Just wondering about ‘engagement’ and ‘motivation’.
During this school year, I have worked closely with a colleague of mine as her mentor for her Postgraduate Certificate in Education. The PGCE is the Teacher degree in the United Kingdom and I obtained it myself some years ago… Anyway, this colleague has recently challenged me to think about engagement and motivation. She actually shared those questions:
“What do those words mean?”
“Can motivation be measured?”
“Is engagement a measure of motivation?”
“Can a student be engaged without being motivated?”
“Which is the important one?”
First of all, motivation seems to me like a driving force that makes us do things beyond the basic needs for survival. And we know that there are, at least, two kinds of motivations: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. While extrinsic motivation is easier to identify (“I do A to receive Y”), the intrinsic one is less obvious to define: “I do A-but why?” Because A peeks my interest? Probably. So what can we, educators, do to peek interest? It feels like we are touching the heart of the educator’s duty? How can we genuinely generate interest so that our students become intrinsically motivated to engage in with what we teach?
This so-called difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, however, is quite thin. If “I do A to receive Y” somehow exemplifies extrinsic motivation (I remember working a lot in High School to avoid repeating the years and go to University as quickly as I could), and “I do A because it interests me”, this it has an external value that we cannot deny. I remember studying a lot at University because I was genuinely interested by what I was doing, but one could offer that I was doing A (studying) to receive Y (satisfying my interest).
What is more, we can see engagement as an external manifestation of motivation. In epistemology, we strive to understand how we know and we question the nature of knowledge. So, we can identify that a student is motivated because he is engaged in class. We can see that a student is here, that they participate, we can hear that they interact with their peers about the material and we can use reason to corroborate the quality of engagement: test scores will go up and standardized test results should also be positively impacted.
However, we have all worked with students who are motivated to do well but they might find it hard to engage with the material. Maybe they don’t speak the language used in the classroom, or they might have some problems connecting with some groups in the class. They may also have some learning difficulties or the material may prove to be too challenging at this point in time. Our role, then, is to make sure that those barriers slowly go down to make learning happen and also accept that engagement might manifest itself differently for different students. And in order to be able to realise that, there is no other way than being able to connect with our students, knowing them as individuals and as learners. In our school, we have been working a lot on establishing meaningful and healthy relationships with our students. It is crucial for many reasons. Not only can we can peek students’ interests with the material if we know them but also it allows us to understand how their engagement with the material manifests itself. Because if we don’t get it, we may lose their motivation and we are back to square one.
For what it’s worth…
