Three Types of Motivation

Imagine walking into a random classroom. The teacher gives students a task. Read something, try these math problems, answer these questions.

In some classrooms most students get right to work. In others, most don’t. Why?

Motivation is a big topic. I want to write about a framework I have that helps me think about how to motivate students in the classroom, but first I want to clarify what I mean by motivation. I’m talking about the situation above. Do students attempt the task in front of them? Do they put in effort or try to get through an assignment with as little thought as possible? Do students persevere if they don’t know something right away?

Motivation is complicated. There’s no one magic button that motivates students, no single strategy that teachers can always rely on. But that can also be overwhelming: ask teachers for advice about motivation and you’ll get lots of different answers.

To me, the fundamental difference between motivation strategies is the time scale. Some motivation strategies are useful in the short term. These are limited: they don’t last very long, so you’ll need to keep finding more motivators, but they can also be helpful tools to build momentum. Medium-term motivators take more time to get going, but can help motivate students over multiple days and weeks with sustained effort. Long-term motivators are the real magic: self-sustaining tools that are slow to build but the most powerful. Every teacher needs multiple motivation strategies, and the best motivation strategies fit together and build on each other.

Short-term motivators include choice, relevance, enjoyment, and extrinsic incentives. These are all useful tools. Giving students choice helps them feel ownership over their learning. Helping students feel like learning is relevant to their lives can cultivate interest in a subject. Most humans like to have fun, and making a lesson enjoyable is better than the opposite. And while extrinsic rewards and consequences aren’t always fun to talk about, they are valuable tools.

The first problem with short-term motivators is that they are short-term. These might work well in motivating students today or tomorrow, but to motivate them next week you’ll probably need to continue designing in opportunities for choice, or relevance, or enjoyment, or extrinsic incentives. Some teachers are really passionate about these! If that’s you, go for it. But one risk is burnout: because these short-term motivators must be renewed day after day, they require continual effort and can feel like an endless treadmill.

The second problem with short-term motivators is that they often involve tradeoffs. If you are giving students choice day after day, how confident are you that those choices involve equal learning? Maybe most of your students like soccer so you use that to make learning relevant, but what about the students who don’t like soccer? If you are prioritizing enjoyment, are you compromising on learning? And extrinsic incentives offer a whole raft of tradeoffs. If you can’t be consistent with a reward or consequence it will quickly lose its power, and over time students may find ways to game the system.

This isn’t to say short-term motivators are useless. But from my perspective, their primary use is in the name: they are short-term tools to “get the ball rolling,” and move towards the medium-term and long-term motivators, or maintain momentum, rather than as the primary reason students are motivated to learn.

Medium-term motivators include habits, success, and accountability. These honestly sound totally boring. Routines build habits, and a good way to get students engaging with schoolwork is to build habits through everyday consistency. If students feel successful in school they are more likely to engage with learning, and if they feel dumb they are more likely to tune out. A human in the room who communicates to students that their learning matters, and that they will hold students to account if they don’t put effort in, can nudge students in the direction of more effort.

The disadvantage of these strategies is that they don’t work right away, and they also require regular effort. Habits don’t happen overnight. The effects of feeling successful build gradually, especially for students who have often felt unsuccessful in school in the past. Students often resist accountability at first. These also aren’t strategies that a teacher can set and forget: they require constant maintenance. But, when done well, they can be incredibly powerful in helping students feel like their effort matters and that school is a place where it’s worthwhile to work hard.

The other important note about these strategies is that they work best when used consistently from the start of the year. Bad habits are harder to undo than good habits are to build. Once a student feels dumb it’s hard to make them feel smart. A student who feels like they can shirk their work without any adult caring will be even more resistant when the adult starts to hold them accountable. It’s not hopeless in the middle of the year, but it is absolutely a tougher hill to climb.

Long-term motivators include community, identity, and belonging.

If you talk to a veteran teacher, they often talk about these types of long-term motivators. These tools are incredibly powerful, and honestly put all the other motivators to shame.

One thing to note: these motivators can be strengthened or eroded by school culture. In some schools you get a head start: the school already creates common language and systems to support community, identity, and belonging. This is a huge leg up for teachers, especially new teachers. In other schools, it’s every teacher for themselves. It’s still possible to support community, identity, and belonging in schools like those, but it’s much harder. Many veteran teachers have struggled to transition into that second kind of school, finding that the tools that worked for them previously just don’t anymore.1

There’s a classic story in education. Rookie teacher Mr. A is struggling with classroom management and motivation. Students just don’t seem to care in his class. The principal recommends he goes to watch veteran teacher Mr. B, who teaches the same students and gets a lot more effort out of them. Mr. A goes to observe. Students do try a lot harder in Mr. B’s class. But it doesn’t seem like Mr. B is doing anything different at all. The students just sort of listen without any special teacher moves or classroom management on his part. Mr. A feels a bit dejected, like there’s some invisible secret sauce that is being withheld from him, and continues to struggle through the year.

In this story, Mr. B is an expert at building community. That’s great! It’s an incredibly powerful tool for a teacher. But it’s also a tool that is often invisible to others, impossible to imitate, and slow to develop. I’m not an expert at this: I do my best by being a weirdo and coming up with little classroom rituals.

Look, this stuff is worth trying to develop. But I would be really wary about putting all of your eggs in this basket. If the community you’re trying to build doesn’t come together, you can end up in a really tough place without some other motivation strategies to fall back on.

This isn’t an exhaustive collection of motivation strategies. I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m missing. I do think that stepping back to consider whether a motivation strategy is short-term, medium-term, or long-term is a useful exercise. Every teacher needs multiple motivation strategies, and every teacher should understand how those strategies fit together and build on each other.