Motivated Teaching
Peps Mccrea's book Memorable Teaching in his High Impact Teaching series was excellent, and so is his latest, Motivated Teaching. These are books which are both modest and ambitious: the former because they are short, tight, controlled, and the latter because they also deal with big ideas about learning, absorbing, compressing and then expressing them very clearly. They also point the way for readers to more extensive research (the Notes and Further Reading at the end of each section are very good, sending you to interesting but not abstruse material).
Some notes [my main comments in square brackets]:
The mechanics of motivation: this section examines the centrality of attention [I've been writing an appropriately slow series on this: I'll get back to it]. 'What we attend to is ultimately what we learn.' 'Cognitive constraint' means our attention is limited, and so 'motivation is a system for allocating attention' [albeit a very imperfect, often misfiring system].
A few pages later there is a clear explanation of what for most people is a mysterious word 'heuristics', 'honed over millennia to enable us to make rapid decisions that lead to good enough results across a wide range of situations’. [Like everyone else does, I recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.]
Motivation is a specific response to a particular situation, not a general trait. [It’s important for teachers to keep this in mind: generally 'we' tend to think there are motivated and less-motivated pupils, rather than more precisely consider ‘situation-specificity’].
'Extrinsic drivers' have 'a fleeting impact. [Daniel Pink's book Drive is worth reading].
'Mitigating failure' is important [there is a lot around these days about 'resilience', and everyone's latest favourite quotation come from an unlikely source, Samuel Beckett].
The process of learning should be made easy; the content of learning should always be challenging.
Running routines in lessons: 'routines trip out redundant decision costs, reduce the amount of novel information that we have to process, and make the most of our ability to think less about the things we repeatedly do [this is a regular mistake by novice secondary level teachers, who tend to overwhelm pupils with material; primary school teachers understand it much better, by necessity].
Make the first step in a chain of actions easy in class - what Mccrea calls a 'micro-investment'.
Norms in school are particularly powerful: 'they often override more formal school policies or rules'. Prominent norms can be powerful tools [including my favourite tool, narrative sequencing]. [Again, as teachers and school leaders we tend to put too much faith in formal statements and instructions. In our current situation, schools have been concentrating on norms like mask-wearing and hand-washing, but we are finding it hard to have effective 'normative messaging' for so much else, due to restrictions on large gatherings and difficulties in communication].
'Chastising a class by messaging that the majority of them didn't do their homework is more likely to act as a reinforcement rather than as a deterrent.' [Quite: again, a novice error, but it’s also all too easy for experienced teachers to fall into this too].
'When schools focus on behaviour at the expense of motivation, they can quickly find themselves drawn towards a culture of superficial compliance, of being satisfied with suppressing bad behaviour.'