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In a recent blog, I reflected on the idea that sometimes we miss a step when trying to motivate our students. We think about what we can do as teachers to set the conditions for motivated learning but maybe we need to think more carefully about students’ emotional starting points.

Being aware of student feelings and emotions can help us to plan and deliver better lessons, particularly when managing success and failure. As Mccrea (2020) says in Motivated Teaching “Expectancy is heavily shaped by prior success rate. The more successful we have been in the past, the more likely we are to invest in similar opportunities in the future”.

Students are more motivated when they feel competent to do what is expected of them.  Boekaerts (2010) said that students who feel likely to succeed tend to “choose more challenging problems, invest more effort, persist for longer”. I recognise this in my own six-year-old son, who believes he is good at everything. At that age, it doesn’t occur to him that he has strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others; he believes he is clever, and that message is reinforced at home and at school.

Wigfield and Eccles (2002) found that children’s sense of competence generally declines as they get older. Older children compare themselves to peers and become accustomed to grading and evaluation procedures. While successful learners tend to use this information to work harder, students who are less successful find themselves lacking motivation without really understanding why. They switch off and, often, no one really notices when this happens.

So at some point my son will realise that he isn’t good at everything but I hope that the realisation doesn’t come as too much of a blow to him. I hope that between school and home, we can work together on the messaging that it is good to have talents in particular areas and to work hard at the things we struggle with. Most importantly, I hope we stop to notice how this realisation makes him feel.

Getting the Right Messages Across

The messaging we receive and the stories we tell ourselves are vital. When I was a student at school, I was surrounded by messaging that said I was clever; I was good at English and would do well. The messaging I received from the maths department, however, was that I couldn’t do it and I had no hope of passing my exams. The messaging from the maths set I was in told me that behaviour would dominate lessons and there would be very little maths covered.  The messaging from my teacher came from the roll of his eyes every time I asked him to explain something to me for the second or third or fourth time. So, when I failed Maths GCSE, it was no surprise to anyone.

So how can we ensure that our messaging is on point? For me, this is about teachers knowing that everything they do, everything they say, communicates something to the students they teach. The way we speak to students, the way we frame activities, they way we present difficulty, all this matters.

As Boekaerts (2010) puts it:

“Teachers need to be aware that the motivational messages are embedded in their own discourse, their selection of learning tasks, and in their teaching practices. Students pick up on these unintended messages and appraise the climate as either favourable or unfavourable for learning.”

Maybe by being more mindful of the approaches we take as teachers, we can help our students to perceive the climate as favourable and beneficial.

Some of the ways I have done this recently are by:

• Dwelling on success
• Attributing Success
• Breaking it down
• Slowing it down

Dwelling on Success

We need to ensure our students experience the sweet taste of success. We shouldn’t give empty praise or ply students with messages that their achievements will be limitless, but we have it in our power to signpost successful behaviours and to celebrate good work. I think we need to be explicit as we go along about when students have been successful and let them bask in it. We need to dwell on that success with them, encouraging them to savour that feeling so that they can develop an appetite for success over time.

We shouldn’t just think about success as something we experience individually; we can also think about the collective endeavour of striving for success as a group. This might involve using some reflective questions at the end of the lesson or as part of an exit ticket that asks: what did we get right today? How did you contribute to the success of the lesson? What did you do well? What did others do well? What were the strengths of today’s lesson? Asking about how we have been successful together is an important nuance.

Attributing Success

As well as helping our students to feel good about their achievements, we also need to help students build positive associations over time so they can recall and make links to prior successes. We need to help students attribute success and failure correctly. If students feel that doing well was a fluke (they were just lucky this time) they are unlikely to be motivated by that achievement. They must own their successes and know why they did well otherwise they might not be able to use that experience as a milestone for future goals and aspirations.

Mccrea (2020) says that “only when pupils believe they were successful themselves and they attribute the cause to themselves – their own effort, ability and approach – will their expectancy increase” and that teachers can influence expectancy by “repeatedly messaging, through both our talk and action”.

One way we might go about doing this is by reminding students about the excellent work they did today, last week, last month, etc. The way we use our language can help make this explicit for students: “Remember that excellent point that Jacob made last lesson…”; “lets return to that model paragraph that Alice produced last week…”; “let’s revisit why Adiel’s answer was so good last month…”. This makes the success they experienced memorable and motivates them to work hard for it again.

