Toward an Integrative and Fine-Grained Insight in Motivating and Demotivating Teaching Styles: The Merits of a Circumplex Approach

Abstract

Guided by Self-Determination Theory, we offer an integrative and fine-grained analysis of teachers’ classroom motivating style (i.e., autonomy support, structure, control, and chaos) to resolve existing controversies in the literature, such as how these dimensions relate to each other and to educationally important student and teacher outcomes. Six independent samples of secondary school teachers ( N = 1332; M age = 40.9 years) and their students ( N = 1735, M age = 14.6 years) read 12 ecologically valid vignettes to rate four dimensions of teachers’ motivating styles, using the Situations-in-School (SIS) questionnaire. Multidimensional scaling analyses of both the teacher and the student data indicated that motivating and demotivating teaching could best be graphically represented by a two-dimensional configuration that differed in terms of need support and directiveness. In addition, eight subareas (two subareas per motivating style) were identified along a circumplex model: participative and attuning, guiding and clarifying, demanding and domineering, and abandoning and awaiting. Correlations between these eight subareas and a variety of construct validation and outcome variables (e.g., student motivation, teacher burnout) followed an ordered sinusoid pattern. The discussion focuses on the conceptual implications and practical advantages of adopting a circumplex approach and sketches a number of important future research directions.

Full text

Toward an Integrative and Fine-Grained Insight in Motivating and
Demotivating Teaching Styles: The Merits of a Circumplex Approach
Nathalie Aelterman, Maarten Vansteenkiste,
Leen Haerens, Bart Soenens,
and Johnny R. J. Fontaine
Ghent University
Johnmarshall Reeve
Korea University
Guided by Self-Determination Theory, we offer an integrative and fine-grained analysis of teachers’ class-
room motivating style (i.e., autonomy support, structure, control, and chaos) to resolve existing controversies
in the literature, such as how these dimensions relate to each other and to educationally important student and
teacher outcomes. Six independent samples of secondary school teachers (N⫽1332, M
age
⫽40.9 years) and
their students (N⫽1735, M
age
⫽14.6 years) read 12 ecologically valid vignettes to rate four dimensions of
teachers’ motivating styles, using the Situations-in-School (SIS) questionnaire. Multidimensional scaling
analyses of both the teacher and the student data indicated that motivating and demotivating teaching could
best be graphically represented by a two-dimensional configuration that differed in terms of need support and
directiveness. In addition, eight subareas (two subareas per motivating style) were identified along a
circumplex model: participative and attuning, guiding and clarifying, demanding and domineering, and
abandoning and awaiting. Correlations between these eight subareas and a variety of construct validation and
outcome variables (e.g., student motivation, teacher burnout) followed an ordered sinusoid pattern. The
discussion focuses on the conceptual implications and practical advantages of adopting a circumplex approach
and sketches a number of important future research directions.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
The present study suggests that rather than categorizing secondary school teachers as either motivating or
demotivating, this approach reveals that an attuning and guiding approach relate to the most adaptive
pattern of teacher and student outcomes, whereas an opposite pattern is found for a domineering and
abandoning approach. This greater clarity allows teachers to gain a more precise insight into their own
teaching style so that they adopt a more need-supportive style that benefits their students and themselves.
Keywords: autonomy support, multidimensional scaling, self-determination theory, structure, teaching styles
Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000293.supp
Teachers play a major role in children’s engagement, learning,
and development more broadly (Wentzel, 2009). Especially criti-
cal in this process is teachers’ motivating style, that is, the prac-
tices they rely on to foster children’s motivation (Reeve, 2009;
Wubbels, Brekelmans, den Brok, & van Tartwijk, 2006). A teach-
er’s highly structured, highly autonomy-supportive motivating
style is associated with various positive and educationally impor-
tant student outcomes, such as motivation, engagement, learning,
and well-being (Jang, Reeve, & Deci, 2010;Vansteenkiste et al.,
2012), whereas a teacher’s highly controlling motivating style is
associated with a wide range of negative student outcomes (Assor,
Kaplan, Kanat-Maymon, & Roth, 2005;Haerens, Vansteenkiste,
Aelterman, & Van den Berghe, 2016). Experimentally based in-
tervention research further shows that teachers can be successfully
trained to adopt an autonomy-supportive (Aelterman, Vansteenk-
iste, Van den Berghe, De Meyer, & Haerens, 2014;Chatzisarantis
This article was published Online First September 13, 2018.
Nathalie Aelterman, Maarten Vansteenkiste, Leen Haerens, and Bart
Soenens, Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psy-
chology, Ghent University; Johnny R. J. Fontaine, Department of
Personnel Management, Work and Organizational Psychology, Ghent
University; Johnmarshall Reeve, Department of Education, Korea Uni-
versity.
Nathalie Aelterman and Maarten Vansteenkiste contributed equally to
this work.
This research was supported by a postdoctoral research grant of the
Research Foundation Flanders (Grant FWO15/PDO/004) awarded to the
Nathalie Aelterman. We greatly thank Wim Beyers of the Department of
Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University,
Belgium, for his statistical guidance and support.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Na-
thalie Aelterman, Department of Developmental, Personality, and So-
cial Psychology, Ghent University, Watersportlaan 2, 9000 Ghent,
Belgium. E-mail: nathalie.aelterman@ugent.be
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Journal of Educational Psychology
© 2018 American Psychological Association 2019, Vol. 111, No. 3, 497–521
0022-0663/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000293
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