Motivation Theory

 

Motivation Accounts for High Achievement

Leader Diary 1:

Austin’s face was red and lowered as I walked past him exiting the guidance office Monday.  He’d been crying.  While Austin’s home life problems are neither exceptional nor isolated in my northern Maine teaching career, they are extreme.  I’ve wondered and worried about him a lot this year.

As I later returned to my room, the special ed teacher across the hall approached me, “Our friend that we’ve been worried about is having a melt down.”

“Things are getting pretty bad at home?” I asked, already knowing the answer.  Austin is the kid who sits at the front of my class where he can see and hear everything I say in order to learn better.  He has an IEP that says he has a borderline intelligence level, but he puts so much effort into his learning that he amazes teachers.  With some extra time and support, he gets A’s and B’s in many of his classes.  What motivates him to work so hard? Austin is the kid who smells of BO and gas.  Nobody wants to sit by him and, at times, I admit it’s even hard for me to stand near him in the front of the class.  Austin is not only struggling at the border of functional intelligence, but in expectancy theory terms, Austin is struggling to even reach his lower, basic physiological and safety needs.  His single mother doesn’t function and he is left parenting two younger children.  When I referred him to our school nurse, she informed me that she had talked with him several times about his hygiene and that she’d have him come him to shower before school again. The laundry in that house is all over the floor and the dogs pee on it, so there’s always gonna be some odor, she says sadly.  The other freshmen boys began the year bullying him, but I don’t notice that behavior in my class anymore.  I attribute that to both my stern warnings and some respect that Austin has earned on his own in the class.  He will answer questions that they can’t. But he has no hope of ever finding peer-related friendships.  I wonder if self-esteem or self-actualization is even on his event horizon?  And if they are, what goals spur him on?

“He’s ready to drop out so he can take care of his younger brother and sister.  He’s got so much piled on his plate that he feels something’s gotta give, and it’s probably going to be school.”  He was out of school two weeks earlier taking care of mom and family.  We had been finishing up with quarter 3, and when he came back he just didn’t have the ability to make up all his work before grades closed.  My mom was gone and my brother was sick, he shrugged.  Having recently gotten an A in a UMaine Grad class, Educational Assessment, I felt qualified to finangle a couple of missing assignments on work that I had seen him demonstrate ability elsewhere on, so he could keep the same average he’s had before missing school.

“Yea, and school is the only place where he gets to be a ‘normal’ teenager, have someone give him food, have some kind of life,” I shake my head. “Do you think it’s bad enough to call DHS again?”

“They’ve been called so many times,” she sighs, “and they just won’t take those kids out of the house.  The last time they came, those kids were left alone in the middle of winter with no food or heat in their trailer.  And they still brought them back! ” Austin IS taking care of his family, so their needs ARE being met.  Last year I had the younger brother in 6th grade Spanish and he was just as sweet a kid as you’d ever want to have in your class.  There is no malice in either boy, no sense of bitterness from the unfair life they’ve been handed.  Just “let me please you” smiles and “please accept me” hope beaming in their eyes.

“That’s so unfair to Austin,” I despaired.  “They’ll take the dogs out of the house but not the kids!  What about the older sisters?  Are they around to help?”

“No, they stayed around long enough to raise their brothers and sisters and got away from here the second they graduated.  I heard one of them is living in Long Beach, CA now and has her own kids.”  I also know that the kids were going to go to Grandpa’s house in Massachussetts last fall, but he got sick.

I don’t know if Austin will be back in Spanish class on Friday?  It’s hard to sustain the need to acquire secondary drives such as an education when struggling with “specific biological” (Hanson, 192) drives such as food and nurturing are so tenuous. If I look at Austin’s case through content theories, I see there is something inside him that “generates motivation” (Hanson, 191).  He loves his family.  He loves his mother.   At the same time, he believes in the “American Dream” that a person who works hard enough can reach his or her dreams.  Clayton Alderfer’s ERG (Hanson, 194) Theory would summarize Austin’s needs as “existence, relatedness, and growth”.  By providing the existence needs for himself and his family, he maintains a meaningful and satisfying relationship with them.  And he pushes himself in school because it represents an intrinsic desire for his own personal development.

