Motivation matters: we all know this. It’s what drives us to behave and act in certain ways. In schools, you’d struggle to find a teacher, or even a pupil, who would say that motivation doesn’t have a part to play in teaching and learning.
However, the science behind motivation was not widely understood by classroom teachers until recently. Peps Mccrea, the dean of learning design at Ambition Institute and director of research and development at Steplab, has been a key player in this change.
In 2020, he published Motivated Teaching, a book that sifts through the science to bring educators practical advice about motivation. In this episode of Tes Podagogy, Mccrea explains his findings and shares approaches for boosting motivation in the classroom.
So what, exactly, is motivation?
Mccrea explains it like this: at any given moment, we are bombarded by different bits of information competing for our attention, and our brain needs to figure out where to allocate that attention. Motivation, then, can be thought of as a mechanism that allows our brains to process all of that information, and decide the best place to invest our attention going forward.
This, he says, is important in the classroom: what we attend to is what we end up thinking about, and what we end up thinking about is what we end up learning about.
Motivation, he explains, decreases as students progress through school. In order to rectify this decline, there are five things teachers can do. One step is to increase pupils’ feelings of prior success.
“Success is quite a subjective thing, and some pupils may have a very different vision of what success means to others, and even compared to you,” he says.
“That can be quite problematic because you as a teacher [might] teach really well, and think that it’s been a really successful experience for your pupils, but, actually, because pupils have some kind of warped view of success and failure, they end up leaving your lesson thinking that’s like a failure for them, and that adds up over time.”
When pupils feel that they are succeeding again and again, they are much more likely to invest their attention. Teachers, therefore, need to frame success clearly, and make it really explicit what success means in their classrooms.
“Say to your pupils: ‘In this class, success is not about you getting everything done, it’s not about you doing it right the first time or doing it perfectly. In this class, success is about you trying really hard, asking questions when you don’t get it, helping your peers, focusing on knowing more and being more skilful than you were last time’,” Mccrea adds.
Reframing failure in this way, and spelling out what success looks like, should boost your pupils’ motivation. And there are other approaches Mccrea recommends, too. Listen to the full podcast below to hear what they are, and how they can work in your classroom.
