For years, I have unquestioningly accepted the prevailing wisdom that the holy grail in education is to have intrinsically motivated students who learn for learning’s sake.

And yet, most of us don’t do everything we do for purely intrinsic reasons.  We work at least partially for a paycheck. We drive the speed limit not because we enjoy driving 25 mph when we are in a hurry but because we don’t want to get a ticket and imperil the lives of the other drivers around us. We work weekends in order to meet deadlines and complete paperwork because its our job.  We clean behind the fridge because company is coming over and we endure family dinners with Aunt Midge so we don’t upset our mothers. In fact, very little of what we do is purely intrinsically motivated.

For years I thought the key to student engagement was to make work more interesting and yet studies have found no evidence that the interest value of material is a determinant — as opposed to a consequence — of learning. In fact, the more I read the literature on motivation, the more I am struck by one startling idea: Intrinsic motivation may be over-rated.  Two concepts have changed my mind.

The first is the idea of integrated extrinsic motivation.  The research shows that external motivators, when used correctly, can actually help people develop intrinsic motivation over time.  When students recognize the underlying value of a behavior, identify with it, and integrate it with other aspects of themselves, they will carry out the behavior independently and outside of your control — even if they are not intrinsically motivated to do so.  Although externally motivated, they are more likely to transfer to internal motivation.

In order to achieve integrated extrinsic motivation, three factors must exist. Students must feel a sense of autonomy – that they are not being forced to do the activity; they must feel that they can be successful at the activity (competence); and they must see how the activity helps them function within the classroom and outside culture (relatedness).

The second concept is emergent motivation. This theory asserts that although students may initially find an activity boring, it doesn’t mean that they will always find it so.  When they begin to see relevance in the activity or their skill set with the activity improves, and if they can find in the activity opportunities to be successful, the activity becomes more interesting and finally, enjoyable. In other words, our motivation to do something may be initially low, but we can actually grow our motivation over time.

For too long, we have been trying to get students to care about what we teach and lamenting their lack of intrinsic motivation. Turns out, the problem isn’t that our students are not intrinsically motivated.  They may never love literature the way that we do. They may never get their kicks from solving impossible math problems and spelling may never be as important to them as it is to us.  The real problem is that the way we try to motivate them externally fails and puts the work on us. We have to keep pushing them to get any work out of them at all and we are exhausted.  But what if our external motivators could be, well, more motivating?  Do we really need students to love everything we do in the classroom or is it enough that they engage for externally motivated reasons, and in doing so, learn to build their own motivation over time?

Don’t forget to leave your ideas and comments here

For more information, check out the Handbook of Competence and Motivation. (2005, Elliot, A., and Dweck, C., Eds.)

~Robyn R. Jackson

Does your school or system require that objectives be posted in the classroom? Are they part of your lesson plans? Something that shows up in your curriculum? At some point in your teaching career you’ve probably encountered SWBAT – Students will be able to…  But can you put SWBAT in front of just anything and call it an objective?

Often when teachers plan, whether it’s for a single lesson or the next unit, they focus on the activities students need to complete. With curricula that are packed with must-do projects, tests or worksheets, it’s easy to concentrate only on what work students have to get done and not what they should get out of doing that work.

The good news is that with a little reflection, it’s easy to upgrade an objective from the activity level to the mastery level. “SWBAT create a poster about the prairie” may become “SWBAT identify four species of prairie plants and animals and explain how they interact in their environment.” It’s still important for students to know what you want them to do – complete those worksheets or make a poster – but sometimes we forget to explain what it is we really want them to know. When we write objectives at the mastery level we not only clarify for students why they’re doing this work, but we also uncover the key elements for ourselves which makes classroom differentiation much easier.

For example, if a student has difficulty writing or breaking down a complex task, making the prairie poster could take more time than is available leaving her struggling to catch up. For some younger students who are still developing the motor skills for cutting and pasting or who could get lost for an hour looking for prairie pictures in a magazine, it’s difficult for them to meet the objective written at the activity level. This objective says the student must create a poster, implying that the most important skill is poster creation.

But when the teacher rewrites the objective at a mastery level, she opens up the possibilities for expressing the essential knowledge in other ways. Maybe now the student could walk the teacher through a textbook chapter using the illustrations to show what he knows about the prairie environment or select prairie pictures from a variety of choices, group them, and tell a partner how they interact.

Take a moment to look at the objectives posted on your board today or in a lesson plan for next week and reflect on what the objective really asks students to know and be able to do.  Give yourself a pat on the back for your mastery level objectives and be on the look out for those that could use an upgrade!

–Claire Lambert