Teacher Motivation Working Group

By Xuedan Hu

Jan 18, 2017

If we know teacher motivation is important, how can we further understand the challenges and factors that influence it? How do we know whether salary or working environment matter most to teachers? How can we compare the motivation levels between teachers in Uganda and teachers in Indonesia? If you are interested in exploring the answers to these questions, you may find the following studies helpful.

The Work Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers (WTMST)

The WTMST is designed to assess five motivational constructs(intrinsic motivation, identified, introjected, external regulations, amotivation) toward six work tasks (e.g. class preparation, teaching, evaluation of students, class management, administrative tasks, and complementary tasks). Complementary tasks include tutoring, involvement in extracurricular activities, and other activities outside the classroom. This study tests the validation of WTMST by conducting a pilot and full research study with 600 elementary and high school teachers.

Teacher Motivation Assessment Scale (TMAS)

This study develops and validates an instrument entitled the “Teacher Motivation Assessment Scale”. Similar to WTMST, the TMAS also assesses five motivational constructs: attitude, reward,commitment, punishment and interest. This study shows that TMAS is a stable instrument and does not discriminate across school location and job experience.

Teacher Motivation Theoretical Framework

This report summarizes the results of teacher motivation research through a literature review, survey, and interviews with education experts and practitioners. It presents a framework of analysis that can be used to diagnose threats to teacher motivation. This framework includes eight interconnected categories that influence teacher motivation: 1) workload and challenges, 2) remuneration and incentives, 3) accountability, 4) career development, 5) institutional environment, 6) voice, and 7) learning materials and facilities.

Teacher Motivation Diagnostic Tool (TMDT)

The Teacher Motivation Diagnostic Tool has been developed by the Teacher Motivation Working Group with support from Save the Children and World Vision. The tool is designed to capture a variety of factors hypothesized to influence and interact with teacher motivation and performance. It attempts to measure internal and external supports and challenges faced by teachers through five components: Self-Defined Motivation and Challenges, Self-Efficacy, Beliefs, Support, and Professional Development Needs. The TMDT has already been piloted in five countries and will soon be publicly available on our website.

These are only a limited number of studies that attempt to measure teacher motivation. Please share any other tools or measurement systems you might use in your work. The TMWG has been building a bibliographic database of key teacher motivation studies, and we are continually looking for more research about how to effectively measure teacher motivation. This database will also be available to the public soon on our website.

By Xuedan Hu

Nov 2, 2016

Teacher professional development (TPD) is a necessary element to achieve educational change, especially when striving for the more effective application of technology to enhance student learning. A study developed from the discussions of the working group on TPD (TWG3) at EDUsummIT 2015 uses four case studies to address the challenges of providing TPD for ICT Integration in Education.

Among the numerous challenges of TPD for ICT in education, the working group emphasizes five major ones:

1. Contextualization with sociocultural awareness: There are many variations and levels of access to technology, which can be influenced by specific school cultures.
2. Sustainability and scalability of professional development: Barriers include social and cultural factors, lack of teachers’ knowledge, inadequate infrastructure, linguistic differences, and geographical separation.
3. Empowering pedagogy through ICT: Effective application of ICT in TPD is expected to bring changes to the education system as a whole.
4. Technology discernment: Educational decision-makers have to make wise choices about the deployment of ICT and about the content of TPD to support applications of ICT in the classroom.
5. Systemic and systematic TPD: It normally takes a long period of time with constant reiterations to see substantial change in technology integration.

The case study showing how social networking is used for self-generating TPD in Australian schools, for example, mainly responds to the challenge of sustainability and scalability. This example addresses the issues of geographical equity for teachers who are separated by long distances across Australia. This TPD program enables teachers from any location in Australia to have an opportunity to form and contribute to a networked learning community. Teachers are involved in an “Action Learning Project” to develop a plan for implementing a new technology into their classrooms with the help of a mentor and the community of teachers. Although no face-to-face contact occurred, teachers were able to work collaboratively regardless of time and space.

