It takes six weeks to form an exercise habit, but drinking wine can become a habit much more quickly: people embrace attractive tasks and avoid unattractive ones. Students may find a task unattractive because they don’t see its value, don’t believe they can complete it, or don’t want to be made to do it: setting a goal may help. I don’t mean learning objectives, but bigger goals, like ‘becoming a fluent reader’, and smaller ones, like ‘focusing completely on the task for the next three minutes.’ Self-Determination Theory suggests that when the situation fosters competence, relatedness and autonomy, people are more motivated to act; when it hinders those feelings, people are less motivated and less happy (Ryan and Deci, 2000): we can use goals to increase students’ feelings of competence, and, perhaps, their autonomy.
Goals foster competence. A goal clarifies what is to be done: this focuses people’s attention and elicits relevant knowledge; it also increases their interest, persistence and belief they can succeed (Locke and Latham, 2002). Goals also offer milestones: success shows students they are making progress; experiencing and reflecting upon mastery increases students’ self-efficacy, their feeling of competence in the domain (Bandura, 1982). This feeling of progress profoundly affects motivation: on people’s ‘best days’ at work, they make progress in meaningful tasks; on their worst days they suffer setbacks. So a manager’s role is not understanding colleagues’ inner lives, but helping them succeed in meaningful work, by setting clear goals, then solving problems and providing support (Amabile and Kramer, 2011). Setting goals and supporting students to meet them can encourage competence and be a powerful motivator.
Reconciling student autonomy with challenging goals and a compulsory curriculum seems harder. However, forcing unwilling students to act is exhausting: if they are to embrace a goal they must feel they have chosen to do so (Ryan and Deci, 2000). Autonomy is particularly important to teenagers; for example, messages discouraging young people from smoking make it seem like a rite of passage; messages suggesting the tobacco industry is manipulating people are more effective: they encourage teenagers to pursue autonomy by rebelling against the industry, not the law (Siegel, 1998, p.130). While letting people set their own goals doesn’t seem to affect motivation – unless those goals are set tersely (Locke and Latham, 2002) – we can increase students’ feelings of autonomy by acknowledging their feelings and offering choice and opportunities for self-direction (Ryan and Deci, 2000).
How can we use this in practice?
Set big goals
Big goals can guide and justify the effort we ask of students. Challenging and specific goals improve performance; easy and vague goals do not (Locke and Latham, 2002); long-term goals must be clear and meaningful. We might promise, for example, that this year students will:
- Learn joined-up writing or begin using a pen
- Discover how the past has shaped their area
- Be able to converse in another language
Alternatively, we may encourage students to set their own big goals, once they know what they’ll be learning (I’ll return to personalising goals in a future post). The challenge is returning to these goals regularly: if we discuss them once at the start of the year, they will lose relevance; we need to show how individual lessons contribute to big goals, and the progress students are making. For big goals to be meaningful, we need to connect them with smaller ones.
Set achievable goals
Small goals turn tasks into challenges. Big goals point the direction, but breaking them into “attainable subgoals” provides “immediate incentives and guides for action”, which encourages effort, directs action and helps students recognise their increasing competency (Bandura, 1982, p.134; Bandura and Schunk, 1981).” I’ve described the value of breaking tasks down, making each step an achievable goal: breaking writing a paragraph into writing five sentences, allowing faster feedback and success, for example. We can break time down too: Colin Lee at Meols Cop High School divides lessons; instead of asking for an hour’s work, he asks for fifteen minutes’ focused individual work, then offers a three-minute break (‘breaks’ are structured discussion tasks). Breaking a lesson or task into attainable subgoals makes sustained focus easier and more attractive: small goals increase students’ competence.
Increase student autonomy
We may increase students’ perceived autonomy by involving them in setting goals or planning how to achieve them. This does not mean abandoning the curriculum: our efforts are counterproductive if students’ choices mean they aren’t learning what matters most. However, we might ask students to:
- Identify goals about which they feel particularly enthusiastic
- Identify strategies to achieve their goals (which will also encourage metacognition)
- Suggest how big goals can be broken down
These approaches demand care: asking students to think about goals and strategies diverts their attention from what they are learning. We may choose to introduce them gradually, with small goals, and invite choice once students have mastered what they are choosing from (inviting students to choose between strategies they have used successfully in previous lessons, for example). Judicious use and emphasis of autonomy may increase students’ motivation and prepare them for future independence.
Highlight progress
Finally, we can emphasise students’ increasing competence and autonomy. Students often overlook their successes: their beliefs about their abilities do not change, even though they are improving. Doug Lemov (2015) describes the merits of ‘brightening lines’: calling attention to shifts between activities and investing them with meaning. Setting goals allows us to brighten lines: when students succeed we can recognise their increasing competence, showing them that we value their progress, perhaps by recording their achievements publicly. Students’ successful use of autonomy allows us to emphasise their developing identities as successful learners or mathematicians. Students’ first successes should feel momentous, but Chip and Dan Heath (2017) suggest we should also celebrate continuing success by creating fresh milestones: we make the first day of school special; why not underscore the need for sustained effort by recognising students’ tenth essay, or hundredth day. Emphasising students’ ongoing, self-directed successes should increase their motivation to keep learning.
Conclusion
At best, goals can initiate a virtuous cycle: goal, progress, positive feedback; emphasis on students’ success and a new, more challenging goal. We can guide students’ actions and increase their motivation by:
- Setting big goals
- Setting small goals
- Increasing autonomy, and
- Highlighting progress
Nonetheless, a goal can be made more motivating, and a task more attractive, through underscoring its value, framing it carefully and personalising it; future posts discuss ways to do this. I should also reiterate a point I’ve discussed previously: people may sincerely hold a goal, but still fail to act; to turn goals into reality, we may need to prompt action and build habits.
This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning. It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.
If you found this interesting, you might be interested in…
This post describing how – and why – we can break learning down
This post discussing the value of temporal landmarks in encouraging student reflection and motivation
This post on using learning objectives to communicate what success looks like to students
References
Amabile, T. and Kramer, S. (2011). The Power of Small Wins. Harvard Business Review. May.
Lemov, D. (2015). Teach like a champion 2.0. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.