Períodos del desarrollo cognitivo

Current events in the state of Florida/USA have made me consider another aspect of motivation affecting second language students – the motivation of the teacher. In May 2011, Florida lawmakers passed Senate Bill 736 into law introducing performance

teachers hired after July 1, 2011. Florida Governor Rick Scott hails the legislation as critical to improving Florida’s public education system, and says on the Florida Government website, The Office of the 45th Governor of Florida Rick Scott, “We must recruit and retain the best people to make sure every classroom in Florida has a highly effective teacher.” (2011)

The Florida performance based merit pay system will center on an evaluation system of which a large portion – half or more –will be based upon how well students perform on the state student assessment test, such as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) as well as other exams. (Florida Senate, 2011) However, there are no guarantees that teachers whose students perform highly on state testing will be compensated with more pay. State Senator Bill Montford is the director of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents and has expressed doubts that the state would have the funds available to be able to pay more money to teachers whose students do well on state testing. (Haughney and Postal 2011)

Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University and

nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., says that performance based merit pay is the wrong track to take in order to improve student results in the classroom: “Vanderbilt University conducted the most rigorous

empirical research ever done on merit pay, and they found no evidence of differences in student performance even with a $15,000 incentive for one group of teachers.” (Moran 2011) Referring to the results of the same study, Ravitch says, “That tells me that both groups of teachers were working as hard as they could. I don’t know how rewarding a teacher will get students to work harder.” (Murray 2011)

This performance based merit system couples with the loss of the tenure system for public school teachers. As of July 1, 2011, newly hired teachers will have contracts that will be reviewed annually, meaning that teachers can be fired at the end of a school year if students are not performing on state assessment materials at satisfactory levels. The U.S. news magazine The Week, calls such legislation “…the biggest fad in public education: judging schools and teachers based on their students’ standardized tests.” (April 25, 2011 p. 20)

Fad or not, Senate Bill 736 was passed into law. Only time will tell the effects this will have on teacher motivation in the state of Florida. However, previous research shows that merit pay has not has positive effects on teacher motivation. Farrell and Morris conducted a study of UK teachers’ attitudes towards what they term

Performance Related Pay (2009). They found that almost 90% of teachers included in their research felt that Performance Related Pay would have a negative impact on teacher motivation (2009, p. 86). Taylor, Leitman, and Program Planners (1989) found that teachers, at that time, were, at best, undecided about merit pay programs.

A merit pay program based on student performance outcomes, like the one going into effect July 1, 2011 in Florida, brings a special set of problems along with it. Teachers may feel that such evaluation criteria is unfair in that it takes factors into

consideration which are out of the teachers’ control including student abilities, prior academic training, and home backgrounds. (Rosenholtz 1986) . Rosenholtz also reports that when teachers perceive evaluation procedures to be unfair, teacher morale may suffer as a consequence (1986, pp. 518-519).

Morale of the group could certainly effect motivation of the individual teacher.

Motivation of the teachers must certainly have an effect on the motivation of students. A study carried out by Wild et.al. (1992) shows that the intrinsic motivation of

students can be increased by the mere suggestion that a teacher in intrinsically

motivated herself, and that students’ motivation can be decreased when they are under the impression that the teacher is only extrinsically motivated. Merit pay, according to several studies, is inherently extrinsic in nature and does not act as a motivator for teachers (Porter 1989, Johnson 1986, Chandler 1959, Mathis 1959, Mayston 1992, Deci, Koestner, and Ryan 2001). According to Sylvia and Hutchinson (1985),

teachers were not motivated by pay incentives at all, but rather by higher order needs such as freedom to try new ideas and higher levels of responsibility within the school.

My students related enthusiasm to positive motivation (see section Pilot Study for Questionnaire I: Getting Students ready to write about Motivation in chapter three). Patrick, Hisley, and Kempler describe teacher enthusiasm as “…an external catalyst for the intrinsic motivational energy that may be lying dormant within the student.”

(p. 219) and found that when students see the teacher as being enthusiastic that they, in turn, report being highly intrinsically motivated themselves (p. 225).

Patrick, Hisley, and Kempler also report that teachers who support student autonomy acted as a positive influence on student intrinsic motivation. This supports the ideas of Dörnyei who sees self-determination as a driving Motivational Influence. (Dörnyei and Otto 1998) Self directed learning turned out to be an important contributor to motivation for some students in my class. As I review the results of my research in chapter four, I consider this factor more in depth.

Teacher motivation in the state of Florida will most certainly be affected by this new set of laws which includes a merit pay plan for teachers. Past research has shown that merit pay does not contribute positively either to student performance nor does it contribute in a positive manner to teacher motivation. The effects of merit pay upon teacher motivation and student performance in the state of Florida remain to be seen.