Another way we can do this is by using the visualiser to look at a piece of student’s work, asking, ‘what makes this so good?’. By linking what is good in the model answer to successes students have had, they are likely to feel that improvement is possible. We might say something like “This is a brilliant example of using explanations and this is also something I saw in Emily, Mohammed and James’ essays”.

As Mccrea says, we need to influence expectancy through our talk and action. We need to make those successes feel current and relevant. Talking out loud and naming these achievements help students attribute success to their own effort. 

Breaking it Down

As teachers, we need to make connections between what students feel they can’t do and what they do well already. In his book ‘Habits of Success’, Harry Fletcher Wood (2021) talks about the importance of breaking big tasks into bitesize chunks. He recommends we either break tasks down in advance of setting a task, or when students are doing the task and hit a bit of a wall. By breaking tasks down into the steps which will hopefully become automatic later, we put a spotlight on the process and point out the parts that students have mastered already.

When planning a scheme of learning on discursive writing recently, I predicted that at least one child wouldn’t know where to start. English teachers will know that this is a common problem with writing tasks! Realising that emotional starting points could be a bit of a barrier, I broke my teaching down into the following steps:

1. Frontloading the thinking and planning. 
2. Taking a viewpoint and not sitting on the fence.
3. Developing an argument through several different lenses.
4. Planning the structure and sequence of the argument to include a main argument, a few supporting mini-arguments and a counter argument.
5. Using a range of linguistic devices to engage their audience, enabling them to write with conviction.

We spent quite some time on points 1 and 2 above which focus primarily on thinking. I provided a lot of scaffolding about how students might go about planning ideas before even starting to consider writing. With point 3, I began to take the scaffolds away, asking students to identify the ‘big ideas’ they could draw on more independently.

I planned this sequence knowing that students needed to experience success early, something I also talked about in my Educating Northants talk back in March. By investing time in the pre-writing stages, students were able to experience success before beginning to compose a piece themselves.  

Slowing it Down

In Mary Kennedy’s paper ‘Parsing the Practice of Teaching (2015) she makes the excellent point that “education is mandatory, but learning is not”. For students to engage with learning, they need to concentrate hard on challenging material. She tells us:

“School learning requires what Kahneman (2011) calls “slow thinking” the kind of thinking that requires concentration and effort. In contrast, most of life outside the classroom calls for “fast thinking” thinking that is reflexive and that allows us to jump to conclusions, rely on rules of thumb or re-use a habit we used in the past”.

I think it is our duty as teachers to recognise this tension and to present challenging material with an acknowledgement that students will struggle with it. Simply reciting knowledge or walking through a maths problem on the board is not going to cut it. Understanding that students need to think about something in order to understand it (Willingham, 2009), Kennedy recommends that teachers ask students to make a prediction or explain why something happened to help them see the causal relationships:

“These questions and prods are intended to help students to think about the underlying relationships and concepts that the teacher is addressing and increase the chances that students will see and understand those relationships.”

When I teach William Blake’s poem ‘London’, which students find incredibly difficult, I usually spend several lessons introducing and exploring some key concepts first, including ideology, hegemony and consent. These are difficult concepts to grasp so I take my time, give them space to explore the meanings of the words and help them make connections to knowledge they have encountered elsewhere in the curriculum.

This means that when we come across the phrase “mind-forg’d manacles” in stanza 2, students are already comfortable with the notion of the hypocrisy Blake was challenging in the social institutions of his time.  In the past, when I tried to explain the meaning of this line as I read the poem aloud, I found it difficult. It is not the sort of thing you can explain in a nutshell or write in a glossary; it takes much more unpicking than that. Slowing down and giving time to do the unpicking has made all the difference when studying poems with difficult concepts like this.

The four approaches discussed here are by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope they help to illustrate the importance of using students’ emotional starting points. Perhaps this is the kind of data that we should be looking at more in schools.

References

Boekaerts, M (2010) The Crucial Role of Motivation and Emotion in Classroom Learning. Available to access at: The crucial role of motivation and emotion in classroom learning | The Nature of Learning : Using Research to Inspire Practice | OECD iLibrary (oecd-ilibrary.org)

Fletcher-Wood, H (2021) Habits of Success. Routledge.

