Motivating students and providing leadership for learning communities are critical leadership functions of teaching.
A classroom community is a place in which individually motivated students and teachers respond to each other within a social setting.
Classroom communities are social and ecological systems that include and influence the needs and motives of individuals, institutional roles, and the interaction between member needs and group norms.
A productive learning community is characterized by an overall climate in which students feel positive about themselves and their peers, students' individual needs are satisfied so they persist in academic tasks and work cooperatively with the teacher, and students have the requisite interpersonal and group skills to meet the demands of classroom life.
Theoretical and Empirical Support
The concept of human motivation is defined as the processes within individuals that arouse them to action.
Psychologists make distinctions between two types of motivation: intrinsic motivation, which is sparked internally, and extrinsic motivation, which results from external or environmental factors.
Many theories of motivation exist. Four that are particularly relevant to education include reinforcement theory, needs theory, cognitive theories, and social learning theory.
Reinforcement theory emphasizes the importance of individuals responding to environmental events and extrinsic reinforcements.
There are several needs theories. In general, these theories hold that individuals strive to satisfy internal needs such as self-fulfillment, achievement, affiliation, influence, and self-determination.
Cognitive theories of motivation stress the importance of the way people think and the beliefs and attributions they have about life's situations.
Social learning theory posits that individuals' actions are influenced by the value particular goals hold for them and their expectations for success with particular tasks.
Three important features that help us understand classroom communities include classroom properties, classroom processes, and classroom structures.
Classroom properties are distinctive features of classrooms that help shape behavior. Six important properties include multidimesionality, simultaneity, immediacy, unpredictability, publicness, and history.
Classroom processes define interpersonal and group features of classrooms and include expectations, leadership, attraction, norms, communication, and cohesiveness.
Classroom structures are the foundations that shape particular lessons and behaviors during those lessons. Three important structures include task, goal, and participation structures.
Some classroom features can be altered by the teacher; others cannot. Some classroom properties , such as multidimensionality and immediacy, cannot be influenced readily by the teacher. Group processes and the classroom goal, task, reward, and participation structures are more directly under the teacher's control.
Studies on classrooms and teaching show that student motivation and learning are influenced by the types of processes and structures teachers create in particular classrooms.
Studies have also uncovered important relationships between teacher behaviors, student engagement, and learning. In general, students react more positively and persist in academic tasks in classrooms characterized by democratic as opposed to authoritarian processes and in classrooms characterized by positive feeling tones and learning orientations.
Influence in classrooms does not flow just from the teacher. Studies show that students influence each other and the behavior of their teachers.
Strategies for Motivating Students and Building Productive Learning Communities
Effective teachers create productive learning communities by focusing on things that can be altered, such as increasing student motivation and encouraging group development.
Factors associated with motivation that teachers can modify and control include the overall feeling tone of the classroom, task difficulty, students' interests, and students' needs for achievement, influence, affiliation, and self-determination.
Although the use of extrinsic rewards makes good common sense, teachers should avoid overemphasizing this type of motivation.
Teachers assist the development of their classrooms as a group by teaching students how groups grow and about the stages they go through and by helping students learn how to work in groups.
Allocating time to build productive learning environments will reduce many of the frustrations experienced by beginning teachers and will extend teachers' abilities to win student cooperation and involvement in academic tasks.
