Supporting Students' Motivation

Strategies for Success

Johnmarshall Reeve, Richard M. Ryan, Sung Hyeon Cheon, Lennia Matos, Haya Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367550493
• eBook ISBN: 9781000521559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

This is a book about teachers' classroom motivating styles. Motivating style is the interpersonal tone and face-to-face behavior the teacher relies on when trying to motivate students to engage in classroom activities and procedures. The over-arching goal of the book is to help teachers work through the professional developmental process to learn how to provide instruction in ways that students will find to be motivationally-enriching, satisfying, and engagement-generating.

To realize this goal, the book features six parts: Part 1: Introduction, introduces what teachers are to support—namely, student motivation; Part 2: Motivating Style, explains what a supportive motivating style is; Part 3: "How to," overviews the recommended motivationally-supportive instructional strategies one-by-one and step-by-step; Part 4: Workshop, walks the reader through the skill-building workshop experience; Part 5: Benefits, details all the student, teacher, and classroom benefits that come from an improved motivating style; and Part 6: Getting Started, discusses
ways to begin using these skills in the classroom.

Based on a successful workshop program run by the authors, teachers successfully improve their classroom motivating style. In doing so, they experience gains in their teaching skill and efficacy, job satisfaction, a renewed passion for teaching, and a more satisfying relationship with their students. This multiauthored book provides teachers with the practical, concrete, step-by-step, skill-based "how to" they need to develop a highly supportive motivating style.

Part 1Introduction

CHAPTER 1Origins

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003091738-2

At 7:00 am on a chilly Monday morning in February 2002, one of the authors and a team of four graduate students met together in the College of Education’s parking lot at the University of Iowa (United States). Together, we drove 30 miles north to a high school in nearby Cedar Rapids. Upon arrival, we pulled out our schedule of classes and, working in pairs, observed maths, English, science, and economics classes throughout the day. That was the first day of what became this book.

By the end of the week, the research team had closely observed 20 teachers in action. Most of what was observed was the unfolding of a typical classroom script in which the teacher took 5 minutes to introduce a task and a learning objective and then another 15 minutes to explain how students could complete that activity and attain the learning objective, as the teacher offered a demonstration, a videoclip, a lecture, or something similar. For the next 30 minutes, students worked to complete their assigned task, such as a biology laboratory project, a series of math problems, a writing activity, or a class discussion on how an economic principle explained a current news event. Most classes ended with a wrap-up group discussion or Q&A (question and answer). While all this was going on, two members of the research team sat in the background with a stack of rating sheets to score how engaged students were throughout the lesson and also everything the teacher said and did to motivate and support that engagement.

Our research question was this: If the teacher made a special effort to support students’ needs, interests, and initiatives throughout the 55-minute class period, would students’ engagement be unusually high?

During that first week, the classroom observers simply recorded what was typical of teachers and students in this Cedar Rapids high school. The filled-in rating sheets told the story of how engaged and how motivationally supportive these students and teachers typically were. After that first week, we then did something special. We conducted an experiment. In late February, we randomly assigned 10 of the 20 high school teachers to participate in a workshop designed to help them develop a more supportive motivating style. Using motivation theory and research, we recommended specific acts of instruction the teachers might put into practice. For the other ten teachers, they were placed into a waitlist control group. Throughout March, these ten teachers provided instruction in their usual way (i.e., “practice as usual”). A month later (after the experiment ended), these teachers were provided the same workshop experience.

In the last week in March, we revisited all 20 classes for a second time. As before, the pair of raters scored how engaged students were and everything the teacher said and did to motivate that engagement. The raters did not know which teachers were in the experimental group (participated in the workshop) and which teachers were in the control group (did not participate in the workshop). The critical question was this: Would the students of teachers who participated in the workshop show significantly greater classroom engagement than the students of teachers who did not participate in the workshop? If so, how closely related would the teacher’s use of motivationally supportive teaching practices be to students’ level of classroom engagement? If this relation existed, would this effect be a mild, moderate, or strong one?

In the classrooms of the ten teachers in the control group, students’ classroom engagement in March declined a bit from its earlier February level. This is not an unusual occurrence in a high school classroom. What was unusual, however, was that students’ engagement in the classrooms of the ten teachers in the experimental group spiked higher. When we analyzed the data, two findings were clear. First, teachers who participated in the workshop were able to provide instruction in a more motivationally supportive way. In doing so, they took their students’ perspective, supported their interests and initiatives, and helped students discover personal value in the classroom activities. Second, a strong linear relation emerged to show that the more teachers taught in this motivationally supportive way, the more engaged their students were. Some teachers (those in the control group) did not make a special effort to support their students’ motivation, and their students’ engagement was correspondingly low to moderately low. The teachers in the experimental group made a special effort to support their students’ motivation, and their students responded by showing an unusually high level of engagement. The full study and its findings can be found in a published journal article (Reeve, Jang, Carrell, Jeon, & Barch, 2004).

