The Motivated School

Alan McLean

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781446238172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación primaria

`The book is a pleasure to read and whether the model is adopted in whole or in part, as a lens through which to examine and understand what is going on in a learning community it has much to offer? - Improving Schools

`As a head of department in a comprehensive school in an education action zone, this book has made me think about not only the way I relate to the students I work with but also about relationships with the teachers in my department. I therefore warmly recommend to teachers and especially to headteachers and others in positions of leadership in both primary and secondary phases? - Emotional & Behavioural Difficulties

` The Motivated School is an important book. It addresses a number of key issues which are central to Scottish educational policy, including Better Behaviour: Better Learning, Inclusion and Raising Attainment. It is also a controversial book, challenging as it does "woolly thinking" on issues such as self-esteem, rewards and motivation to learn? - Scottish Education Review

`This book is well written and demonstrates the author?s commitment and dedication to an individual?s psychological well-being and positive, effective learning environments? - The Psychology of Education Review

`The best education books frequently challenge our assumptions. Alan McLean?s The Motivated School demonstrates with a kind of forensic exactness, the way we over-emphasize the importance of student?s self-esteem. We can?t make students motivated: we can only create the right conditions. There is much to admire in this book. It isn?t difficult to read, and the format is generous and accessible. I suspect all school leaders will learn something from it? - Geoff Barton, Times Educational Supplement, Friday Magazine

Some students do not achieve their full potential, while others of similar ability achieve more than predicted. This book shows how important students? motivational mindsets can be in influencing the way they learn. The author brings together evidence from recent research, shows how successful learning contexts can be created, and provides real-life suggestions for teachers working with disengaged learners.

Increasing pressure to meet targets has sent schools down the path of trying to motivate students `from the outside?. By recognizing that genuine motivation comes `from the inside? and that self-motivation needs to be nurtured, this book provides a practical guide to both teacher and student motivation.

This book will be of interest to anyone seeking to develop their skills in motivating young people to learn. It will be of particular interest to teachers, educators and management at all levels.

Part I

The Motivation Drivers

1	Introduction

This chapter provides a rationale for schools to move from a control culture to one that emphasizes self-motivation.

□ The Need for Change

Student management in Britain’s schools was dominated until the 1980s by corporal punishment. Although replaced by a system of paper punishments, the predominant philosophy of corrective punishment prevailed. Phasing out of corporal punishment however stimulated for the first time in schools a need to look at the conditions that encouraged good behaviour and effective learning. In 1989 the Elton Report, a government review of discipline, moved the debate forwards by seeking a greater balance between sanctions and rewards (DES, 1989). By the late 1990s most school initiatives involved positive reward based approaches to student management. The 1997 Education Act in England and Wales moved schools in the direction of self-discipline while retaining the traditional role of regulating behaviour and promoting a proper regard for authority. Self-discipline was also given prominence in the Scottish Education Executive’s Discipline Task Group (SEED, 2001).

The trend in practice has moved from a reactive punitive approach to a reactive positive, albeit corrective approach. The control model still dominates our thinking and practice. Teachers exert most of the effort and still predominantly do things to and for students rather than with them. Students do things for or against teachers, less so with them. For self-directed behaviour to be learned, however, schools need to provide the lightest touch and the least restrictive structures necessary. The art of successful teaching is to do just enough and no more (Galvin, Miller and Nash, 1999).

There is an increasing lack of synchrony between the status given to young people by schools and by society. This book suggests that schools need to close this gap and evolve from a control culture to one involving a greater emphasis on self-motivation. Schools need to adopt the optimistic view that learning and growth is an intrinsic part of human nature that needs to be nurtured.

Young people today are experiencing an increasingly autonomous world as evidenced by their attitudes to music and fashion and their preference for watching soap operas and advertisements over children’s television. Their ‘mature’ consumption of advertising means today’s children get the toys they want, unlike previous generations who got what their parents wanted them to have.

