Student Motivation

Where does motivation come from?

It's actually a pretty interesting question. Particularly as I'm a parent of a three-year-old, and motivation is a major point of contention among parents. As in, how do you encourage children to do...whatever it is you want them to do? Many parents rely on the old carrot-and-stick approach. Heap on the praise when a child does something you want, or just does something, and punish, reproach, or withhold affection when a child does something you don't want. (Example: "Oh, Johnny! You drank your juice! Good job! What a good boy!" and "What a pretty picture you painted. I love it!" or "Johnny, I can't believe you spilled your juice. What a bad boy. Go sit in the corner.") This provides a child with external motivation - they are concerned with your reaction to their achievements or actions.

Other parents try to encourage internal motivation. Instead of praise for things like a painted picture, they offer reflection. "Wow, Susie, there are a lot of colors in that painting." Instead of praise for an accomplishment, they offer reflection. "Susie, I see you finished your juice." Instead of punishment or reproaches, they offer reflection and encourage solution-finding. "Susie, I see you spilled your juice. You need to clean it up. Where's the rag?" This helps a child to develop internal motivation - they keep painting because they like to paint, not because painting gets lots of high marks from mommy. They clean up because it's just what you do after a spill, not out of fear of punishment.

Are these extreme examples? And not altogether realistic? Yes.


Why am I talking about parenting? Because I think how I parent really affects how I teach, and how I teach has affected my parenting. Not that I see students as children, but there are a lot of similarities between parenting and teaching.

I do not try to provide my child or my students with external motivation. The motivation's got to come from inside. My job as a parent is to help my child to develop his own internal motivation. My job as a teacher is to help my (adult) students utilize the internal motivation they already have.

Why do I see my job in this light? Well, two reasons.

First, all of my students are adults who are attending classes voluntarily. Nobody forced them to come, and so in theory, their motivation to learn is naturally high. (It's not like we're teaching traffic school where everyone has to be there.) My job should not then be seen as needing to provide motivation...but to instead capitalize on the already high sense of motivation and help it to remain high.

And second, I strongly believe that, in the end, it doesn't matter what I think about your dancing, or what I think about a child's painting. It matters what YOU think about your dancing, or what the child thinks about his own painting. Does it make YOU happy? Are you able to lead well, do you follow well, are you having a good time while you're dancing?

Why do I feel this way? I see many people who teach various things develop in their students a kind of dependency. The students need constant feedback from the teacher, they need praise, they can't feel good about what they're doing until the teacher says they should. Sometimes it even goes so far that a teacher is a little manipulative with students to keep them coming back because they feel so good with the teacher and the teacher's constant ego-stroking. And that's sad. It really is.

So you won't hear a lot of praise - especially false praise - in our classes. You will hear feedback, reflection. "You look like you're struggling." "You're getting it." "You look uncertain, but you're doing it just right." "That looked pretty good." "OK, it looks like we need to go over that a few more times." "OK, you're starting to get it now."

And this means that, when we do say "that's looking really good!" you can know that we mean it!