In early 2021, when it was announced that exams in England were being cancelled (when it sounded as though they were being cancelled, rather than replaced by exams that teachers set, marked and graded themselves), one of the first questions on many teachers’ lips was: “What do we do with Year 11 now?” In other words, how do we motivate them to keep working without the pressure of externally set exams hanging over them?
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In his book Motivated Teaching, Peps Mccrea explains that motivation is a system for allocating attention. For instance, am I more motivated to write this article or to check my Twitter feed? What will win the bulk of my attention?
Mccrea suggests that our motivation to pay attention depends on three things:
- Value: the potential benefits we see in the activity.
- Expectancy: whether we think we will see the benefits.
- Cost: the time and effort we need to put in in order to see the benefits.
Thinking about motivation in this way shows the role that exams play in keeping the attention of students where we want it. Time and effort is spent on ensuring that they value their GCSE grades with horror stories of what will happen if they don’t achieve the magical grade 4 or higher.
Student motivation: It shouldn’t all be about exam grades
We ensure that their expectancy is high through positive reports and, perhaps, slightly optimistic predictions.
The cost, meanwhile, is kept as low as possible. For years, it has seemed that many teachers are working far harder for these grades than many students. They run revision sessions - at first, after school before an exam, but increasingly year-round and during weekends and holidays; they track data and plan interventions for anyone who looks like they are falling behind; they take the decisions over what should be revised and how. And all with perfectly sound reasons: these approaches work.
That is, they work until the exams go away. Or, until you come up against students who, despite all the messages to the contrary, decide they really don’t care about these qualifications - or, despite the hopeful predicted grades, still feel like failures; or where the cost still seems too high when it eats into time they need to spend working to help out their family.
There are practical issues with relying on exam results for motivation, then. But I’d go one step further and also argue that this reliance throws the very purpose of schools into question. The grades studenst receive should reflect the education they have received; it shouldn’t be the education they receive. I don’t want to ask someone what they learned in geography and hear that they learnt how to achieve grade 7.
Over the past year, I have been wary of the call to transform education because of lessons learned from the pandemic, but in this case, with the disruption to exams highlighting issues around motivation, I do think this is a moment where perhaps we can try to change where our students place their attention by shifting their motivation to focus on the simple joy of learning.
Motivating all students to embrace learning for the sake of learning is not easy, but I think that the approach outlined by Mccrea shows how it might be done.
Firstly, we need to show students the value of learning; they need to see that knowing things and understanding things and being able to do things opens up all kinds of horizons for them. We need to be able to talk about what we, as adults and professionals, are doing to continue to learn and what we can enjoy as a result of what we have learned.
Secondly, we need to think about expectation and help our students to see that they should expect to be able to enjoy the fruits of learning, whoever they are and whatever their background. We need to show them that the people who do amazing things with what they have learned are people like them. Our curriculum needs to be diverse, in its widest sense.
Finally, we need to address the issue of cost. This is perhaps the hardest step, for, as Harris Westminster principal James Handscombe points out in his book A School Built on Ethos: “Education is fundamentally counter-cultural: the idea that we should work without immediate pay-off is inherent.”
But, he adds: “Schools should embrace this.”
Perhaps the best way for schools to do that is to make it as easy as possible for students to encounter learning for the sake of learning, thereby reducing the cost.
One thing I am enjoying about our assemblies at the moment is that each one starts with a piece of music that our students may not have encountered before, along with a discussion about it and its wider significance.
I also love the fact that even if our students “drop” a subject at GCSE, they don’t stop learning about it. We use assemblies and tutor time to continue engaging in those subjects (we recently learned about Earth’s life support systems and contrasted the planting of trees with geoengineering) and also use collapsed curriculum days and a programme of wider curriculum activities to ensure that students understand that these subjects have a value beyond a certificate at the end of an optional course.
The science and application of motivation is a fascinating field with a huge array of implications for what we do in schools. Hopefully, we can use it to move us away from grubbing for grades and to lift our heads towards new horizons.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex. His latest book, The CPD Curriculum, is out soon. He tweets @EnserMark
