It's all about motivation.

The system needs to change, not teachers.

Education systems are becoming systems whose principal functions, apparently, are the administration, management and surveillance of teachers and students, rather than the education of students and teachers.

(Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon, 2014)

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

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In 2017, Goss and Sonnemenn looked at engagement in the lower and middle levels of Australian schools (grades 3 - 10) and found that only 60% of students were engaged at any one point in time. Since engagement is known to be predictive of outcomes, this was obviously an important observation, and an informed response could be expected. Since then, the only effort by systems has been to put the responsibility onto teachers, who are required to conform to system structures like syllabi, assessment, and reporting. However, being unable to change year level content, assessment and reporting ultimately serves to limit the extent to which teachers can address engagement in their classrooms.

In reality, motivation theory suggests that the design of the system in which teachers and students work is much more important than anything teachers can do individually.

Research basis.

My conviction, based on a 5-year experiment, followed by 12 more years of observations in classrooms, and research focused explicitly on student motivation, is that student motivation is ultimately dependent on the structure of the system in which they work. The best teachers can make some difference, but the majority, the average teacher, can’t overcome the negative impacts of poor system design.

The main motivation theory behind this assertion is Self Determination Theory by Ryan and Deci. I chose this theory as my main source of understanding as the behaviours and feelings it suggests most closely resembles those that I could see in students and teachers, including myself.

This theory postulates that for someone to be motivated to learn, three internal beliefs must be supported. Students must believe they have:

1. Autonomy, that they have some control over their learning,

2. Competence, that they have the capacity to be successful, and

3. Relatedness, that they have some connection with the context of the work, such as the teacher, school and/or how the learning fits into their lives, or the lives of others.

Teachers have been shown to be good at fostering positive student relationships and in fact have, at the same time, been blamed for doing so by some commentators for being too “soft” on students. Where they mostly fail, through little fault on their part, is in supporting autonomy and competence beliefs in students.

My research suggests that it is the system that actively causes negative beliefs in students in these two areas, and interestingly, in teachers as well who then choose behaviours based on those beliefs that further undermine autonomy and competence beliefs in students.

The following analysis of systemic structures is limited to lower and middle school, as these are the formative years of each student’s perception of themselves as a learner.

Two significant systemic structures impact quite directly on students and teachers, structure of content and reporting. Currently these could be described as follows:

1. Structure of content; organised as specific content arranged in year levels, where the content at one level does not necessarily flow from the content at the previous level. The impact of this structure is that teachers have less freedom in the way content is organised and every student at that grade level must be taught that content. A good example is the statements of content in the Australian Curriculum, Science, which from 7 to 10 have little conceptual continuity.

2. Reporting; formalised as A - E with the following general meanings: A, performing significantly well compared with age peers, to E, performing significantly poorly compared with age peers, with the other grades implying something between those extremes. The impact of this structure is that:

   1. students perceive ability only in comparison with their age peers, with A students feeling they are far more capable and E students feeling they are far less capable. In fact, it is not uncommon for both ends of the spectrum to be less motivated than they could be, A students because they know they can rest on their laurels and E because there is no link between their effort and their results.

   2. Students develop fixed intelligence beliefs, a belief shown by many researchers to have negative consequences for motivation.

   3. Students develop a feeling of failure, an inability to perform at that level, with consequent negative impacts on motivation. 

An anecdote I have used in workshops may help understand this emotional state.

It is well known that students begin school with as much as 5 years of difference in ability and skills. A student who starts school near the bottom of that spectrum is likely to receive E for a subject by grade 3, the first year A to E grades are normally given. Your teacher, as they should, explains that you can get a C next time if you try really hard, but that is actually a huge skill jump as they will be studying new work. so next time maybe you get a D or another E, and again next time may be a D or maybe an E and so on. Unless a student who begins at the lower end of the spectrum than others improves enormously more than their peers, they will always get D or E results, and quite reasonably label themselves as a ‘D or E student’, a failure, despite any good teacher’s emotional support.

In 2000, Queensland and other states adopted an “outcomes approach to education”, which was ambitious, allowing a range of implementations. From my perspective as Head of Science in a large, low socio-economic high school, it was a huge success, not primarily because it was ‘outcomes based’ but because of the design features encompassed in the syllabus and the flexibility it allowed. That flexibility was the beginning of my 5-year experiment, allowing curriculum, classroom language, assessment and reporting to be designed to be as supportive of relatedness, autonomy and competence as possible.

System characteristics supportive of motivation.

The characteristics of the Outcomes Approach that made it better for teacher and student motivation were:

1. Syllabus content organised as relatively few (15) streams of broad concepts through which students developed a greater understanding of over time. This meant that:

   1. Teachers had greater flexibility to organise tasks that were more meaningful to their students, by following interests while still meeting syllabus requirements.

   2. Content was not organised in ages/grades that students either passed or failed. Instead, content was organised as streams that passed through all grades, and students demonstrated understanding at whatever level they were capable of, hence always “passed” at some level. Over time their understanding improved, moving through the levels, with levels not directly dictated by age.

2. Reporting was individual and personal, focused on showing the student and parent what they knew and could understand, not how they performed compared with others. Comparison was possible but not explicit. This meant that reporting:

   1. was “ratcheted”, meaning that once a student showed understanding at a level, they only moved forward from that level, never backwards, a significant psychological boost. At worst, a student remained static if they did no work on a specific concept.

   2. required assessment to be focused on discovering where the student was in each stream of content. This meant that assessment:

      • was a positive event looking for what a student knew and understood, instead of a negative, anxious event, intended to find out what a student didn’t know, to compare them against their peers, and which they then either passed or failed.

      • could be used to give credit any time and all the time. If a student showed understanding they could be given credit for it even outside formal assessment situations.

Over the 5 years of the experiment, students demonstrated higher motivation and engagement in classes and fewer reported negative behaviours, with some examples of students changing from disengagement to active engagement with work. Interview comments by students are given here on page 6.

In 2005, this system was effectively hamstrung when the then Commonwealth government took an ideological dislike to it, demanding that states implement an A – E model of reporting and more well-defined content. This was the end of the main experiment, but the next 12 years were spent testing those key ideas in a system not designed to support them.

What needs to happen.

If education systems truly want improvements in student outcomes, they need to take a focused look at systemic structures through a lens of student motivation, using well established theories such as Self Determination Theory.

Refocusing our attention towards rethinking systemic structures such as content, in learning progressions, and reporting, as progress along them, and trusting teachers to do the best they can for students, would improve engagement and boost outcomes.

Till next time,

References

Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Springer.