Twenty years have now passed, and these positive findings have been replicated many times in many different schools across different grade levels and even in different nations. As we shared our findings with researchers in education and psychology, we learned that the questions we were asking and our approach to helping teachers improve their motivating style were just as interesting to those in other nations as they were to us. So, we expanded our small research team to include international collaborations. We conducted our first international studies in Seoul, South Korea. At the same time we were doing this, researchers in Israel were conducting similar classroom-based research that produced similar positive results. Next, we joined forces with researchers to conduct investigations in Peru and then in Australia. To give the reader a sense of the international nature of our current research, Figure 1.1 shows the nationalities of the five authors who came together to produce this book. In addition to our team, similar investigations to help teachers improve their classroom motivating style have now been conducted by other research teams in 18 different nations, including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Columbia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Korea, Norway, Peru, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States (reviewed in Reeve & Cheon, 2021).

FIGURE 1.1 Nationalities of the Book’s Five Authors

This book is the story of what we learned and what we now recommend. We have worked closely with about 2,000 teachers, and just about all of them have been able to develop a highly supportive motivating style. After each investigation, we talked with the participating teachers to ask what we might do differently to provide a more helpful, effective, and satisfying workshop experience. With each successive study, our goal has been to provide a new-and-improved workshop that becomes increasingly able to help teachers work through the professional development experience of upgrading the quality of their classroom motivating style. Fortunately, we have learned a lot, and the workshop we provide today is a much stronger version than what we were able to provide to those Cedar Rapids teachers all those years ago.

In watching teachers in action and in listening to their stories and experiences, we have noticed that each teacher seems to go through a similar three stage professional development process. First, teachers understand what a supportive motivating style is. This is an accomplishment of knowledge and theory. Teachers come to understand what student motivation is, where it comes from, why it changes, and under which conditions it changes. Teachers also understand what a supportive motivating style is, what motivationally-supportive teachers say, and what motivationally-supportive teachers do. Teachers further come to understand the close connection between the motivational support they provide and their students’ motivational thriving.

After a teacher learns all this theoretical knowledge, he or she still needs practical skills. This takes a good deal of deliberate practice in an authentic classroom setting. It takes access to expert role models—What do highly motivationally supportive teachers say and do? It takes a good deal of mentoring and guidance to advance one’s skill level from clumsy to proficient to mastery. And it takes feedback, still more guidance, and personal reflection to figure out how to do today what one was not able to do yesterday. At this point, the teacher has gained both knowledge and skill (theory and practice), but there is yet a third process that lies ahead.

When teachers successfully support their students’ motivation, it soon becomes obvious to the teacher how beneficial such an approach to teaching really is. Students respond with greater motivation, engagement, learning, and personal growth. With some reflection, it becomes equally obvious how much more satisfying and fulfilling it is to be a teacher when one’s students are so enthusiastically engaged. At some point, the teacher realizes that a supportive motivating style is not just a luxury possessed by a few special teachers but is, instead, a necessity for all teachers. With this insight, the teacher’s professional journey to develop a more supportive motivating style is complete.

As we have helped teachers work through this professional development experience, we have learned that most teachers initially see the instructional effort to support students’ motivation to be a somewhat mysterious process. When we first collaborate with a teacher, we frequently hear this: “Okay, fine. Supporting students’ motivation sounds well and good; but what specifically could I do?” Teachers want clear, explicit, concrete, realistic, effective, and tried-and-true recommendations. With each successive study, we have worked hard to provide the next group of teachers with recommended teaching practices that are clearer, more explicit (step-by-step), more concrete, more realistic, more effective, and more evidence-based. If this “What specifically could I do?” question resonates with you, then we provide the next 22 chapters to guide you through your own professional journey to become a more motivationally supportive teacher. Let’s start!

CHAPTER 2Student motivation

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003091738-3

One of the authors was once an 8th grade student sitting in English class taking the weekly vocabulary quiz. The quiz was always on Friday and offered the same challenge: Define 33 words and use each in a sentence. The words varied from week to week, of course, except for #33. Word 33 was always the same: Motivation. The English teacher’s preferred definition was: “The stuff that permeates your entire being when you have a clear, vivid picture in your mind of what you want to do and an intense burning, all-consuming desire in your heart to fight for it.” No student ever missed question #33.

Contemporary motivation researchers do not use the English teacher’s colorful definition. Still, “intense burning, all-consuming desire” does conjure up some rich imagery, and it does convey a sense of purpose that goes beyond the standard definition of an internal process that gives behavior its energy, direction, and persistence (Schunk, Meece, & Pintrich, 2014). The English teacher’s definition also makes it clear that motivation is foundational for all forms of skilled performance and adaptive functioning. Most teachers can help students generate “a clear, vivid picture in your mind of what you want to do.” They will say, “Memorize 33 vocabulary words” or “Make an A on Friday’s quiz.” The difficulty begins when teachers try to help students generate the elusive “intense burning, all-consuming desire” that gives behavior its energy, direction, and persistence.