Interested in learning more about how to integrate ICT into TPD programs? Check out the paper to read three case studies about technology integration in Kenyan schools, TPD through teacher initiatives in Israeli schools, and Sri Lankan pre-service internships. These cases provide a better understanding of how professional development programs can facilitate teachers’ use of ICT in education. While reading, think about other examples of integrating ICT through teacher professional development that you have experienced. Do teachers prefer online communication over face-to-face interactions? In what situations is it effective, and in what situations less effective? Can you identify additional challenges to integrate ICT in TPD, especially in low-income countries with limited access to technology and Internet?

By Yein Suh

July 13, 2016

To what extent has teacher motivation been influential to students? A working paper from National Center for Research on Rural Education gives us an intriguing idea about the influence, or impact, of teacher motivation for students’ behavioral outcomes. The question they attempted to answer was whether teacher motivation could moderate the effectiveness of Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC) for improving student behavior, and what they found was ‘YES.’

More specifically, their results indicated that among students who received CBC, students whose teachers had higher levels of motivation showed lower levels of conduct problems than students whose teachers had lower levels of motivation. Additionally, students whose teachers reported higher levels of motivation showed greater improvement in their behaviors over time.

Yet, how did teacher motivation to participate in intervention actually affect students’ behavioral outcomes? Perhaps teachers who were willing to make changes were better at dealing with their students. Or those teachers may have showed students that they cared about, respected, and trusted them, which helped students improve their behaviors. Either way, the answer is simple: whether teachers are motivated or not matters a lot.

Now think about teachers you have met during your school days. Were there any teachers who showed, or didn’t show, motivation, willingness, or aspiration? How do you recall your experience with them? How much influence do you think their motivation had on your life as a student?

By Yein Suh

July 6, 2016

When we talk about the issue of teacher motivation, many of us tend to focus on external factors that affect teachers’ motivation. It is largely because we know that teachers face many challenges at the classroom level, and because external factors are those that we can more easily tackle to make changes. However, the internal aspects of teacher motivation should not be overlooked; as internal and external factors go hand in hand in teachers’ everyday lives, we should also look at what motivates teachers from within. Today we will discuss the relationship between self-control, productivity and motivation.

A recent New York Times article by Sendhil Mullainathan, written from an economic perspective, sheds some light on the complex relationship between workers’ self-control and productivity. In order to find out more information about the role of self-control in productivity, Mullainathan and two Ivy-League economists conducted an experiment with data entry workers in India.

The workers were usually paid 2 rupees for every 100 fields of data they entered. The researchers offered the workers another alternative: the workers could either keep working under their current contract or choose to work under a new contract. The new contract would give the workers a target of data fields per day. If the workers hit the target, they would be paid the same amount of money that they would have been paid under the current contract; if they failed to do so, they would be paid only half the amount they normally earned. Interestingly, although the new contract did not pay the workers more, which they also knew, they chose to work under this new contract – because it encouraged them to work much harder, exercising more self-control to push them to greater levels of productivity, even though it did not lead to increased income.

This experiment is connected to the way that strict work rules were used to strengthen self-discipline among workers during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, in the article we hear from Dr. Greg Clark at the University of California-Davis, who notes that ‘the Industrial Revolution was in part a self-control revolution.’

Factories imposed discipline. They enforced strict work hours. There were rules for when you could go home and for when you had to show up at the beginning of your shift. If you arrived late you could be locked out for the day. For workers being paid piece rates, this certainly got them up and at work on time. You can even see something similar with the assembly line. Those operations dictate a certain pace of work. Like a running partner, an assembly line enforces a certain speed.

At the end of the article, Sendhil acknowledges that the old-fashioned ways of operating factories may not correspond to the reality of life in the modern knowledge economy. Our jobs are more complicated, working conditions are important to employees, and there is an increased desire for autonomy in the workplace. Yet, the author suggests that “if employers could tackle the problem of self-control at work successfully, we might have another revolution in productivity”.

We can see many remnants of the industrial revolution in the way that modern school systems operate. Education activists have pushed back on this approach, leading to school reform. To what extent do external factors in school systems help motivate teachers to be more effective and productive? Is it human nature for us to need stricter rules to reinforce our own self-control? Or do we flourish within systems that allow more flexibility and less oversight? What do you think are the most effective ways to address the internal aspects of teacher motivation?

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