As an educator, I find myself rooting for Austin, even bending the system a little bit in order to help him along, because I want to believe in the American Dream, too.  Not only do I want Austin to succeed, but I realize that his potential for success is one thing that motivates me to be as a teacher.  I’ve always believed in Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y (Hanson, 194-5), even though I’d never heard of them before reading this chapter.  I steer away from students, teachers, and administrators who see the world through Theory X.  I don’t need the drag on my own motivation that comes from people who believe that workers (students) are lazy, unintelligent, indifferent.  Theory X’ers are self-fullfilling prophecies.  They become what they attribute to others.  If you give a Theory X teacher or administrator power or authority, they become petty bullies and vicious tyrants.  In contrast, I’ve always believed that learning and working are as pleasurable as eating chocolate.  Deep down inside, our natural condition is more akin to Theory Y.  If as a teacher or administrator I could just help my students or employees find the way back to the pleasures and dreams they once had, I would feel as if I’d accomplished something important in my life.  When I see a student like Austin still believing in his future by wrestling with realities beyond his comprehension, I push myself harder to be the one who illuminates his path.  If there is hope for him, then maybe there is hope for me, too?

I have spent most of my adult life under the umbrella of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  The content-based theory provides a great paradigm for organizing my adult life into a series of decisions or reactions to circumstances which has led me to become a career teacher.  Process theories (199) of motivation are new to me.  In Expectancy Theory, motivation comes from the belief that if one works hard enough, one can achieve goals and desires.  Instrumentality and valence are essential factors in determining the outcome of my efforts.  When I stop believing that my hard work will pay off or when I stop valuing the goal, my motivation will dwindle.  On face value, Expectancy Theory seems logical.  But what about a kid like Austin?  No matter how hard Austin works, his IQ will be 80.  He may really value being able to take care of his family because he wants to keep them together, but in the end, he’s just a boy.  No matter how much he wants a better life, there’s always the chance that DHS will finally step in and take those kids from the mother (and each other).  In real life, there are some “dreams” that some people just can’t reach, aren’t there?

Leader Diary 2:

“THING 1:”

Expectancy Theory is useful to me as a leader because it helps me navigate my own mid-life “fork” in the road.  As I look at Hanson’s (206-8) Self-Interrogation Model (SIM) filtered through the teacher career path, I couldn’t find myself further from this model.   In SIM, the career stages of preservice, early service, and career service are very dissimular to my own motivations to be a teacher and the 15 years I’ve spent in this profession.  When I was in college, the last thing in the world I wanted to be was a teacher!  The nature of the work was not at all appealing to me.  I had a difficult enough time dealing with my own children, and I didn’t need anyone else’s kids.  Teaching and motherhood were equal in status and achievement, and they both ranked slightly above nail-scraping on a chalkboard.  As hard as I worked and with as many obstacles as I had overcome to get to college, and with the high grades and honors I received in college, teaching was “beneath” me.  I went to law school instead.  But real life was harder than any college professor I had yet to face.  Law school was 4 hours from my unsupportive husband and my 3 little kids.  So at the end of the semester when I had to choose between career or family, I chose family and returned to rural Maine.  I worked really hard and got a job in the corporate world. That lasted a couple years until the I-95 commute and 12 hour work days kicked my butt.  It didn’t matter how hard I worked or how much I believed in myself, I wasn’t going to overcome rural Maine.  The only professional job in my town was teaching and so, as a last resort, one January, I became a teacher–just until I could get my kids a little bigger and then I was out of there.

Teaching was a lot harder than I had thought it would be. If I hadn’t have been desperately motivated by the responsibilities of meeting my family’s physiological and safety needs, I would have bolted out the doors by June. I had my very own Teacher’s Names Alphabet based on the things my students said to me: A is for “Asshole”, B is for “Bitch”, C is for . . . you get the idea.  I taught high school kids who walked out the room when they got bored or all started coughing in unison or laid on the floor to “sleep.”  I taught Cote Cheneska that year.  They transferred him into my room from the teacher he’d been threatening to kill.  He left Friday for February vacation and shot a store keeper six times over a piece of gun. Because two of my classes were out of my certification area, I had to return to UMaine to take Second Semester Spanish courses.  I couldn’t move away to greener pastures and my family needed a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, so I sucked it all up with a fake smile and endured.

