Searching for Teachers’ Motivation

“It takes a big heart to help shape little minds.” Yes, it also takes a strong will, a ready mind and a happy outlook to teach little children. Teachers are at the heart of it. In our country teachers of government schools are notorious for absenteeism, lack of motivation and what not, but in my experience as schools reviewer and educator, I have found that Principal’s and school leaderships complain about the lack of motivation  among teachers even in few favoured schools of our towns and cities. This has left me sometimes surprised, sometimes confused as to why the teachers having world class infrastructure around them, still lack motivation?

Important thing to notice is that teachers do not say that they don’t like doing their job enough and also say that they want to keep doing their job, but the lack of enthusiasm is writ all over their actions during the lesson observations. Dead and lack luster classes and low student engagement give out the impression that teachers’ hearts are not with the job, how will they then shape little minds?

The psychology of human motivation has taught us that when it feels like doing a job is a reward in itself, people approach their work with the greatest enthusiasm, passion and commitment – and they derive the greatest satisfaction from it. But this doesn’t just happen – as research into the psychology of motivation has demonstrated, feeling as though work is intrinsically rewarding depends upon whether the environment nourishes our basic psychological needs.

 So, I have often found myself asking these questions to the teachers while interacting with them. Does your work allow you to feel like you are good at what you do, or do you constantly feel as though you are failing? The answer that I get is that, “We try our best and many times we feel that we are doing a good job but the marks that our students get always disappoint us.”. Are you able to express yourselves through what you do, or do you simply feel like a pawn at the mercy of somebody else’s agenda? The answer is ,” We feel bound by so many things and we have to fit in so many things that are demanded from us in terms of teaching methodology, completion of syllabus, checking of assessment papers and notebooks that we at times feel there is nothing in the school that we can control!” And does what you’re doing make you feel valued and cared about in a larger sense? The answer invariably is we feel valued only when our students get good marks or improve their test scores.”

Not surprisingly the answers that I have got to these questions are not very encouraging and I have found with my own research that when teachers’ basic psychological needs are suffocated in the school’s atmosphere, this translates into their dampened interest and enthusiasm for students. I realized that lack of salary and poor infrastructure is not always the reason for lack of motivation in Indian Schools.

In fact, there is every reason to believe that some of our educational policies that we are carrying from the past are actually stifling teacher’s psychological needs. Hopefully many new initiatives taken by the policy makers to improve education system will yield result and in future issues will be sorted to some extent.

But the matter of the fact remains is that focusing on marks, exams and tests all the time has invaded teachers working lives so much that they have been completely robbed of any sense of personal autonomy. Teachers often say that all of the most powerful teaching methodologies they use every day are no good to them because they take too much of time and don’t help children get ready for the tests and exams quickly enough.

In fact often times I have felt that the whole concept of motivated teacher is  a flawed one because most of the time it is understood that a motivated teacher is the one who is regular to school every day, follows official protocols blindly without questioning and if necessary provides information that management or leadership team wants and gets down to the drill of teaching where the focus is majorly on reading and writing so that students can reproduce the learnt subject during their exams! When this happens in a school, the real focus shifts from different psychological  needs of teachers and students, to complying orders, as found fit by the administrative department relegating teachers to a mere stature of puppets, who have no voice and students to personalities, that have an exam to write and get good marks!

As teachers have to comply and students have to relent, the whole process seems like a mundane task leading to disheartened and demotivated teachers, who are only appreciated when their students get good marks. The situation for the teachers is “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” No wonder teachers are not motivated because they are neither empowered nor there is required professional support for them.