Motivated by the Spring Leadership Forum

1/4/2025 0 Comments

Motivated by the Spring Leadership Forum

“Successful motivation is tied to life, survival and thriving.”

The build-up to the Spring Leadership Forum last month was already motivating before we even got started with the speakers.

A sizeable sign-up of keen delegates from across our Teaching School Hubs, with a number current and past LSSW/SWIFT NPQs Programme Members. Anticipation was stirred. Or you might say, very motivated.

Keynote speaker, Peps Mccrea, enthused us with his presentation on The Science of Motivation that drew on his experience as a teacher, teacher trainer, Director of Education at Steplab and educational researcher. With his characteristic positive persona, Peps provided an engaging overview of the evidence-based strategies that can significantly enhance student motivation in classrooms and schools.

From conversations with leaders and teachers around the country, Peps is increasingly seeing motivation to be a fundamental part and challenge of the school system. It is fair to say that some aspects of motivation are intuitive, but some are not always obvious. The purpose of his presentation was to dig deeper to provide us with a clearer understanding of how motivation works and to equip us with strategies that reflect the attention and effort students put into their class sessions.

It is important to understand that motivation is a system for allocating attention.
We all know the busy world we live in and finding headspace can be tricky in a constantly buzzing world. Yet we can only think about a very small number of things at once and our brain needs a way of thinking about or considering all of these different aspects demanding our attention. Prioritising and allocating our precious attention is essential in our motivation system that triages these opportunities.

Context-specific motivation varies significantly depending on the context and task at hand, which means that you can influence motivation by altering the learning environment.

Motivation is not a fixed character trait, but a dynamic response to the environment and this perspective shifts the focus from labelling students as "motivated" or "unmotivated" to recognising the situational factors that influence their motivation levels. Unconscious processes are at work given much of the motivation system operates unconsciously.

The hopeful news for you as teachers is that Cognitive Science shows that when students pay attention, they learn.
So, yes motivation is very closely tied to learning and is worth the investment as effective motivation strategies will help to direct students’ limited attention towards learning tasks.

You will have perhaps heard of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The two key components to the motivation mix. Intrinsic motivation is driven by interest in the task itself and persists over time, but takes time to build up. Extrinsic motivators can be useful for initiating engagement. However, reliance on extrinsic rewards should be minimised over time to foster intrinsic motivation.

Let’s keep in mind the following five major strategies to enhance student motivation:

Securing Success | Ensuring students experience success early is important and requires effective teaching and clear framing of what success looks like in the classroom. By building on this success, students can be challenged to take more risks to lock into a higher success rate. Ever mindful that success is a highly subjective concept, our perception of success can inevitably look and feel different. But be explicit with students and reinforce over time, and remind them over and over again.
Establishing Routines | Routines can be powerful in reducing the cognitive load on students, allowing them to focus less on the process of learning and more on learning content. Consistent routines also create a predictable and safe learning environment for all students.
Leveraging Social Norms | The behaviour and attitudes of peers significantly influence individual students. Amplifying positive behaviours and creating a strong sense of belonging can enhance motivation.
Building a Sense of Belonging | Students who feel they belong are more likely to be motivated and this can be achieved by recognising individual contributions, fostering common ground, and establishing a strong classroom or school vision.
Gaining Buy-In | Explaining the rationale behind learning activities helps students to understand the purpose and value of their efforts. Building trust through credibility, consistency, and care is essential for gaining student buy-in.

A caution! Beware the phenomenon of expert-induced blindness in that it can be hard for us to empathise with people who do not know what we know. Because in our heads, success in the classroom is such an obvious thing to us, because that is where we spend a large proportion of our time, we can sometimes overestimate what students perceive or understand success to look like. To counteract this bias, we need to over-communicate and over-explain - a lot!

By the end of the session, we were super motivated and we thank Peps for providing such galvanising insights into the complex nature of motivation and practical strategies to enhance it.

By understanding and applying these evidence-based approaches, we hope that colleagues can feel even more confident in creating engaging and effective learning environments to foster long-term motivation and success.

find out more about peps mccrea here

Our Executive Director, Martin Smith got us motivated for the next academic year when he shared a sneak peek on our bold new offer for 2025 – 2026. The ambitious new professional development plans intended to enhance and support the work in schools and Trusts to which you have steered us.

Leading on from his appearance as a keynote at the Summer Conference, Dan Fitzpatrick will be leading a one-day conference and three webinars on AI's impact on schools. Something we are all twitchy about in an excited, but slightly unknown quantity way. Still on the tech and AI theme, Mr. P ICT will be providing practical tech and AI sessions for primary teachers and middle leaders.

If you have yet to hear about our Summer Conference – it is time you did! Register and be with us on Thursday 19 June 2025 with a stunning line-up of national and local speakers. Tickets: £100 for SWIFT members, £150 for others.

Keeping enthused and inspired, we have some new Initiatives. Secondary subject briefings will be termly briefings for English, Maths and Science with leading national contributors. A SEND focus will look at an adaptive teaching series and practical strategies workshops led by Whole School SEND.

SWIFT will be working with The Engagement Platform - a tool for Schools and Trusts to collect, analyse and understand school engagement across pupils, staff and family to improve outcomes. There is an extra good deal for SWIFT Members who will benefit from a 50% discount on the first year's subscription.

Thinking more about SWIFT membership benefit, you will have free access to 25 Professional Communities, briefings, and Leadership Forums. We are also offering a minimum 30% discount on all professional development events and an early bird discount will give you 10% off if you register before 11 July 2025.

You heard it here!

We thank our sponsor ONVU Learning for sharing their motivation.

Vice President, Matt Tiplin (gentle and genuine motivation personified) explained how their lesson capture tool provides 360-degree video and audio footage to support teacher self-reflection and professional development by enabling and empowering them in a powerful way.

Who really enjoys being observed whilst teaching? With the ONVU platform teachers have control over their own footage and can know they are having the conversations that were otherwise based purely on recollection or performative observation or deliberate recording in notes.

Building on the collaboration within Schools and Trusts in a very productive, purposeful and informed way, ONVU enabled-tech transforms teaching and learning into meaningful teamwork that ultimately drives impactful outcomes for students; which has even been shown to boost and build on intrinsic motivation in case studies and testimonials.