This is a book about teachers' classroom motivating styles. Motivating style is the interpersonal tone and face-to-face behavior the teacher relies on when trying to motivate students to engage in classroom activities and procedures. The over-arching goal of the book is to help teachers work through the professional developmental process to learn how to provide instruction in ways that students will find to be motivationally-enriching, satisfying, and engagement-generating.
To realize this goal, the book features six parts: Part 1: Introduction, introduces what teachers are to support-namely, student motivation; Part 2: Motivating Style, explains what a supportive motivating style is; Part 3: "How to," overviews the recommended motivationally-supportive instructional strategies one-by-one and step-by-step; Part 4: Workshop, walks the reader through the skill-building workshop experience; Part 5: Benefits, details all the student, teacher, and classroom benefits that come from an improved motivating style; and Part 6: Getting Started, discusses
ways to begin using these skills in the classroom.
Based on a successful workshop program run by the authors, teachers successfully improve their classroom motivating style. In doing so, they experience gains in their teaching skill and efficacy, job satisfaction, a renewed passion for teaching, and a more satisfying relationship with their students. This multiauthored book provides teachers with the practical, concrete, step-by-step, skill-based "how to" they need to develop a highly supportive motivating style.
"Finally a motivation book not based on pushing or pulling the student into the class activity, but based on the premise that students are already motivated and it is more about students answering 'Why do this or that?' Motivation is about direction and striving, about developing deeper levels of autonomy and competence, and the teachers role is to stand in the students shoes to understand their motivations, to be inviting, to show patience, and to create classroom learning activity that provide students with an opportunity to become motivated to learn. Based on the best theory of psychological being, grounded in 20 years of workshops to show how to engage students to thrive and strive, and with a perfect blend of practical and theoretical excellence."
- John Hattie, Emeritus Laureate Professor, Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia
"In this engaging and very accessible book, the authors provide convincing evidence why teachers do well to invest in autonomy-supportive teaching. Importantly, they also go to great lengths to provide specific recommendations how teachers can apply this motivating approach in their daily teaching, to the benefit of their students and themselves."
- Maarten Vansteenkiste, Professor, Department of Developmental Psychology, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium
"This is an important and interesting book that should be on the shelf of every teacher who would like to apply recent insights from rigorous research to their everyday practice. We really need such books, and we do not have enough of them."
- Avi Assor, Professor Emeritus, Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University, Israel