The Motivation Crisis Facing American Students, Teachers

A lot has been written about students’ loss of learning during the pandemic. I am less interested in how we will “catch them up” and more interested in how we will motivate them to learn at all. Because the same lack of motivation that has left that dusty treadmill in the corner of your living room all winter, is also facing America’s students. And if we don’t do something about it, the consequences will be far worse than needing to buy a new pair of jeans.

So let’s think a little bit about how students are typically motivated to do well in school…

We know that there are two types of motivation — intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is more powerful, but more rare. Extrinsic motivation often (but not always) works where there is no intrinsic motivation.

What teachers — and some parents — know, is that very, very few students are intrinsically motivated to learn. These are those students who spend their free time trying to see how things work, or researching a topic of interest. These are often gifted students who perform well in a subject or multiple subjects without much effort. But intrinsically motivated students — at least at the middle and high school level — are rare. And even those who are intrinsically motivated to learn, are not always motivated to learn at school. My own teenage son will research the French Revolution and learn everything about it for no particular reason, but groans when he has to attend history class. So within the very small group of intrinsically motivated students are an even smaller group whose motivation actually applies to school work.

Then, there are more who are extrinsically motivated by things outside of the school. Some parents are very good at holding their children’s feet to the fire and taking away privileges like screen time or cell phone use if students don’t perform well in school. Or, rewarding them with privileges when they do. When teachers see these students, they may seem at first like they are intrinsically motivated, because they are alert and ready to learn, but this will typically wear away as the year goes on and the student will be less so. Not because the parents are doing anything wrong, but because the nature of extrinsic motivation tends to be short-lived.

But parents aren’t the only motivating factor outside of school — the promise of a college scholarship, attending a dream college, or getting into a particular career field can be very motivating for some students. Typically, these are students who are able to delay gratification and see how current work might lead to future payoff. Both schools and parents can help students get to this point by stressing the values of hard work, grit, and perseverance. But, for many kids, this pandemic has created a very bleak vision of the world. They are seeing their parents out of work in record numbers, and income inequality is at an all time high. These factors are very demotivating and make it difficult for even once diligent, hardworking students to see what payoff might come from their efforts.

Even prior to the pandemic, however, in most public schools, the students motivated by factors outside of the school and those who are intrinsically motivated combined, account for less than half of the student population. The rest of the student body, if they are going to be motivated at all (inevitably, some are not) are going to be motivated by the school, their teachers, and their peers. This is where we are facing a crisis. We must figure out how to motivate these students moving forward.

Some students are easy to motivate. They are motivated by their relationships with teachers. If they like a teacher, they want to do well to please them. This is nice, but it is rare, and it never works across all classes or subject areas because inevitably the student will meet a teacher that they do not particularly like. Building these relationships is harder, but not impossible during COVID; I know this from the classes I’m currently teaching, where I’ve managed to form some of these motivating relationships with students even through a computer screen.

But what motivates the vast majority of students are the things that we do at school — field trips, dances, football games, assemblies, social lunch time, and the like… and what we do in the classroom — group work, hands-on lessons, integrated projects. The list goes on.

But let’s read through that list again. What of these things is possible in the era of social distancing, regardless of whether we are in person or online? Field trips and dances are not likely to return any time soon, and group work and hands-on learning is a thing of the past in classrooms where desks must be facing forward and students are to be spread six feet apart… This pandemic has taken away all of the ways in which we motivate our students. No wonder they are struggling. And these struggles are not going to come to an end anytime soon.

What’s going to have to happen in order to keep students motivated at all, is that the other pieces of the “motivation pie” are going to have to get bigger. Parents are going to have to step up and find ways to motivate their students. And Schools are going to have to learn what the intrinsic motivations of our students are (What do they actually want to learn? How do they want to learn it?) and work with that. And we are going to have to build school cultures where peers push each other to do well, perhaps even foster a little competition, rather than demotivate and drag each other down. Because we no longer have these other motivating pieces to work with. And if we don’t quickly figure out how to work around that, we are going to end up with a generation of woefully unmotivated kids.