Every pupil and teacher has sat through their fair share of assemblies with a motivational speaker. From the mountain climber bursting with soaring rhetoric or the famous author full of anecdotes, to the ex-pupil who proved the doubters wrong and the teachers right, these tales of turning the tables are often dramatic and awe-inspiring.

But does all this make a difference to those who are watching and how they feel about school, about pushing towards a goal, about achieving their dreams? Perhaps the impact of a motivational moment lingers, or maybe it doesn’t. We actually don’t know.

Motivation is tricky like that. Every teacher and school leader knows it matters, but it consistently proves quixotic and difficult to master for the mass of pupils.

One of the issues for teachers and leaders is that it is difficult to define what we mean by motivation. It can be an elusive mix of confidence, self-belief, habits and responses to experience. It can change over time, lingering for some but fading fast for others.

And it is a very complex thing to measure and manipulate compared with test scores. As such, tests tend to take priority and looking specifically at motivation falls down the pecking order.

So what do we know about motivation that might be helpful? The best available research indicates that intrinsic motivation should perhaps be the aim. It is the type of motivation that emerges from within rather than external rewards - ie, you do something because you want to, not because you might get a chocolate bar at the end of it. Again, however, we struggle to define what intrinsic motivation actually means for the classroom.

Given all of this, I think that we need to apply some practical thinking here. It does not take a mountainous leap to realise that a great assembly speaker isn’t going to motivate all pupils to complete, for example, a mass of complex maths problems. Instead, it’s a consideration of the specific details of classroom tasks that is likely the most helpful way to think about how best to manage our pupils’ motivation.

For example, when you explore the evidence on reading motivation, you dig out some valuable answers. A large-scale review from the US, on the “relations between motivation and reading achievement” (Toste et al, 2020), shows how motivation to read is unlikely to emerge from an assembly, but from being good at reading from an early age.

Essentially, when we are good at something, we invariably enjoy it more. Faced with a steep challenge, we take it on because we have more tools at our disposal, not because we heard someone speak about overcoming adversity on the north face of Everest.

Alex Quigley is national content manager at the EEF, and author of Closing the Reading Gap and Closing the Vocabulary Gap

This article originally appeared in the 16 October 2020 issue