Effective Motivational Strategies; What Makes Your Learners Care and Involved As a Facilitator?

What do you think of when you hear the term learners motivation?

Is it the result of something that the facilitator adds to the equation or something that the learners brings to the situation?

The field of human motivation is a complex and expansive domain, not lacking in motivational experts or approaches.

This article presents a brief survey of various classroom motivation strategies, outlining both theoretical and practical perspectives for each.

INTRINSIC VERSUS EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION

The idea of learners’ motivation often carries with it strategies that are used to provide incentives for them to do something or do it with greater intensity.

Yet, motivation is not always something that is added to the situation. Motivation can be something that comes from within us.

While making an absolute distinction can be tricky, we might refer to some motivators as coming from the outside, or being extrinsic, and others as coming from within, or being intrinsic.

Extrinsic forms are those in which there is something added that comes from an external agent, such as a reward from the facilitator.

Contrastingly, intrinsic forms tap into internal sources.

These forms of motivation may reflect the meeting of a basic need or can come from an inner source of satisfaction, such as personal fulfilment.

In comparison, supporting the development of learners’ intrinsic motivation will have substantial long-term advantages.

Over time, students with a more intrinsic motivational orientation, working within a needs-satisfying environment, will tend to outperform those who have become accustomed to extrinsic rewards, reinforcement, and incentives.

While it is true that there are few absolutes in the field of motivation, it may be helpful to classify various motivational strategies into those that are more extrinsic and those that are more intrinsic.

Given that at any one time a multitude of motivational influences exists inside and outside any learner, it is still useful to examine each strategy independently.

In the next sections of his article, we will examine many of the most common intentional strategies used by facilitators to motivate learners.

These strategies are divided into;

those that can best be characterised as extrinsic,
those that encourage intrinsic motivation,
and those that will have a variable effect depending on how they are applied.

EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION TECHNIQUES

What could be considered the leading principal extrinsic motivational strategies used in classrooms by Facilitators:

grades,
rewards,
incentives,
praise,
punishments,
positive reinforcement,

This section includes recommendations for applying these strategies in a manner that produces beneficial and effective results.

GRADES

Grades are the most prevalent example of formal extrinsic motivators used in schools.

Their primary purposes are to provide a concrete representation of either the completion of a task or the quality of a performance and to act as an incentive for later benefit and opportunities.

As representations of the level of quality performance, grades have only a symbolic meaning.

They only represent something of value (quality work, scores on a test, or assignments completed, for example) and have no inherent value.

Therefore, in practice, grades become more effective when they are related to a meaningful outcome.

This is why grading systems that incorporate more authentic measures, such as performance assessment rubrics, are more motivational than more artificial uses, such as a total of the number of correct responses on a worksheet.

Moreover, the way that a grade is derived can help it become more meaningful and tap into an intrinsic source rather than being entirely an extrinsic reinforcement.

Grades also act as an incentive.

As learners’ progress in their academic careers, grades have the effect of creating future opportunities.
These opportunities vary greatly depending on several variables:
importance to parents or schools, and scholarship or financial aid opportunities.
Moreover, only some students are much more influenced or even aware of these incentives.
As a result, grades are a more motivational influence on some students than others.
Research of a typical high school will support the wide discrepancy in how learners view the importance of grades.
And teachers who rely primarily on learners’ being motivated by grades are commonly frustrated with the number of learners who are unaffected by the threat of a poor grade if their performance does not improve.
In most cases, learners who see a relationship between their grades and their ability to reach their personal goals will be most influenced by this source of motivation and therefore more concerned with the grades that they receive.
However, learners commonly see grades as something “given” to them by the facilitator (the external agent).
Too often, they view grades as a representation of their aptitude, ability, or even self-worth rather than the quality of their investment.
Although this is rarely the intention of the facilitators for giving the grade, it is common for learners to perceive the grade as such.
So, for example, a student who gets a C on a paper may perceive that grade as a reflection of himself or his ability in that subject.
Given this reaction, he finds himself in the position that he must respond to the level of the grade by either accepting or rejecting it as an accurate reflection of his ability.
Although these two responses, accepting the grade as consistent or rejecting it as inconsistent, may appear somewhat different, they are similar in that neither will motivate the student to do better in the future.
If the student views the C grade as consistent with his academic self-concept, he will find no need to do any better or adopt any different strategies in the future.
If the learner perceives the grade as inconsistent with his academic self-concept, he will likely feel shame, confusion, and inadequacy along with resentment toward the teacher.

Even if there is a great deal of intensity to the emotion connected to this second response, if the cause is viewed as external and the learner does not feel that his grade reflects concrete and constructive feedback, there will be little or no motivation to change future behaviour.

