#83: Does school kill intrinsic motivation?

🧠 It sure can. Here's what to do about it (part 1)

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve spent a decade or two of your life sitting down in classrooms. Did this help or harm your intrinsic motivation?

I enjoyed school and think it stifled my intrinsic motivation. There was little room to explore personal interests and direct my own learning. The perfect pupil raised her hand to answer questions, rather than ask too many of them. I learnt to excel at understanding what was expected of me to get good grades (weren’t grades the point of school¹?). I’m still unlearning.

Of course, school has changed since I collected good behaviour tokens in the second grade. As my own children reach school age, do my grievances hold true? If they do, what can we do about it? To find out, I spoke with motivation psychologist Johnmarshall Reeve, from the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney. His answers point to a clear—though not easy—way forward.

May I introduce you to Prof. Johnmarshall Reeve

Reeve and I spoke for a generous hour, so the interview below has been edited for brevity and clarity. I hope our conversation is useful to you as the school year begins²! (This is part 1 and part 2 is here.)

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IIs it true that school kills children’s intrinsic motivation—that children are self-directed from the moment they're born, and then we suck it out of them?

Well, I agree with some of that. I do believe the first half of your statement: kids are born with intrinsic motivation. If you have a brain, you've got intrinsic motivation. It's natural, it's part of having a nervous system. So everybody's got it, but they're dependent on the environment.

I think a newborn baby is a great example. The baby's crying and complaining and uncomfortable. If the parents take the baby's point of view, they’re on their way to be a great parent, or have a really great motivating style: I really want to understand why you’re crying. Let me try this. But other parents don’t take the perspective of the child, they say: You should be quiet, I'm working. They take their own perspective and they try to suppress the child. Can environments, can relationships suppress intrinsic motivation? Absolutely, they can. But they can also support and nurture intrinsic motivation. Or there’s a third option: they can be not suppressive, not supportive, but neglectful.

So the answer is it depends—on the school, on the teacher, on education policies maybe?

If you say the point of school is to have good grades and to please your parents, to listen and obey your teacher, to follow the rules—in other words, if it’s the school’s, the teacher’s perspective that’s imposed on the student, and it’s done with a little bit of pressure—then that will suppress intrinsic motivation.

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“The teacher’s motivating style is the most important thing in the classroom.”

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You’ve worked across different countries and cultures. Is that something you found around the world?

Yes, it’s in every school system I’ve ever seen and it’s why I research what I do. If I say: Should I support intrinsic motivation and curiosity and interests and personal goals? All teachers will say that’s a good idea! Then you ask them: Okay, how do you do that? And there's a pause and a silence. It is a puzzle, it’s hard to figure out.

So typically, [teachers] do what’s normative, they do what everybody else does: learn how to do a lesson plan, set the goals. It is a lot of structure, but not much autonomy or intrinsic motivation support. And people generally get rewarded or praised for having a classroom that’s well-behaved and highly structured. I wish autonomy-supportive teachers would be valued in the same way.

One of your recent research papers [PDF] brought together studies on 51 “autonomy-supportive teaching interventions”³. What benefits can we expect from these interventions?

First, the magnitude of the benefit is huge, in terms of everything educators care about: they want students to be engaged, to learn, to develop skills, to be happy, to have a lot of friends, to have high test scores, self-control and self-regulation. If you support people’s autonomy, you get all these student benefits, it’s a very powerful effect. And it also benefits the teacher.

Don’t other factors matter, like class size?

The teacher’s motivating style is the most important thing in the classroom. Whether the class goes well, and the students leave the class saying, That was fun, I enjoyed class, that depends on the teacher’s motivating style.

We always include class size in our studies, [as well as factors like] subject matter, gender, grade level. Empirically, class size just doesn’t matter. It does matter for classroom dynamics—the culture that develops in the classroom, whether it's cooperative or competitive. Grade level does matter: middle school is tough and teachers are more controlling in middle school than any other grade level. But class size doesn’t matter.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

I didn’t expect that! Okay, back to what teachers can do. What are good practices to try?

When we talk about motivating styles, we’re basically talking about the teacher making an engagement request. Open your book, revise your paper, pay attention, do your homework. Or don’t talk in class, don’t make a mess, don’t be late, this kind of request. There are three main things teachers can do to facilitate intrinsic motivation:

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- take the student’s perspective
- give explanatory rationales
- use invitational language

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Step one is what we’ve already talked about: taking the other person’s perspective. How do you feel about this material? Where would you like to start? If the student isn’t interested at all in an activity, you present it in a way where students will say: It’s not interesting but it’s important, it’s valuable. You acknowledge and accept people’s resistance. Okay, I see you don’t want to do this. I see you’re stressed / bored.

Then you provide an explanatory rationale. Well, you might not be aware of this, but revising your paper is actually a useful thing to do to build skill X. Usually children don't know why they should be on time, or raise their hand before speaking.

[The third step is that] the teacher needs to use a language that’s not pressuring, we call it “invitational language”: you might consider, when you're ready, if you're willing, you might try this… giving people a choice about engaging, rather than pressuring them.

How do we make sure that invitational language isn’t a benign-looking version of “because I say so”, where children end up doing something to please the adult?

The language is very important. Hooks like: you would make me so happy if you did this / it would help me out / I would be so proud of you, are extrinsically motivating. It's not autonomy, it's not really choice, it’s sneaky and controlling. This is conditional regard, promoting doing things to please other people, which is, again, divorcing them from their intrinsic motivation, from their personal goals and values.

What we’re talking about is the hard and important work of promoting internalisation, trying to build up a sense of value in you that revising your paper and coming to class on time is useful and responsible. It’s not intrinsic motivation, but it’s the sense of “this will make my life better”. And it’s a very hard thing to do.

Another way is: how can I present the learning activity in a way that's going to satisfy your psychological needs? We [self-determination theorists] think enjoyment and interest come from needs satisfaction. It's not that the art or the math or the foreign language is interesting, it’s that I feel competent, and effective, and am making progress. Or it comes from relationship satisfaction: I feel close, I feel included among my peers. [And] does the activity allow you to have self-direction? We call that autonomy: I feel like I'm calling the shots. Can you build that into the learning?

In part 2, Reeve explains how he reaches the most reluctant teachers; his take on reward charts; and why everyone—not just teachers and parents—should care about autonomy support:

#85: Does school kill intrinsic motivation?

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1. Read or listen to best-selling author Daniel Pink’s take on grades and learning, plus more ideas for parents:

#77: How to harness the right kind of motivation

2. If you’re in the Southern hemisphere, I hope winter is treating you well!

3. This includes 38 randomised controlled trials in different countries around the world, measuring motivating styles before and after teacher training sessions on autonomy supportive teaching.