Deci’s final pillar is Relatedness, or feeling connected, understood, and secure. Children won’t take the intellectual risks required to learn a foreign language if they don’t feel safe. Creating a supportive classroom is a bit of an art form. I’ll write more about it in the next post.
Teaching tip: To build competence, reframe language targets as interesting puzzles. Smile, introduce the target to a student, and if they stumble, give them time to think and observe. Resist the immediate urge to control and correct. Instead, turn to another student, smile and ask them the same question.
If they are unable to answer, keep going. If no one is able to answer, then encourage them to ask you and gently provide the answer. Give students time to think and observe, then go back and ask the first student. If they have been paying attention, and, in my experience, they will be quite observant as they are now genuinely interested in solving this puzzle, they should have and will have figured it out. The key is doing this in a fun, lighthearted, gentle, non-authoritarian and pressure-free way.
Handing the cognitive work back to them so they solve the puzzle themselves builds a profound sense of mastery and agency. The key is to create a gentle, non-threatening classroom atmosphere where dealing with the unknown and exploring and making “mistakes” while doing so is not only “safe”, but actively encouraged. Again, the paradox here is that the better we become at doing this, the less need we have for control and domination. The classroom becomes an increasingly enjoyable, fun place of genuine learning where students actually WANT to be and want to learn. The foundation of this is trust and respect.
Deci’s second pillar is Competence. This relates to the need for students to feel effective. If a task is too hard, students feel anxiety. Too easy, they feel boredom. Intrinsic motivation blooms in the “Goldilocks zone” of optimal challenge, where students feel challenged, yet capable of succeeding.
Teaching tip: Build autonomy through meaningful micro-choices.
Instead of dictating and controlling every step of the lesson, “Here’s what we are going to do today.” provide a menu of options for students themselves to choose from.
Even better, don’t even introduce the menu. Have a list of students’ names on the board somewhere and place a magnet next one student’s name.
If students ask you, “What are we doing today?” shrug and point to the list of names. Let them figure out that the student whose name the magnet is next to is the leader.
When the leader looks at you asking what to do, smile, shrug your shoulders and point at the menu of options. Gently hint that the leader ask the rest of the class what they want to do.
Some students will want to work on an essay on their own. Others may want to work together on a group project. Some may be in the mood to catch up on reading today. Let them choose.
Here’s the paradox: by trusting students and daring to relinquish control, we actually reduce the need for control in the long run.
Small choices and steps toward agency give learners a sense ownership over their learning, which, in turn, subtly lets them learn that being responsible is an integral part of the process. They naturally become responsible, not by coercion, but through trust.
Deci’s first pillar is Autonomy. In education, this doesn’t mean letting students run wild. It means fostering a sense of volition. Ideally, we would like students to feel their actions are self-endorsed rather than coerced, turning forced compliance into genuine curiosity. How does this look in the classroom?
Welcome back! Canada was great. Before the break, we asked how to build intrinsic motivation by implementing Edward Deci’s Self-Determination Theory. This week we will explore how Deci’s ideas can help transform a teacher-centered classroom into a learner-centered one.
I will be off to Canada on vacation for the rest of the summer. Will be taking a break from the blog until September. Have a great summer, everyone.
To fix this, one avenue we can take is to look at Deci’s Self-Determination Theory. Instead of carrots and sticks, humans need three basic psychological nutrients to build intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. When we support these, motivation comes from within! We will explore each of these in the next few posts.
Then there’s the instinct to reward — stickers, snacks, a points chart. Paul’s worry is that prizes quietly signal the task wasn’t worth doing for its own sake. We mean to motivate, but we can end up teaching children to work for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reasons. How do we fix this?
This video by David Paul explores more examples and delves into some of the underlying psychology in a child-centered approach in the language classroom:
Teaching tip: When introducing language targets, a useful technique David Paul recommends is to simply put the language out there. For example, rather than carefully pre-teaching to ensure no mistakes are made, we can look at a child, smile and say [language target]. If she cannot answer, smile again and ask other children. Aim to generate the feeling, “Here is an interesting puzzle to be solved. Trying to solve it could be fun.”
In this way, students, from the very outset, experience dealing with the unknown and making mistakes along the way as an integrated part of learning, rather than something to be avoided.
Creating a playful, supportive classroom atmosphere that encourages curiosity and exploration is an important factor not only in how students approach making “mistakes” but how they feel about learning as a whole. In the English classroom, this starts with how language targets are introduced.
Teaching tip: When a child makes an error, hold off. Pause, then offer a gesture — a raised eyebrow, or counting the words on your fingers, or a hint — that nudges them to find and fix it themselves. The wait time does a surprising amount of the teaching. View mistakes as learning opportunities.
An excellent, just-released report on the Science of Learning.
Paul reframes the mistake itself. Use mistakes as a learning opportunity or a sign of thinking in progress — and the best moment to hand back to the child, so they’re the one who notices it and puts it right. Tips on how exactly to do this in tomorrow’s post.
Unlearning the Rescue
The next instinct is to rescue. A child struggles to solve a puzzle, or stumbles, and we step in to fix it — quickly, kindly, almost automatically. But every fast correction quietly tells the child that finding out the answer was our job, not theirs. What’s the alternative strategy? Next post…
Teaching tip: when planning lessons or activities, rather than starting with an explanation, think of ways of introducing the lesson target that encourage exploration. The ISLE approach to teaching physics gives some great examples here: www.islephysics.net/philosoph… I will share some examples for the language classroom in the future posts.
We can start with a subtle but fundamental shift in how we plan our lessons. Instead of asking, “How do I explain this clearly?” we start with, “How do I set this up so the children work it out?” Less delivery, more design — and a lot more trust in what our students can reach on their own.
Unlearning the Urge to Talk
To many educators teaching means telling. So we explain — and we work hard to explain well. David Paul’s quiet challenge: in a child-centered class, the most useful thing in the room is often the teacher’s silence… getting out of the way and giving students the time and space to think and discover.
What ties Paul’s thinking together is constructivist psychology: the idea that children build their own understanding rather than receive it. Every idea keeps returning to one practical question — what would we do differently in the actual classroom if we trusted children a little more?