To understand what most teachers do, one group of researchers visited the classrooms of 30 late-elementary school teachers to observe which motivational strategies they most used (Newby, 1991). The observers also recorded how effective each strategy was, as judged by the rise or fall in students’ engagement following each particular strategy. The four most frequently used motivational strategies were, in order, offer extrinsic rewards and punishments (used 58% of the time), capture students’ attention—as by a dramatic statement or a quiet pause (27%), build students’ confidence (7%), and explain the relevance of the learning activity to students’ lives (7%). In terms of effectiveness, emphasize relevance was the only motivational strategy that actually worked (generated engagement), while offer rewards and punishers actually backfired (decreased engagement). Gain attention and build confidence were somewhere in between (i.e., both were mildly engagement-fostering). The unfortunate take-home message was this: Teachers least frequently used motivational strategies were the most effective, while their most frequently used strategies were the least effective.

These are discouraging results, and they cast skepticism on doing “what everyone else does.” A better starting point would be to conduct the classroom-based research necessary to identify what actually works. Once a teacher knows this, the road to best practices then becomes a matter of developing the skill needed to put those evidence-based teaching practices into action. So that is what this book will do. This chapter explains the nature of student motivation—what it is, where it comes from, how it works, why it changes, under what conditions it changes, and why it is so important. Coming chapters will identify what those evidence-based engagement-generating motivational strategies are and how to do them.

TEACHER-STUDENT DYNAMICS

Talk to a typical teacher about student motivation and you are likely to hear yearnings such as, “I wish my students were more motivated.” Most teachers—perhaps all teachers—walk into their classrooms with some level of worry about how students will respond to the day’s lesson in terms of their motivation, engagement, and learning. The fear is that students will respond with apathy, minimal engagement, and token learning. Similarly, most students walk into the classroom with some level of anticipation that the teacher has prepared some interesting things to do and that the teacher will be there to encourage and support them (rather than offer long boring lectures and endless worksheets). Mostly, teachers wish for motivated students, while students wish for motivating teachers.

When things go well, teachers and students support each other. As shown in the left and upper parts of Figure 2.1, students’ classroom engagement flows out of their motivational resources, including their needs, interests, goals, and values (the arrow on the top). Teachers, on the other hand, offer a particular motivating style, and the right and lower parts of the figure illustrate that teachers’ motivational teaching practices flow out of their motivating style (the arrow on the bottom).

FIGURE 2.1 Student-Teacher Motivational Dynamics

What students say and do (display engagement) affects what teachers say and do (introduce motivational teaching practices) and vice versa. When teachers appreciate and support students’ motivational resources, things go well. Similarly, when students value and respond favorably to the teacher’s learning activities and behavioral requests, things also go well. In these classrooms, students give voice to their needs, interests, goals, and values and the teacher responds by offering learning activities that are relevant to those needs, interests, goals, and values. The teacher and students are in sync and mutually support each another (see center of diagram). In other classrooms, however, the teacher fails to support students’ interests and goals and students resist the teacher’s motivational strategies. This is when things do not go well, as the teacher and students are in conflict and mutually oppose one another.

To understand student motivation, it is helpful to look inside Figure 2.1’s “Student’s Motivation” box. What is in there are motivational resources. Some of these are inherent motivations that all students possess in roughly equal measure (e.g., need for relatedness). Others are acquired resources—motivations that students learn through experience and thus vary from student to student (e.g., one student has a goal to learn how to speak Spanish fluently, while another does not).

INHERENT MOTIVATIONS

All students, indeed all humans, have a rich repertoire of inherent (i.e., inborn) inner motivational resources that, when supported, are fully capable of energizing and directing their productive behavior. These endowed sources of motivation include psychological needs and intrinsic motivation.

Psychological needs

A psychological need is an inherent condition whose fulfillment is necessary and essential for psychological growth and well-being ( Ryan & Deci, 2017; Vansteenkiste, Ryan, & Soenens, 2020 ). Everyone is familiar with biological needs such as hunger and thirst and that bodily health and wellness depend on attaining nutriments such as food and water. Similarly, everyone has psychological needs, including three that are quite basic and important, namely those for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. With a psychological need, what the person needs to be well is to pursue and fulfill a particular psychological experience.

Autonomy is the need to experience personal ownership during one’s behavior

Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Detailed contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 Motivating style
• PART 3 “How to”
• PART 4 Workshop
• PART 5 Benefits
• PART 6 Getting started
• Glossary of key terms
• References
• Author index
• Subject index