Kennedy, M (2015) Parsing the Practice of Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education. Available to access at: (PDF) Parsing the Practice of Teaching (researchgate.net)

Mccrea, P (2020) Motivated Teaching. Peps Mccrea.

Wigfield and Eccles (2002) Motivational Beliefs, Values and Goals. Annual Review of Psychology Vol.53. Available to access at: eccles-wigfield-2002-motivational-beliefs-values-and-goals.pdf (wordpress.com)

Willingham, D (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School? Jossey-Bass.

There is still a lot we don’t know about motivation. In his book ‘Motivated Teaching’, Peps Mccrea reminds us that “the mechanics of motivation are not only highly complex, they are also largely invisible” and he urges us to do all we can as teachers to tease out the most powerful insights that persist across the field and codify them in ways that we can use in schools “on a hot Friday afternoon”.

Mccrea describes motivation in a way that helps us begin to codify what it is. He says that to understand motivation, we must first understand attention, and he explains that “attention is the gatekeeper of learning” and that “what we attend to is ultimately what we learn”. So, if motivation is a system for allocating attention, then it becomes something tangible – something we can influence as teachers. We can use the curriculum, lesson planning or activities to ensure that our students attend to the right things in the right way.

He goes on to say that allocating attention is a largely unconscious process. Students aren’t aware they are making decisions about what they give their attention to because they typically use short cuts, or heuristics, like deferring to previous success rates or by looking at what others are doing.

Mccrea describes motivation as being like an investment engine. Students will decide whether the task in hand is worth their time based on three things: 1) the value they put on the task; 2) their chance of success; 3) the time and effort they will have to invest to be successful. Students will probably take a few seconds to make these judgements so no matter what we try to do to secure their attention, it is possible that they might have already made up their minds.

In his book, Mccrea goes on to introduce five drivers which help us to think about how we can build motivation in our students. These drivers are brilliant and I based my Educating Northants presentation on how I used them to create the conditions for motivated teaching in my own classroom.

But now I find myself taking a step back and thinking more about what it is that makes students reach those decisions about effort and ability. Those attitudes like I can’t do maths; I am useless at spelling; I have no chance of passing that exam can become so deeply ingrained in students’ minds, that it becomes very difficult for teachers to do anything about them. Mccrea says that as humans our decision making is fuelled by emotions, and it is this connection between motivation and emotion that I wish we talked about more.

In  The Crucial Role of Motivation and Emotion in Classroom Learning (2010) Boekaerts begins her paper by explaining why motivation and emotion are essential to education: “because, together they ensure that students acquire new knowledge and skills in a meaningful way”.  She tells us that students will inevitably encounter situations in the classroom that they find hard or boring and it us up to teachers to adapt the curriculum so that students feel the learning is worth their attention.

She also explains that many theories of learning and instruction give a hat tip to motivation, but rarely do they integrate motivational constructs

“Competence models mainly focus on the domain-specific process that they need to acquire, and cognitive and metacognitive processes that they need to access in order to become strategic learners.”

What this doesn’t account for, she suggests, is the fact that all students come to learning differently. “Not all students acquire knowledge in the same way, and they differ in the value they attach to new knowledge and newly-acquired strategies”. She goes on to say that if students’ cognitions and emotions about learning are not factored in, these models will not be able to adequately represent the dynamics of the learning process.

Motivational Beliefs

Motivational beliefs are the feelings that students hold about themselves as learners. Students often come to us with pre-conceived ideas about how good they are or how likely they are to succeed. This is crucial because students use these motivational beliefs to give meaning to learning tasks. These beliefs fall into 5 categories:

1	Self-efficacy	The beliefs they hold about their own capability to do something.
2	Outcome expectation	That certain actions will lead to success and others will lead to failure.
3	Goal orientation	The purpose of the learning activity.
4	Value judgements	How interesting or boring activities are.
5	Attributions	Perceived causes of success and failure.

Motivational beliefs can be positive or negative. Students are influenced by the climate for learning and the behaviours of others; these things shape the choices they make as well as how much effort they will invest and how long they will persist in the face of difficulties.