REWARDS

Another common extrinsic motivational strategy, used primarily at the elementary level, is to give tokens and other prizes to students who perform a desired behaviour.
These act as concrete representations that something of value has been accomplished.
Therefore, they are intended to act as the reinforcement in the process of operant conditioning, a technique that originated in the field of psychology called behaviourism and is most associated with one of its pioneers, B. F. Skinner.
In operant conditioning, the operant or desired behaviour that is being conditioned is reinforced by an extrinsic reinforcement or reward (Alberto & Troutman, 2003).
In this case, the operant is the act of desirable behaviour on the part of the student, and the extrinsic reward is the token or prize (Reeve, 2006).

INCENTIVES

Incentives can take many forms.
For instance, prizes at the end of the week for successfully performing a task or refraining from an undesirable behaviour, group privileges for being first or best, or rewarding students who do well on one task with the chance to opt out of a further task.
Incentives can help clarify what is desirable behaviour.
At their best, they can help promote good habits and shape more functional patterns of action
If a mother provides a child with an incentive to make her bed every day, the child may become comfortable with that behaviour and continue it throughout her lifetime, even after the incentive is no longer present.
In the case of healthy behaviours that become intrinsically satisfying once they become habits, this can lead to positive long-term benefits.
However, with any extrinsic reward, we must question whether the incentive has contributed to the development of good behavioural patterns or has just bribed learners to do something that they would not have done without the bribe and will not do once the bribe has been removed.
And if, over time, the learners do not experience any internal satisfaction from the behaviour being induced, the incentive will eventually lose its power.

One popular incentive strategy is that of preferred activity time, as said by Jones (2000).

This sets up the bargain that if the learner applies himself acceptably to an academic task now, he will be allowed to do something that she likes to do later.

On the surface, this strategy works; it motivates the learners to do what it takes to attain the preferred activity.

However, this strategy produces undesirable by-products.

Although this may work in the short run, like other bribes, it will lose its effect over time, and students will eventually return to their previous level of motivation for the academic activity.
Moreover, they will become accustomed to the bribe and likely demand it.
It will reinforce the principle that the work that is being done in academic time is undesirable.
If we bribe learners with a preferred activity, we generate the previously unconsidered question,
Preferred to what?
What is the association that we are creating?
Is it that academics are inherently unenjoyable?
Although this strategy is attractive, consider its costs and long-term effects.
And if you feel you need to bribe your learners to engage in learning, you may want to consider the alternative of making the learning activities in your class engaging and inherently motivating.

PUNISHMENTS

The desire to avoid undesirable conditions can be motivating, so punishments can have the effect of changing behaviour.
Avoidance of a punishment is based on fear and founded in a pain-based logic.
The source or feeling of fear can be alleviated in a great many ways, but only one of these is to change behaviour to achieve or improve the behaviour others desire.
Others include avoiding school, avoiding the facilitator, giving up, self-destructive behaviour, or changing the definition of failure to success
Like extrinsic rewards, punishments lose their effect over time.
Moreover, they do not support more positive forms of motivation or behaviour because they offer no pathway to success, only a source of discomfort for failure.
However, if the consequential penalty is natural or logically related to the misbehaviour and is associated in the learner’s mind with his own choices, then it can have the effect of supporting real learning at the same time as it represents a disincentive to misbehave.

Developing logical consequences is a critical feature of creating a classroom social contract that helps learners become more responsible and the class more functional.

Positive Reinforcement

When asked about their favourite motivational strategies, most facilitators respond by saying something to the effect that they want to be “positive” and use a lot of “positive reinforcement.”

On the surface, this is encouraging, especially when compared with the possibility that they would rely heavily on strategies defined by destructive criticism, shaming, pain-based logic, and coercion.

However, not all positive reinforcement is the same or will have the same effect.

Positive reinforcement describes a wide range of practices, including the use of;

extrinsic rewards,
praise and approval,
encouragement,
having positive expectations,
being warm and accepting,
using positive recognitions,
providing increased opportunities,
using systems for rewarding quality behaviour.

These all share a couple of features in common: each is given purposefully and is controlled by the facilitators, and therefore external to the student.

But they will have dramatically different effects on learners’ behaviour and motivation.

Some of what we might refer to as positive reinforcement can remain largely external, while other forms can lead to the development of more intrinsic sources of motivation.

Healthy and Unhealthy Praise.

Encouragement can take many forms.

While we want our learners to feel appreciated, the language that we use to show that appreciation can have dramatically different effects.

Many people, in and outside education, use the term praise to refer to generically supportive messages to learners.

As we examine the term praise and the common uses of what might be considered praise, we will see that different types of messages have very different effects on both the learner being praised and the class as a whole.

Problematic Praise Messages.

