation, but they are qualitatively distinct types of motivation. When provoked, adolescents in the experimental group showed more prosocial behavior than adolescents in the control group. The cognition component of learned helplessness refers to our cognitive interpretations, our beliefs, and the associated feelings that amount to a personal sense of control. In the case of learned helplessness, these are characterized by loss of hope, resignation, loss of self-esteem, and fear of global implications of failures and negative events. Creativity results from a complex interaction between a person and their environment or culture. Real learning and creativity require student engagement, which involves a combination of motivation, concentration, interest, and enjoyment derived from the process of learning itself – qualities that are essential to flow (Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Shneider, & Shernoff, 2003).The interventions below also translate motivation theory into practical application, although in a somewhat less direct fashion. Nevertheless, they have the potential to improve the social context necessary for motivation to thrive. Intervention 2: Increasing a growth mindset

A longitudinal survey data on more than 3,000 children in grade 7 in German schools were analyzed using latent growth curve modeling and showed that items that focus on the performance aspect of learning, where the students said they worked hard in math because they wanted to get good grades, predicted a higher immediate math achievement score. Dolton, P.; Marcenaro, O.; de Vries, R.; She, P.-W. 2018. Global teacher status index 2018. London: Varkey Foundation. I look for ways to help my students continue to invest in the classroom using their new currencies. Poor working conditions also affect teacher motivation. Limited education budgets may also lead to insufficient resources for school infrastructure or teaching materials. Data indicate, for example, that approximately 25 per cent of primary schools globally do not have access to clean drinking water or single-sex sanitation facilities (UIS, TTF, and GEMR Team, 2019). Shortages of equipment such as desks, books, computers, and other teaching materials can frustrate teachers and cause drops in motivation (TTF, 2016; UNESCO IICBA, 2017; World Bank, 2018). Cultural and societal perceptionsGagné, M., & Deci, E. L. (2014). The history of self-determination theory in psychology and management. In M. Gagné (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of work engagement, motivation, and self-determination theory (pp. 1–9). Oxford University Press. Peps Mccrea's book Memorable Teaching in his High Impact Teaching series was excellent, and so is his latest, Motivated Teaching. These are books which are both modest and ambitious: the former because they are short, tight, controlled, and the latter because they also deal with big ideas about learning, absorbing, compressing and then expressing them very clearly. They also point the way for readers to more extensive research (the Notes and Further Reading at the end of each section are very good, sending you to interesting but not abstruse material). One of the most appealing elements of Motivated Teaching is the fact that it is centred on real and possible approaches. Too often, educational guides offer strategies that would fall apart within seconds of being exposed to a real classroom environment. By contrast, this book is empowering because it calls on us to apply our own subject knowledge and adapt our pedagogy to bring about improved motivation in our students. The guidance is broad enough for us to own, and yet specific enough that we can take it away and make it work. In their study, participants were engaged in a problem-solving exercise and received a surprise memory test related to the task. Those in the mastery goal condition were told that the purpose of the task was to develop their cognitive ability, while those in the performance goal condition were told that their goal was to demonstrate their ability relative to other participants. The expectancy theory explains motivation in terms of reasons we engage in specific behaviors, where we expect that effort will lead to better performance, which in turn will lead to valued rewards.