Why autonomy-supportive interventions work: Explaining the professional development of teachers' motivating style

Carefully designed interventions consistently help K-12 teachers learn how to implement a more autonomy-supportive classroom motivating style. In the present study, we investigated what resources teachers acquired during these interventions that explained why they are so able to successfully upgrade the quality of their motivating style. We randomly assigned 91 full-time teachers to participate or not in a year-long autonomy-supportive intervention program (ASIP), and we longitudinally assessed autonomy support and three hypothesized mediating resourcesdgains in need satisfaction during teaching, gains in teaching efficacy, and a greater adoption of intrinsic instructional goals. The ASIP did increase teachers’ autonomy support, as expected, and the two resources that explained this professional developmental achievement were intervention-enabled gains in teaching efficacy and intrinsic instructional goals. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. In every class, teachers ask their students to engage in various learning activities. While doing so, teachers inevitably rely on a particular motivating style, the most widely studied of which is autonomy support (Assor, Kaplan, & Roth, 2002; Cheon, Reeve, Yu, & Jang, 2014; Deci, Schwartz, Sheinman, & Ryan, 1981). Autonomy support is an interpersonal tone of support and understanding in which the teacher appreciates, vitalizes, and actively supports students' inner motivational resources (e.g., intrinsic motivation, psychological needs) by utilizing teaching practices such as taking the students' perspective, creating opportunities for students' input and initiative, offering learning activities in need-satisfying ways, providing explanatory rationales for teacher requests, and acknowledging and accepting students' expressions of negative affect as both understandable and okay. A teacher's classroom autonomy-supportive motivating style is important because its presence catalyzes high-quality and engagement-fostering motivations (need satisfaction, autonomous motivation, intrinsic goals) and hence students' adaptive classroom functioning and outcomes (Assor et al., 2002; Cheon, Reeve, & Moon, 2012; Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004; Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Soenens, & Matos, 2005). When K-12 teachers participate in carefully-designed, theory* Corresponding author. 633 Uncho-Useon Hall, Department of Education, Korea University, Anam-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 02841, Republic of Korea. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Reeve).