What is commonly referred to as praise is, at its essence, a personal comment from the teacher that conveys the message that the student is being or acting in a manner that pleases the teacher.
For example, the teacher who says, “Good work, Andrews,” or “I like the way Mavis is working,” is using messages that sound encouraging on the surface, and the intention is to encourage good behaviour.
But these types of messages have potentially negative effects.
Messages such as “What a good girl,” or “Isaac is doing such a good job,” have the effect of essentially giving “love” for obedience.
The message they send tells the students that the teacher gives affection to those who please her or him.
In fact, these messages are very external.
They originate from the wishes and desires of the teacher.
The net result could be best characterised as the use of the teacher’s affection as an external reward.
If we are attempting to create externally motivated affection addicts, then this form of praise is an effective means.
If we include disappointment for behaviour that displeases the teacher, we can be even more effective in creating dependent “failure fearers” and students who are easy to manipulate.

As we examine the effects of praise more closely, we can see that the negative effects reach beyond the object of the praise to the class as a whole.

Effect of Praise on the Learner Being Praised.

Both academic achievement and academic self-concept are strongly related to the degree of internal locus of control that a student possesses.

Internal locus of control is essentially the mentality that our thoughts and actions have consequences.

And if we do certain things, such as apply ourselves to our learning, we learn more.

When we make students dependent on any external reinforcement, we rob them of that internal locus of control.

Any external reinforcement is addictive, but the addictive quality of praise is special.

Learners long for love and acceptance.

A facilitator who says phrases such as “Good girl, Rosa,” is giving the learner her affection as a personal reinforcement, and the implicit pact is that as long as Rosa does what pleases the facilitator, she will continue to give Rosa that reinforcement.
The natural result is that the learner learns to approach each task with the mindset, “I wonder if the facilitator likes what I am doing?”
Rosa will increasingly lose touch with her sense of value, sense of satisfaction for the learning, interest in creativity, and internal locus of control.
If the teacher adds a message of disappointment when Rosa does not do what she desires, the cycle of addiction is complete.
Not only does Rosa begin to increasingly crave the desired messages, but she also increasingly fears the withdrawal of the feeling she gets from those messages.
Over time, Rosa will begin to act and behave in ways that he has interpreted are most likely to achieve his desired dose of praise.

As we grow in our understanding of how the brain operates, the better we recognise that the chemical reactions within the learner’s brain are much the same for praise as they are for drugs such as opiates.

If we take a step back and examine learners’ behaviour within the praise-intensive classroom within this addiction framework, the clear parallels become evident.

Some might say that if we are going to successfully teach learners, making some of them dependent on praise may be a necessary evil in the pursuit of getting them to learn.

This might be a legitimate argument if praise were useful in helping learners learn.

But it is not.

Personal praise is far less effective than positive recognition of performance.

Praise is nearly useless in helping learners understand the task in a more meaningful way and robs learners of their internal locus of control.

Consequently, it produces increasingly passive learners over time.

Inﬂuence on the Class as a Collective.

The stated intention of praise is to send a message to a learner or a class that a desirable behaviour has been performed.

A message is effective in promoting a behavioural expectation that succeeds in developing clarity of the desired behaviour and promotes a positive association with that behaviour.

Let’s look at the effectiveness of the use of personal nonspecific praise on those two counts.

When we say, “Good job, Wisdom!” we assume we are positively reinforcing Wisdom’s behaviour.
But what actually occurs?
In essence, the rest of the class hears us say, “I like Wisdom,” or “I like the way Wisdom is working.”
The rest of the class hears nothing to help them understand why we like the way Wisdom is working or what constitutes a successful performance, which is what they need.
The net effect of the message is that the class heard another example of their teacher expressing what they already knew: that he or she has a positive view of Wisdom.
Learners learn from watching the facilitator giving praise for behaviour that pleases her or him.
Therefore, if the learners want some of that praise, they need to focus on pleasing the facilitator.
Over time, we create a class of learners who try to appear good.
Their locus of control has shifted externally; they become less interested in what they are learning and more and more interested in what the facilitator thinks of them, and they begin to equate success in school with the amount of praise they get each day.

All of this leads to a psychology of failure.

Although;

We often view these students as “problem students.” We should give them credit for finding an ingenious solution to the problem situation in which they found themselves.

In addition, as we examine the effects of our use of praise, we can see that we essentially created the conditions for the problem by the implicit rules that we created in the class.

Unhealthy Praise Messages

“Love” given for obedience
External and addictive
Your value, not the learner’s
Nonspecific noneducational feedback
Combined with the overuse of disappointment, becomes highly manipulative or addictive

Healthy Encouragement Messages

Behaviour, not learner praised
Authentic and spontaneous
For accomplishment or effort
Based on the learner’s own goals
Show appreciation
Public attention to the underappreciated learner
Combined with the use of authentic emotional investment, it can show caring by the facilitator.

MOTIVATIONAL TECHNIQUES WITH VARYING EFFECTS ON LEARNERS.

