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Annabelle Fourie
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Teachers' motivation and professional engagement: an integrated theoretical perspective.
Teachers’ motivation for work predicts teacher engagement and well being. The motivation of teachers also affects the motivation and learning of their students (Fernet, Senecal, Guay, Dowson, & Marsh, 2005). Unfortunately, teachers suffer from a lack of motivation to work more than any other profession (de Jesus & Lens, 2005). There is limited research into what motivates teachers to complete their daily work. Of this research, most studies have used global scales of motivation; few studies have looked at motivation for specific teaching tasks (Fernet et al., 2005), despite the fact that teaching involves a number of different tasks that teachers may have differing levels of motivation towards.
Current figures indicate that teacher dissatisfaction is high. Understanding the determinants of teacher motivation will allow policy makers to implement effective cognitive and motivational intervention strategies to maintain teacher motivation and satisfaction. Maintaining teacher motivation would improve teacher well being, reduce organisational absenteeism and turnover (de Jesus & Lens, 2005) and increase students’ achievement, self efficacy and motivation for learning (Roth, Assor, Kanat-Maymon, & Kaplan, 2007; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001).
This project aims to increase understanding of teachers’ motivation to undertake specific work tasks from an integrated theoretical perspective. It will also investigate whether different styles of professional engagement can be linked to different types of motivation.
Supervisor: Associate Professor Helen Watt