Adam Robbins Education

I’ve started going down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding motivation and teaching. I got introduced to Self Determination Theory by Adam Boxer and I’ve been slowly making my way through its seminal tome by Ryan and Deci. It’s a big book (approx. 700 pages) and I am not a very skilled reader so it’s going to take a while to read and digest it fully. I like to blog to help crystallise my thoughts and my understanding. I hope that you will read and be a critical friend if you think I have made any errors. 

The role of autonomy in teaching is relatively controversial. There is a moral argument that teachers owe their students the best possible educational experience and so full autonomy is not desirable. There is also a retention and professionalism argument that says autonomy is an important driver in teacher satisfaction. Each school or MAT seems to value these two aspects differently, with varying degrees of consistency required in lessons for example.

Self determination theory (SDT) is the psychological theory of intrinsic motivation. It has some powerful and sometimes counterintuitive findings. Today we are going to look at just the basic outline (mainly because I’m only ¼ of the way through the book) and what it can tell us about motivating teachers to act on feedback.

Essentially SDT looks at three broad contributing factors for intrinsic motivation:

Autonomy: The need to feel in control of one’s own behaviour and goals

Competence: The need to feel effective and capable of achieving your goals

Relatedness:  The need to feel connected to others and feel a sense of belonging

SDT then breaks these components down further to allow experiments to focus on particular aspects. We are not going to go into this now as the blog would get too long. Also to simplify things we are going to ignore relatedness and focus just on the interaction between autonomy and competence. 

Consider a simple scenario like this:

You observe a lesson and you think the lesson is going fine but you notice two areas that could be improved. First you notice that the teacher doesn’t pause for very long after asking a question (wait time) and you notice that the teacher is too quick to circulate around and support the students insteading waiting in a place where they can see the whole class (their perch). So the teacher has two things that could be their leverage points.

In this feedback conversation you have three options:

1. Give them both things to work on
2. Set their leverage point to be wait time so that students have time to formulate a full answer
3. Set their leverage point to be using their perch before circulating to ensure all students are able to start the task and judge the need to intervene at a class or student level. 

Which would you choose?

Firstly I want to say that I would generally advise against option 1. If you go with option 1 the teacher is less likely to achieve either as their focus will be split. Much better to just pick one. 

But how to decide? And who should be the decider? 

Intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is the motivation we have from within ourselves. It’s the thing that makes us act off our own volition to achieve a task. In teaching this is incredibly important for a couple of reasons.

Firstly as professionals there is an expectation of self evaluation and improvement that is a lot easier if we are motivated intrinsically to do. Secondly it ensures that our perceived locus of control (PLOC) is within ourselves. Change is difficult and is made much harder when we feel it is done to us rather than when we choose to do it. In the world of quality assurance and accountability that exists in education this can accidentally disempower teachers and make them unable to receive and act on feedback without feeling judged. 

If SDT is to be believed one of the most important things we can do is give teachers autonomy to improve and this will hit both the autonomy and competence aspects of intrinsic motivation. However while this may hit autonomy well, it really doesn’t hit competence as well as we might initially think. You see humans are not great at looking at themselves objectively, we suffer from many biases that impair our judgment. Education is also not always as transparent as we would like it to be. Some things that we may not think align with our values are actually incredibly powerful in the classroom, working in silence, for example. These two aspects combine to mean giving teachers full autonomy for the direction of their professional development is probably not going to increase competence as much as we want it to. 

The tension between autonomy and competence

So we can look at autonomy and competence as aspects that can sometimes be in tension with each other. This tension is greatest when the perceived benefit of one LP compared to another is greater. 

In my example I deliberately chose two things that I thought were probably roughly the same level of impact. How would it change if there were two things and one was considerably more impactful than the other?

Let’s say that this time the wait time is still there but also there is an inability to check for understanding. In this case I think we can all agree that checking for understanding is a much more salient leverage point. But what about autonomy?

If we become directive in the feedback is that not demotivational? 

While it’s true the more controlling we are the more the teacher will lose autonomy and in theory this will reduce their intrinsic motivation this does not have to be the case. Because competence is also an incredibly important motivator. So if we can significantly improve competence then the lack of autonomy will counteracted. This kind of explains why new teachers are very receptive to direction and do not lose intrinsic motivation. In fact when you give them direction that is valuable you see an improvement in intrinsic motivation often. The improvement in competence is so great that their lack of autonomy is not an issue. 

How does this impact more experienced staff?

When dealing with more experienced staff issues can arise. They can be less open to change and feedback. This is because the feedback might communicate a lack of competence. So if we reduce autonomy then we can run into issues with demotivation and a feeling of control that is counter productive. When giving them feedback we need to prioritise identifying how the change will benefit the teachers competence. This can be challenging because they might not be fully aware of the issues. One simple way is to frame things within the persistent problems of teaching. We can reflect on how they feel when they give students instructions but they struggle to execute them effectively. Now we can offer our feedback as a potential solution to this problem. This can then increase the competence to compensate for the loss of autonomy. 

When looking at leverage points we can present them in ways that can aim to build intrinsic motivation. If we are to sacrifice autonomy then we must tap into competence to ensure the teacher leaves the conversation willing to act on their own volition. If we don’t then most likely the teacher will not act or will act but with an external PLOC. This can lead to demotivation and significantly reduce the impact of the lesson visit. 

A quick work on instructional coaching models.

We can use SDT to assess different models of instructional coaching.

Some schools prefer a peer-to-peer model for their instructional coaching, with teachers buddied up to observe and feedback. This often works very well when it comes to motivation because there is high autonomy and low threat of judgement. However it has significant issues when it comes to improvement because the quality of the leverage points might not be consistent across the school. A more coach-teacher model has the advantage of improving the expertise and leverage points but might be demotivational. This is why the quality of the feedback is so important. To me this gives a significant advantage to the coach-teacher model.

I’d love to know your thoughts