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Teacher-centered (or teacher-directed) education is often characterized as an authoritarian or controlling approach that undermines students’ social, emotional, and academic learning (as well as teachers’ performance and wellbeing when faced with resistance from students). This approach can be contrasted with learner-centered (or autonomy-supportive) teaching, which takes individual learners (and their authentic interests, values, and goals) seriously and encourages students to become active and equal partners in their own learning (Massouleh & Jooneghani, 2012; McCombs, 2013). A teacher’s orientation towards control versus autonomy, or their motivating style, reflects a recurring and enduring pattern of teacher-student interactions (Reeve, 2016).
Controlling Style
Controlling Style
A controlling motivating style can been characterized as interpersonal sentiment and behavior that “pressures students to think, feel, or behave in a specific way,” including relying on outer sources of motivation (e.g., directives, deadlines, incentives, consequences, threats of punishment), neglecting explanatory rationales, using prescriptive or pressure-inducing language (e.g., saying “should” or “must,” raising one’s voice, or offering guilt-inducing criticism), displaying impatience for students to produce the right answer, and asserting power to overcome students’ complaints and expressions of negative affect (i.e., attempting to change a student’s “bad attitude” into something acceptable to the teacher) (Reeve, 2009).
Autonomy-Supportive Style
Autonomy-Supportive Style
In contrast, autonomy-supportive instructional behaviors include taking students’ perspective (i.e., inviting students’ input and maintaining awareness of students’ needs, goals, preferences, and emotions), vitalizing inner motivational resources (e.g., framing learning activities with students’ intrinsic goals in mind), providing explanatory rationales (i.e., explaining the value, importance, benefit, use, or utility of requests), using invitational or non-pressuring and informational language (e.g., providing choices and saying “may” or “might” instead of “should” or “must”), acknowledging and accepting students’ negative affect (i.e., listening non-defensively and accepting complaints as valid), and displaying patience (i.e., allowing students to work at their own pace and in their own way) (Reeve, 2016).
Some reasons that have been suggested for why teachers adopt a controlling motivating style toward students include an interpersonal power differential inherent within student-teacher interactions, teachers’ responsibility and accountability from outside forces (e.g., administrators, state education standards, standardized testing requirements, and parents), the cultural value of controlling strategies, inappropriate associations between control and structure, teachers’ perceptions of students as unmotivated, unengaged, or disruptive, the perceived utility of controlling strategies (especially large salient extrinsic rewards), and control-oriented personality dispositions (Reeve, 2009).
Teachers cannot directly give students autonomy, but they can support this experience by identifying students’ inner motivational resources (i.e., needs, interests, preferences, goals, and values) and creating classroom opportunities that align with those inner resources (Reeve & Jang, 2006). Provision of autonomy-supportive structure has been linked to a variety of educationally-important outcomes, including greater autonomous motivation, study effort, classroom engagement, skill development, and positive emotions, as well as reductions in maladaptive academic and personal functioning, such as classroom disengagement, burnout, depression, negative affect, and externalizing behavior problems (Cheon, Reeve, & Vansteenkiste, 2020; Eckes, Großmann, & Wilde, 2018; Lochbaum, & Jean-Noel, 2016; Mouratidis et al., 2018; Reeve & Cheon, 2021; Vansteenkiste et al., 2012). Research shows teachers also benefit from autonomy-supportive teaching, including greater teaching efficacy and job satisfaction (Cheon, Reeve, & Vansteenkiste, 2020; Reeve & Cheon, 2021; Slemp, Field, & Cho, 2020). Further, autonomy-supportive teaching is also malleable, or learnable, through modeling, guidance, practice, and feedback (Reeve & Cheon, 2021).
Reflections on Student Voice and Choice
Interviewee: Dr. Lisa Medoff is a developmental psychologist and a Learning Specialist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she teaches courses on Adolescent Development, Adolescent Sexuality, and Adolescent Mental Health in the Program in Human Biology.
Specialization: Adolescent mental health and education
Interview Topics:
Making content relevant
Connecting with students
Problem-solving
Student voice and choice
Implementing Motivation Science Tip-Sheet.pdfStrategies for Autonomy-Supportive Teaching
Strategies for Autonomy-Supportive Teaching
For more information on how to create an autonomy-supportive classroom environment, including strategies for empathy, care, authenticity, choice, goal setting, reward, and feedback, check out this resource.
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