First, as a result of not being offered opportunities to learn that align with their most basic needs (as defined under Choice Theory), students make decisions that appear to reflect being unmotivated, when they are actually just meeting other needs. Glasser’s view (1992) is that we are “always motivated all the time” (p. 42), so the reality is that students who don’t engage in our learning activities do remain motivated -- just not to do what we had hoped or expected they would.
The second source of failure is that teachers, operating from a stimulus-response behavioral model, fail to fully appreciate a student’s agency and freedom of choice, and continue their reliance on extrinsic motivation, especially forms of coercion, which ends up being ineffective for both teachers and students. Teachers become “boss-managers” in Glasser’s economy of terms (p. 26).
A third factor compounding the situation that exists between resistant students and their “boss-manager” teachers occurs as administrators, who are likely to play the part of “boss-manager” to the classroom teacher, rely on extrinsic motivators as well. Though the terminology of Glasser’s theoretical framework pre-dated the NCLB era and any specific NCLB terminology, it anticipated and captured the essence of NCLB’s punitive and sanction-based approach very well.
Consider some selected quotes from Glasser’s The Quality School (1992):
While the manager cannot make people do quality work – control theory contends that no one can make anyone do anything – it is the job of the manager to manage so that the workers or the students can easily see a strong connection between what they are asked to do and what they believe is quality. And as long as we continue to embrace expediency (“get them through”) as an excuse to compromise on quality, our schools, already behind, will continue to slip. (p. 6)
It would be extremely helpful to come up with an exact definition of quality education that would apply to all situations. Even without being able to define it, however, we can almost always recognize quality when we see it. Ask any school administrator to take you through the school and show you some high-quality work in any subject area, and I am certain that you will agree that what you are shown is quality. What is similar about all this work is that none of it could be graded or evaluated by a machine – quality never can. (p. 6)
Our main complaint as students (and this has not changed) was not that the work was too hard, but that it was boring, and this complaint was and still is valid. “Boring” usually meant that we could not relate what we were asked to do with how we might use it in our lives. For example, it is deadly boring to memorize facts that neither we, nor anyone we know, will ever use except for a test in school. The most obvious measure of the effective teachers we remember is that they were not boring; somehow or other what they asked us to do was satisfying to us. (p. 7)
Boss-managers and administrators constantly lament that students are not motivated, but what they are actually saying is that they do not know how to persuade students to work. And as long as they continue to believe in coercion, they never will. (p. 39)
So what is happening when students experience failure even when all the conditions seem to be in perfect order? Teachers should strongly consider how their approach is reflected in the level of student motivation being observed. It can be a litmus test of sorts. If students appear to be very “unmotivated” to you as a teacher, they probably are hoping their observable behavior will tell you that what you are doing isn’t working for them. It is a paradigm shift when teachers see student failure as a sign that the teacher’s behaviors must change, not merely the student’s.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) era is now underway, it is important to reflect on the many large and small ways we can move away from punitive and externally regulated boss-manager relationships.