Can we motivate the unmotivated?
Recently I have been asked to prepare talks for teachers on the topic of motivation.
A title has been suggested: 'motivating the unmotivated'. It turns out that it is a popular title! If you google 'motivating the unmotivated' on the internet you get more than 7,000 hits, and most of the pages you can then access have exactly that title.
It is clear that teachers of all kinds are concerned when their students become uninterested and show a lack of motivation. Students who are switched off are difficult to teach, and perhaps, more importantly, are no fun to be with. We believe, too, that motivation (at least in the sense of engagement with task and topic) is critical to successful learning.
So what is this motivation? How is it created, and how is it sustained? These were questions I felt I needed to re-visit as I started to prepare my talk.
Cracked whips and tossed pieces of fish
A teacher called Louis Schmier in the department of History at the University of Valdosta, Georgia, USA, makes the point, on a web page she has written, that motivation is not just 'cracked whips and tossed pieces of fish' by which she means,
I think, that our students are not performing seals, nor is it enough just to provide students with fun activities and energy-fuelled teaching. Both of those things are undoubtedly important, but it's more than that too.
Motivation is a psychological state, and though we may be able to effect it in the short term by involving our students in engaging activities, that will not be enough to create real and deep motivation. Nor is it possible to sustain motivation only through a series of teacher-provoked tasks. We need to address more fundamental issues than these.
For motivation to take place, some form of cognitive arousal is necessary. We need to take account too of the various sources of motivation, both from within and without the students themselves, and then we need to think carefully about how our classes feel, and what students get out of them. For, whereas we cannot do much about the anti-motivational influences from outside the classroom, we can alter perceptions within it directly as a result of how we promote and organize learning.
The Flying 'A's
In the talk I am preparing on motivation I have decided to focus on what I have called 'the flying 'A's', since they all play a part in helping to provoke and sustain a student's motivation. The Flying 'A's are: activity (because engaging activities are more effective than unengaging ones!), affect (because, as one secondary student once told me, 'a good teacher is someone who knows our names'), attitude (of the teacher, because the way we manage our classes and present ourselves to our students has a critical effect on their feeling about learning in our classrooms), agency (because students are more motivated when they are given a say - when they have agency - in classroom decision-making), and adaptation (because good teachers are responsive to the atmosphere in a lesson and how things are going, and can adapt what they are doing accordingly).
But that's just my way of trying to explain this complex issue. In the motivation development pack that accompanies this topic, you'll find other ways of describing the process, and other extremely useful suggestions for initiating and sustaining motivation. I hope the articles and extracts in the pack will help you as much as they have helped me.
Jeremy Harmer