Most parents today want their children to be assertive, self-reliant and able to make their own decisions. Nowadays, parents would not be happy if a teacher shouted at or otherwise ‘overpowered’ their child. Most teachers were brought up in families that were very different from their students, where parents made all the decisions. They were educated in schools where teachers dominated the classroom.

Assertiveness is a goal of anti-bullying campaigns, as well as of Personal Social Development programmes that encourage children to say ‘no’ to strangers and to drug pushing peers. Schools now tell children it is not always right to do what adults tell them and that adults can be wrong.

The transformation to an increasingly autonomous youth culture is a huge challenge facing teachers, and the skills with which they resolve these tensions will be a key factor in the effectiveness of contemporary schooling. ‘Youth has become adulthood without the experience, a destination reached without a journey made’ (William Mcllvanney).

Although the power balance between teacher and student is still asymmetrical, it is changing. Advances in communication technology challenge the idea of the teacher as the main supplier of information. The student is no longer a passive object waiting to receive knowledge from the teacher. The Internet has the potential to transform teaching into a situation where the learner is in control and where students become producers as well as consumers of knowledge.

□ The Transitional Reward Culture

Society is progressing towards greater affirmation and empowerment of young people. Schools are now expected to regard young people as active citizens rather than citizens-in-waiting (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2002). The equality principle is undermining the old structures and leadership now needs to take on a new form.

While teachers are under great pressure to make more academic demands on children in the context of government drives for higher achievement, some teachers see students as increasingly challenging and harder to motivate in the new culture. They may think that worsening behaviour means we are going in the wrong direction, but the genie is out of the bottle. Teachers are unable to stop this evolution, but if they stay one step ahead they may be able to control the pace of change. Teachers who remain in the past will struggle in a conflict-and-blame swamp. Only when teachers have accepted they cannot turn the clock back will they be able to move on.

Of course, schools have not stood still and, indeed, are currently in transition. The mentality that assumed students had to be made to feel bad about themselves before they could do better has gone. Most teachers now acknowledge the need for, and benefits of, praise.

The move from a control to a reward culture however should be seen as a transition phase. Schools that have introduced rewards quickly realize they have repeatedly to refresh their approach. This constant search for new reward strategies will not lead to the holy grail (Ryan and La Guardia, 1999). At the same time the praise culture is open to criticism as a culture of indulgence (Damon, 1995).

□ Towards a Culture of Autonomy

This book argues that schools need to move on from the compliance culture to an emphasis on self-motivation. We need to encourage young people to invest more in themselves, to become stakeholders in and architects of their own learning. Self-discipline is what employers are looking for in young people. Lifelong learning also relies upon self-determination. Such an approach is also required to help achieve the goals of student participation recently enshrined in child care and educational legislation. Preparing students with a positive attitude to learning is probably the most important goal for schools today. Schools focus on educational qualifications but what young people will do with their qualifications will in the end be more important. For some young school leavers the problem is not a lack of job or training opportunities but their reluctance to access these because of a lack of confidence or self-determination. For others it is an inability to break away from their peer group’s anti-work and anti-training culture.

This book also criticizes the conceptual wooliness of the long-held assumptions about the role of self-esteem in motivating learning, particularly that low esteem is one of the most significant roots of underachievement and high self-esteem is an asset. This has led to the belief that an important function of schools is to boost students’ esteem. Trying to raise self-esteem may be of limited value as this ignores the fact that many of our feelings about our selves come from what we do rather than cause us to do it (Emler, 2001).

At the same time this book suggests that schools cannot actually affect esteem as much as we think. Esteem-building approaches are laudable but in isolation will not nurture confident learners (Dweck and Sorich, 1999). This requires attention to be focused on specific aspects of competency that are important to the student rather than vague attempts to make students feel good about themselves. The real classroom ‘feel-good’ factor is perhaps more accurately self-efficacy in goal achievement – the ‘SEGA’ factor. We motivate ourselves by thinking we can achieve our own goals by our own actions.

