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How can teachers effectively learn to become more autonomy-supportive to enhance student motivation and wellbeing?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Start with perspective taking:
  Implement regular exercises encouraging teachers to see classroom experiences from students' perspectives, fostering empathy and awareness of students' intrinsic motivations and challenges.

• Support student interests:
  Offer activities aligned with student preferences and provide meaningful choices, enhancing intrinsic motivation, engagement, and making learning more personally relevant and enjoyable.

• Clearly communicate relevance:
  Explain why classroom tasks are important by regularly connecting activities to real-life applications, helping students internalise values even for less engaging tasks.

• Present learning activities in need-satisfying ways:
  When introducing a learning activity, present it as both an opportunity to learn something new (learning) and as an opportunity to feel competent, interpersonally related, or autonomous (motivation).

• Reduce controlling behaviours:
  Train teachers to replace controlling language and strict commands with more supportive and explanatory communication, significantly reducing students' psychological frustrations and resistance.

• Regular reflection and adjustment:
  Conduct ongoing evaluations with students to continually adjust teaching strategies, ensuring classroom practices effectively address evolving student interests and motivational needs.

Abstract

Using self-determination theory, we sought to explain how teachers learn autonomy-supportive teaching. We randomly assigned 28 teachers (35.3 years-old, grades 7–9) and their 1566 students (13.4 years-old, 50.8% female) to participate or not in an autonomy-supportive teaching workshop. Teacher participation in the workshop increased autonomy-supportive teaching. Results from a multilevel structural equation modeling analysis showed that teachers in the experimental, compared to the control, condition first learned perspective taking skill, then learned the three teaching practices of interest support, value support, and lesser teacher control, which then explained their students’ year-end gains in need satisfaction and declines in need frustration.

Johnmarshall Reeve, Sung Hyeon Cheon. (2024). Learning how to become an autonomy-supportive teacher begins with perspective taking: A randomized control trial and model test. Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 148.

Contact the researcher

Professor Johnmarshall Reeve
Johnmarshall.Reeve@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Johnmarshall Reeve’s research.