I liked being closer to home. The hours were great and, the next year, we had health insurance.  I grew to like teenagers.    I stayed for quite awhile, then I got laid off due to program cuts.  My kids were grown now, so I did go away.  I got a job teaching rich people’s kids in a private school in Tampa thinking that I would use this job to get out of teaching once and for all.  But now it was hard to let go of the summers and holidays when I would have to be working.  So I stayed while working on my MBA.  Through my hard work and effort, my teaching allowed me to pay rent to live in a nice ocean-side resort apartment complex where my springtime neighbors were NY Yankee and Tampa Bay Buccanneer players.  I had bought my first new car, a 2005 Jaguar X-awd.  I regularly vacationed in Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.   I’ll leave teaching someday, I told myself, or become a school principal if I have to.  I was doing OK, I guess because I was pretty happy.  Then personal considerations struck my life.  A series of “Lemony Snickets” pounded the livin’ Be-Jeezus out of me and the next thing I knew, I had returned to my house in rural Maine.  I got a job teaching Spanish and told myself it was just until something better opens up elsewhere.

But now I have Austin and Riley and Matt and Will and Jonathon and Whitney and Ashley and John and Kasey and Gabbie and Matt and Kristen and Mikayla and . . . I’m now in my career service stage realizing that my “valued rewards” have changed a lot since 1991 when I graduated 3rd in UMaine’s College of Liberal Arts. Earlier this semester i skipped my grad class so I could dance the Mambo#5 with my kids in a community talent show. I play this game “Settlers of Katan” with my Spanish 2 class in order to talk about conquest and practice giving and receiving requests.  Last week, I tried teaching it to Austin’s Spanish 1 class which is larger and more chaotic.  The last thing Austin asked me on Monday was if he could borrow that game because it was a lot of fun.  I had to tell him no, but I hope he won’t drop out of school to raise his brother and sister and never get to play that game again.  That’s what’s important to me this week; that’s what motivates me this week.  And even though it’s not quite the Leader Diary assignment I was supposed to write, it’s what I “valued” and what “motivated” me to write about this week.

“THING 2”:

My husband of 30+ years doesn’t smell or fart, but he’s a lot like Austin, I guess.  He’s learning disabled.  He can’t stand lazy people, and he makes a poor employee. He used to be an independent woodsman before the logging business dried up. He tried working a few regular jobs but always quit or got fired. It took about 8 years of encouragement to convince him to study and take the test to become a registered Maine guide.  He passed. He failed. He passed. He failed.  Eventually he got the 3 sections to become a “Master” guide.  But for the first time, he didn’t quit because he was “stupid” at something.  He faced his fears and now he’s proud to be a Maine guide.  During all this time, it’s fallen on me to make a regular paycheck and get health insurance.  This hasn’t been by plan or design, and I’m usually in a conflict between me wanting him to help me pay bills and me wanting him to achieve something fulfilling in his life, something beyond what one would expect for a person with his cognitive abilities. In good years, he makes more in 2 months of guiding than he would if he was working a full-time labor job somewhere, I reason to myself.  And I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t had faith in his instrumentality to do a job for years, so I let him not work rather than feel the shame of failure.

Two and half years ago, he announced to the family that God wanted him to start an outdoor retreat program for the families of fallen soldiers where they could come together in the Maine outdoors to share and heal their sorrow.  Great idea, I told him, never thinking much would come of it.  Since then I’ve seen him talk to generals, senators, governors, and the like.  He’s created House in the Woods, A Military and Family Retreat.  He’s received large and small donations from veterans groups, WalMart, and the State of Maine. When he talks, the Governor says, I feel a tug in my chest. He puts in a lot of effort, but he should never be this successful because he just doesn’t have the support, talent, or ability.  He DOES have a goal hierarchy (Hanson, 204) that reflects the significance of this project to him (he does it to helps soldiers and their families); priorities (he doesn’t care if he has anything else as long as he completes this project); and values (God told him to do it).  This chapter has given me words to describe his behavior.  He is energized by the expectation that he can achieve this goal.  And while I’m usually a whiny wife complaining about the opportunity costs of his not having a “regular” job, I am motivated by the huge success he has made already.

I have found contentment in my teaching career.  Even though I didn’t set out to be a teacher, I look back at how hard it was to get to where I am now, and I have satisfaction.  I work (and have to live) away from home, but I’m happy.  Last week, my former school posted an opening for Assistant Headmaster, one for which I am very qualified.  I didn’t even send in my resume.  I don’t need the advancement, the status, or the increase in salary.  I’m sitting here struggling with this Leader Diary wondering then, why I am in this C.A.S. program if I’m not going to even try to be an Assistant Principal?  Is that the lesson Content and Expectancy Theories are teaching me about leadership?  And what does that mean for someday?

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