Some motivational strategies can be classified neither as inherently effective nor ineffective, desirable nor undesirable, but vary depending on the way that they are applied.

These techniques include;

Facilitator uses their relationship with the students as a motivational tool,
The assessment of behaviour,
Classroom competition,
The instructional models that are used,
And the use of occasional external reinforcement.

Applications of each of these techniques that will lead to more sustainable and internal learner motivation, and what types of applications to avoid.

Facilitator Relationship

The saying that “learners do not care what you know until they know that you care” is both intuitively obvious and supported by research.

Relationships are at the heart of the classroom, and they begin with the facilitator’s emotional investment.

Your ability to develop community, a psychology of success, and outcomes that would qualify as transformative will be dependent on your ability to show that you have a genuine positive regard for your learners and that you believe in them.

A good relationship begins with good intentions.

Many facilitators describe looking back at their early years of teaching and recognising that when their attempts were clumsy and even ill-advised, their positive intentions and desire for the welfare of their learners produced a great deal that was positive.

Love can overcome bad strategies to a great extent when it comes to motivating children.

But it does not undo a mistake, and it does not always lead to success.

Some of the best-intentioned and brightest facilitators leave the profession because the love they had for their learners and for sharing their subject was not returned by the learners.

Here are suggestions for how you can get the most from facilitator-learner relationships:

Show unconditional positive regard for learners. Separate your acceptance of them as people from their behaviour and their achievement. There is never a time when withdrawing positive regard (love) achieves a lasting positive result. This frees you to be honest and objective with your feedback related to learners’ work and behaviour.
Being a friend is fine being too familiar is not. The idea that facilitators should not smile all the time is ill-conceived. But being too friendly runs the risk that learners will misunderstand your position and role, and you will lose authority.
If your class is about you, you will struggle to create healthy relationships with your learners. It is easy to fall into the mindset that you are going to pretend that you are invested while in reality, you are uninvested emotionally. Can you treat all of your students as rising stars?
Avoid the trap of using excessive personal praise, disappointment, and rewards for good behaviour. It indicates that your motivations are rooted in your own needs rather than those of your learners. It may seem effective, but beware of creating a classroom full of reward addicts.
Be careful of using humour. Using humour can be motivating and can keep learners engaged and on your side. But be careful not to use victimising humour. Self-deprecating humour, recognising absurdities, having fun with your own mistakes and surprises, and tasteful jokes can be effective ways to bond with your learners and show that you care enough to account for their basic need for fun.
Make the effort to take an interest in your students as individuals. Knowing about them, their interests, and what they are doing outside of your class can have a powerful effect.

Competition

By definition, competition creates a scarcity of rewards and a sense of urgency to obtain that reward.

This can certainly be motivating to many learners.

Used wisely, competition can increase the level of intensity and fun in an activity.

It can create a whole host of negative side effects, such as increasing students’ fear of failure, increased cheating, overemphasis on results rather than process, increased mistrust among students, promoting the advantage of the advantaged, and creating an unsafe emotional climate in the class if used unwisely.

Here are a few examples of healthy and unhealthy competition.

Healthy Competition

The goal is primarily fun.
The competitive goal is not valuable or real; examples are trivia contests, short-term competitions for a solely symbolic reward, and light-hearted challenges between groups where there is no reward, and it is characterised that way.
The learning or growth goal is conspicuously characterised as valuable.
The competition has a short duration and is characterised by high energy.
There is no long-term effect from the episode.
All individuals or groups see a reasonable chance of winning.
All students understand how competition works in their classroom.

Unhealthy Competition

The competition feels real, and winners and losers will be affected.
The competitive goal or reward is valuable or real; examples are long-term point systems, competition for grades, grading on a curve, playing favourites, and awards for skill-related performance.
The learning task is characterised as a means to an end.
Winners can use their victory as social or educational capital at a later time.
Competition implicitly or explicitly rewards the advantaged learners.
Over time, learners develop an increasingly competitive mindset.

REFERENCES

Jones, F. (2000). Tools for teaching: Discipline, instruction, motivation. Santa Cruz, CA: Jones Publishing.
Kauffman, J. M. (2005). How we prevent the prevention of emotional and behavioural difficulties in education.
In P. Clough, P. Garner, J. T. Pardeck, & F. Yuen (Eds.), Handbook of emotional and behavioural difficulties in education.
Reeve, J. (2006). Extrinsic rewards and inner motivation. In C. M. Evertson & C. S. Weinstein (Eds.), Handbook of classroom management. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Reeve, J., & Deci, E. L. (1996). Elements of the competitive situations that affect intrinsic motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Skinner, E. A., & Belmont, M. J. (1993). Motivation in the classroom: Reciprocal effects of teacher behaviour and student engagement across the school year. Journal of Educational Psychology.

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