While we often think about students’ starting points from a cognitive or academic point of view, how often do we stop to consider their emotional starting points or their readiness to learn? As teachers, how can we pre-empt these beliefs and plan learning to challenge some of the notions that students hold about their ability or likelihood of success?

Managing Emotions

Boakaerts tells us that he word “emotion” refers to a wide range of affective processes. There are six primary emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Others have identified secondary emotions such as envy, hope, sympathy, gratitude, regret, pride, disappointment, relief, hopelessness, shame, guilt, embarrassment and jealousy.

Fridja (1986) argued that emotions have two major functions. Firstly, to give warning signals that tell us we are facing either a highly valuable situation or a threatening one. This creates a sense of urgency as we know that the situation needs our immediate attention. The second function is to prepare us to act swiftly in response. These emotions create physical hormonal responses like the heart beating faster, breathing heavier, or hands feeling clammy, etc.

Some emotions, such as anger, relief and joy, are short lived and have little significance for future learning. Other emotions, such as shame and hopelessness, have enduring relevance to classroom learning because they are tagged to previous situations and can be activated when a student is confronted with a similar task in the future. I can think of many students I have taught across the years who fit this profile: students who felt they couldn’t face lessons because they had a bad experience in the past.

This makes me wonder, as teachers, how tuned in are we to the previous experiences that our students have had? Are we aware that the success and failure they experience in their lessons has the power to make or break their confidence and perception of self? Do we create the conditions for students to tell us about these experiences or do we leave them to take root in the student’s mind where they can sit dangerously invisible?

Coming to Learning

When students are faced with a new learning task, Boekaerts suggests that they do three things in the following order:

1. Observe specific features of the task and its educational context: how relevant or interesting is the task? What outcome sis expected? What is the purpose? Is it worth my time? What will help me to succeed or fail in this task?
2. They activate domain specific knowledge and relative metacognitive strategies: this will make me better at this? Will I feel more confident than before? Will I be more competent as a result?
3. They activate motivational beliefs and regulation strategies: Am I interested in this? Will it be hard? Can I adapt as the demands of learning change? Is it worth it?

This approach quickly helps students to determine how they feel about the learning task; how committed they are to dealing with it and how they will regulate their motivation throughout learning. But what if their emotional responses are:

1. This is pointless.
2. There is no use in trying.
3. I am not clever enough.

Should we be considering what mechanisms we have in school to either pre-empt these negative responses or deal with them sensitively as soon as they happen? How often do we mistake these emotional reactions for poor attitudes or bad behaviour?

My Takeaways

So where does that leave us? For me, the following points provide a summary:

As teachers, we have it in our power to make learning meaningful. The way we plan the curriculum, deliver lessons and engage students in learning tasks is crucial to the way they perceive themselves as learners. For me, this is a hopeful message and reminds us that we can influence motivation in our classrooms to some extent.

When it comes to understanding motivation, we have barely begun to scratch the surface. This is a complex topic and while many models of instruction allude to motivation, even within these models, there isn’t enough of a spotlight on how emotions influence motivation. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach because all students come to learning in different ways.

Students’ perceptions of themselves as learners are crucial. The meaning they attach to their classroom experiences – their successes and failures – can change how they feel about future learning encounters.

The learning process is social. Students observe their teachers and peers and what they see or hear them saying about the learning can also have a significant impact. See Mccrea’s work on nudging norms for more on this.

All learning is a personal and emotional experience. Some emotions can be fleeting or short-lived and others can stay with students long after the event. Lingering feelings of success can be great, but a lot of unspoken damage can be done when failure stays as the overriding memory.

Writing this blog has helped me get some of my thinking in order, at least for now. I plan to write a follow up post where I’ll suggest some strategies to address the questions raised here. Hopefully, this is a way of getting the conversation started.

References

Boekaerts, M (2010) The Crucial Role of Motivation and Emotion in Classroom Learning’ OECD. Available at: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/the-nature-of-learning_9789264086487-en#page93

Frijda, N. H, Mesquita, B. (2000) Beliefs Through Emotions. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255522675_Beliefs_through_emotions

Mccrea (2020) Motivated Teaching. Peps Mccrea.

Nuthall, G. (2007) The Hidden Life of Learners. NZCER Press.