Dear colleague,
In response to my last article regarding the survey tool I use for measuring student beliefs, our colleague Abbie asked whether the concepts in The Will to Learn map well onto the work administrators do with teachers. As it turns out, I believe they certainly do.
(For the sake of brevity, I'll refrain from re-explaining the Five Key Beliefs framework for student motivation in today's article. If you're unfamiliar, check out this explainer article or this quick video.)
So here's the gist — in my own career and in my conversations with other educators, I find that teacher motivation often stems from the following buckets of problems.
- Problems with leadership:
- They don't care.
- They're bad at their job.
- They're just going through the motions.
- Problems with the idea of the work of teaching:
- It's pointless.
- It's boring.
- It's not worth it.
- Problems with the actual work of teaching:
- No matter what I do, I still can't manage my fifth hour class.
- Even when I try new things, my students still do poorly on tests.
- I've tried everything, but my students just don't care.
- Problems with a lack of fit between who I am and the work I'm doing:
- I just don't fit in at this school.
- I'm the only one who struggles with the things I struggle with at my school.
- I'm uniquely bad at my job; all the other teachers are better than I am.
And basically, each of those maps onto one of the four tiers of the Five Key Beliefs pyramid.
When a teacher is struggling to be motivated due to perceptions about their leadership, that's a Credibility issue. Thankfully, there are things administrators can do to improve their Credibility with staff, and these are pretty much the same things teachers can do. Administrators can:
- Track attempted moments of genuine connection (MGCs) with their teachers (Strategy #1 in the book)
- Improve at the core areas of competence that matter most to teachers, focusing their improvement efforts on one thing at a time (Strategy #2 in the book)
- Demonstrate a “gentle urgency” with their teachers (Strategy #3 in the book)
When a teacher is struggling with a sense that their work is fruitless, pointless, meaningless, just “going through the motions,” that's a Value issue. And once again, administrators can do things to help with this. They can:
- Give skillful, winsome, confident, and approachable “mini-sermons” that act as an apologetic for the real and intelligent doubts teachers have (Strategy #4 in the book)
- Provide teachers with a “feast of knowledge” that lets them experience the breadth and depth of what can be learned and studied in the teaching profession (Strategy #5 in the book)
- Lead teachers in the kinds of “valued within” activities that help us develop our own clear sense of why this work matters, even when it can also be frustrating and difficult and demoralizing (Strategy #6 in the book)
When a teacher is struggling with a sense that their efforts don't pay off and with certain students it's impossible to succeed as a teacher, these are Effort and Efficacy issues. Sure enough, the student-facing strategies in The Will to Learn map well onto the kinds of things administrators can do to help their teachers, such as:
- Woodenize the kinds of things you want teachers to be able to do — be very clear and explicit (this is Strategy #7 in The Will to Learn). I've met many great leaders during my years as a PD partner around the country, and one of them, Ms. Amy Rose in Casper, WY, once said to me, “My teachers just want to be taught. They want to learn stuff.” And I find that many teachers, myself included, actually want the same. Woodenization is basically all about high quality, efficient, direct instruction — you're showing and telling and modeling how to do a thing.
- Define success — wisely, early, and often (Strategy #8 in The Will to Learn). It's crazy how many teachers suffer from poor definitions of success. Like, crazy. And unnecessary. Good leaders (just like good teachers) cast frequent and crystal clear visions of success. They also lead their teachers in exercises that let them define success, too (e.g., Everest Statement exercises).
- Unpack outcomes, good or bad (Strategy #9 in The Will to Learn). This is all about looking at how things went, identifying where things went wrong and where progress was made, and making intelligent adjustments to strategy. Teachers benefit from this just as much as students do.
And when a teacher senses a gap between their perceptions of themself and their perceptions of the folks they work with, this is the stuff of Belonging. When a leader does the things I've written about above, Belonging issues will often just go away on their own. But there's one more thing leaders can do that helps with this:
- Normalize the struggles of teaching (Strategy #10 in The Will to Learn). Struggle normalization isn't about throwaway lip service to how hard teaching is. It's about demonstrating that certain struggles are common, that folks we perceive as better at their jobs than us also struggle with the same things we do. Folks can't be “talked into” this; they need to experience it. And that same reality applies to everything else above. Belief cultivation isn't just saying magic words or doing magic things; it's partnering with the realities of the human heart and mind and spirit.
The Gist
Teachers, like students, are souls, and at the center of those souls sits a volitional core. Here — in the spirit, the heart, the executive center of our being — there exists a little garden from which motivation will grow, with a power like Jack's beanstalk, when given the right conditions.
Great leadership is a lot like great teaching in that it requires that the leader take seriously the doubts teachers have about these Five Key Belief areas. If you don't attend to these with a genuine and intelligent concern, your teachers will be left to grapple with them on their own. It'd be easy for an administrator to say, “Well, they're adults; they need to figure out how to motivate themselves.”
But to such an attitude I would simply say what I say to teachers who have attitudes like this toward students: “That's a fair enough idea, but is it a good one? If we can do things — fairly simple and learnable things — that reliably help students to care more, then isn't it just common sense to get really good at doing those kinds of things?”
This is a topic I could write about more, if you'd like. I have many practical thoughts here. I just haven't written about them up to this point because 1) I'm not an administrator, and 2) this blog is primarily aimed at teachers.
Let me know.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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