□ The Motivating School

The principles outlined in this book will also be of relevance to school managers in their attempts to lead teaching staff and create a motivating school. Child-centred teaching needs teacher-centred management, and management at all levels need to treat teachers the same way they expect teachers to treat their students. The leadership styles that have been found to create effective schools resonate with the motivating style in the classroom.

Just as parents are advised to meet their own oxygen needs before their children’s in an emergency, so teachers need to nurture their own self-motivation for teaching and learning before they consider how they are going to motivate their students.

School management needs to have an overview of motivational strategies used throughout the school to maintain some consistency of student experience and to facilitate the progressive development of students’ capacity to motivate themselves to learn. In this way, for example, class strategies could become increasingly sophisticated as students progress through the school in a staged way, matching the class’s motivational maturation.

□ Aims of the Book

This book has been written to support anyone who wants to develop their understanding of motivation and skills in facilitating the motivation of young people to learn in a structured learning context. It distils and synthesizes the latest research evidence on motivation for learning and blends it with practitioners’ intuitive ideas. It is not a ‘quick fix’ or recipe book. It provides joined-up theory, illustrated via a conceptual framework that lets teachers think about and describe their own and students’ motivation. The framework generates principles that inform and endorse practice in motivating students. The principles lead to practical applications as well as core competencies.

The book tries to offer a greater understanding of student behaviour and needs, as well as providing practical advice on how to develop an optimal learning context. It provides an opportunity for practitioners to reflect on the kinds of learning environments they create and how these impact on their students’ motivation. It helps elaborate our understanding of general ideas like positive attitudes. The model provides a framework that makes motivation explicit and so opens it up for a shared analysis. It provides a window through which to see what is working and not working in our schools. For school managers it allows a consideration of the kinds of environment in which teachers work.

The book aims to refine readers’ intuitive ideas and help them to identify the key aspects of the self that have to be taken into consideration when trying to motivate students. To be motivating, teachers need to understand how they are motivated and how they motivate themselves.

Given the explosion of knowledge about how the brain learns, it is important to focus also on how students motivate themselves to learn. How the brain learns needs to be complemented with how the self interacts with the learning context.

Teachers have great scope to motivate and just as much scope to demotivate their students. How a teacher intuitively understands the way motivation works will shape what he or she does to motivate students. This book aims to develop readers’ understanding of how their own motivation mindsets are ‘downloaded’ to students through the learning contexts they create. Teachers are continually making assumptions about the motives underpinning their students’ performance. This book will help teachers check out the validity of these assumptions. A common assumption for example is that ‘non-participation’ in learning is the ‘fault’ of the disaffected, requiring some kind of remedial intervention. This deficit view, however, stigmatizes individuals and makes it even harder to engage them.

If students are not good at spelling, schools help them to overcome their difficulties. If students are not good at motivating themselves, schools are not sure what to do. Self-motivation is a skill that schools rely upon and expect so much of, yet teach so little. As motivation is to an extent cognitively generated, it is possible for teachers to influence students’ thinking and so develop helpful motivational mindsets. Students can analyse what is going on in the classroom that helps or hinders their learning and are able to put forward sensible suggestions (Rudduck et al, 1998). Making motivational processes explicit and developing a motivation vocabulary for the classroom will enable students to take charge of their own motivation. A considerable amount of material on ‘teaching’ motivation is currently available (for example, Mindstore, 1998; Pacific Institute, 2000; Seligman, 1998; Tuckman, 1995; Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach, 1996).

Teachers need to accept that all students have some form of motivation and the challenge is to try to ‘tune in’ to what motivates students. Many students who are switched off by schools will have, for example, an encyclopedic knowledge of football league tables or the music charts. The common assumption that some students have no motivation betra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Diagrams
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Dedication
• Part I The Motivation Drivers
• Part III The Drivers in Action
• Part IV Summary and Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index