Why Teachers Adopt a Controlling Motivating Style Toward Students and How They Can Become More Autonomy Supportive

Abstract

A recurring paradox in the contemporary K-12 classroom is that, although students educationally and developmentally benefit when teachers support their autonomy, teachers are often controlling during instruction. To understand and remedy this paradox, the article pursues three goals. First, the article characterizes the controlling style by defining it, articulating the conditions under which it is most likely to occur, linking it to poor student outcomes, explaining why it undermines these outcomes, identifying its manifest instructional behaviors, and differentiating it from an autonomy-supportive style. Second, the article identifies seven reasons to explain why the controlling style is so prevalent. These reasons show how pressures on teachers from above, from below, and from within can create classroom conditions that make the controlling style both understandable and commonplace. Third, the article offers a remedy to the paradox by articulating how teachers can become more autonomy supportive. Three essential tasks are discussed. Special attention is paid to practical examples of what teachers can do to support students' autonomy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank editor Gale Sinatra and four anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive suggestions on an earlier version of the article.

Notes

¹ Extremely controlling motivating styles are rare in schools. To understand the psychological and cultural processes involved in the antecedents, manifestations, and consequences of an extremely controlling motivating style, one needs to examine custodial environments such as the military setting (e.g., see Ricks, 1997).

² For an illustration of how direct control and indirect control have been operationalized in the empirical literature, see Vansteenkiste, Simons, et al. (2005, p. 488). With a sample of fifth- and sixth-grade students, these authors operationally defined direct control by utilizing instructional language to promote external compulsions such as “you should follow the guidelines,” “you have to,” and “you are expected to.” They operationally defined indirect control by utilizing instructional language to promote internal compulsions such as, “it is important for your own good to read this text carefully,” and “a lot of kids following the guidelines … to feel good about themselves and to avoid feeling guilty for not doing so”.

³ When experimental studies include a neutral motivating style as a control condition, results continue to show that students relatively benefit from a teacher's autonomy support and relatively suffer from teacher control (Grolnick & Ryan, 1987; Reeve, Jang, et al., 2004; Reeve & Tseng, 2009b).

⁴ At this point, we can only conclude that teachers may benefit in these ways because current research has not yet specifically examined teacher–student interactions.