This article explores how thoughtful teachers use structural elements to turn classrooms into spaces where intrinsic motivation can thrive and then use dialogue to invite students into co-constructing meaning and knowledge rather than adopting it from the teacher. Two main sources for this exploration are Carole Ames’s paper „Classrooms: Goals, Structures, and Student Motivation“ and Judith Kleine Staarman’s and Neil Mercer’s paper „The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk between Teachers and students.“ While their approaches are complementary in covering motivational and interactional aspects of teaching and learning in the classroom, they share important conclusions which run counter to common teaching practice.
Carole Ames posits that a teacher has significant opportunity to design the learning experience to promote achievement through either performance or mastery goal orientation. The former approach – and arguably much more common – pushes students toward learning techniques that produce more immediate results, avoiding possible failures or errors, and guarding one’s own social standing against peers. Typical of this performance orientation are tasks structured for individual completion, and comparative – and often publicly performed – evaluation that may even be normative. With the main focus on performance, each student views success not through their own learning journey but in comparison to standard criteria and – even more so – against the achievement of other students. This results in a rational choice to minimize any risk and avoid exploratory learning or efforts that have no external incentive or a clear payoff. While this approach seems to be in line with the competitive nature of current workplaces and the culture of “winning, rather than just progress, matters,” intrinsically motivated learning for its own sake is given less prominence.
The mastery orientation then requires the classroom to prioritize safety over competitiveness. It is built on social acceptance of exploratory learning and learning from failures, keeping efficiency and normative evaluation secondary. The key driving force is individual progress up to the level of mastery over new material or skills.
Ames makes it clear that these two orientations can be purposefully supported or discouraged by how the teacher designs tasks, performs evaluation, and where authority is located within classroom activities. The arrangement of these structural elements can and does strongly impact the orientation of students even before the teacher starts explaining new material in the classroom. In particular, Ames underscores that the nature of tasks assigned and the character of evaluation performed must be consistent. As soon as students detect performance orientation in either tasks or evaluation, they optimize their efforts around performance metrics, defending their reputation at the cost of possibly enriching but socially vulnerable exploratory learning.
Moving on to Staarman and Mercer’s focus on talk, once motivation is established, the teacher guides the construction of knowledge through dialogue as a tool to either promote cognitive engagement or elicit students’ performance to earn rewards, whether good grades or public recognition.
Staarman and Mercer provide a counterintuitive look at the IRF (initiation – response – feedback) pattern of teacher-student interaction. Although widely seen as an example of stimulating interaction in the classroom, this pattern is ambiguous because when the questions asked are closed and evaluative, the IRF can actually close down students’ cognitive engagement rather than open it up. One of the main reasons is that IRF takes place in front of the whole class and questions asked are often intended to test students’ knowledge rather than deepen or develop it.
The initiatory question in this setup is not meant to draw out opinions from students or give them a chance to make meaning by speaking. Instead, the idea is to check whether correct pre-determined answers can be reproduced by students, regardless of their true understanding of the underlying concepts.
Adopting a sociocultural approach where cognition is fundamentally social and dialogic, Staarman and Mercer argue that learning happens best in a well-designed dialogue rather than during a high-quality performance by a charismatic and expert teacher. That dialogue is most productive in moments when shared meaning is established between a teacher and a student in real time – something they call the Intermental Development Zone (IDZ) or a constantly maintained bubble of mutual attunement. In the IDZ scaffolding is dynamically being built for a student to reach a higher level of understanding which was previously not reachable.
Can the approaches of Carole Ames, and Judith Staarman and Neil Mercer be brought into a productive dialogue?
Both papers argue that learning is not a one-way delivery of knowledge to students, but rather see students as co-creators of their own learning either with skillful use of structural elements of tasks, evaluation, and locus of control, or through the creation of an intermental development zone and building appropriate-level challenges aimed to move the students into the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky). In both approaches, students’ active engagement is the required element rather than even the most coherent one-way delivery of knowledge by an expert teacher. For Ames, the student engagement is an individual motivational response while for Staarman and Mercer, the engagement is an intersubjective process.
Both papers also do something useful. They point to research which is counter-intuitive and show that traditional teacher-centered performance-oriented education may produce measurable results on the surface but sacrifices deeper opportunities for intrinsically motivated learning based on dialogue in which meaning and knowledge is constructed together by the teacher and the learner, with shared ownership.
References
Ames, C. (1992). Classrooms: Goals, structures, and student motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84(3), 261–271. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.84.3.261 Cited by: 15198
Kleine Staarman, J., & Mercer, N. (2010). The guided construction of knowledge: Talk between teachers and students. In K. Littleton, C. Wood, & J. K. Staarman (Eds.), International handbook of psychology in education (pp. 75–104). Emerald Group Publishing.
