Teaching Well and Liking It: Motivating Faculty to Teach Effectively

James L. Bess (Editor)

Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 455 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

The 21 essays collected in this volume explore the conditions that influence faculty's motivation to teach well. As author after author notes, the decentralized structure of the academic workplace and the independence that faculty members as professionals have in most aspects of their jobs mean that traditional theories of motivation and conventional systems for motivating workers do not neatly apply to the college or university teacher. This collection, useful for academic and other administrators who are responsible for ensuring the quality of teaching and learning and for motivating and evaluating teaching faculty, attempts to identify the conditions and rewards that may motivate faculty to teach effectively.

In his introduction, editor Bess identifies three realms of influence on faculty behavior around which the collection develops: "(1) selfor personally driven conditions, (2) local organizational conditions, and (3) systemwide conditions" (p. xii). While these realms constitute conditions over which administrators have more or less control, the theoretical and research reports included in the collection suggest the need to simultaneously address conditions affecting faculty motivation at a number of levels. The cumulative message of this collection is that the conditions affecting motivation may in fact be too complex for any single administrator or even institution to influence in ways that ensure a motivated and satisfied teaching faculty.

The collection is organized into six sections. Part 1 contains a three-chapter overview of motivational theory and research; in the first essay, Walker and Symons define motivation as "the conditions and processes that activate, direct, and sustain behavior" (p. 4). They survey theories of external and internal influences on motivation and identify five necessary conditions emerging from motivation theory: "Human motivation is at its highest when people (1) are competent, (2) have sufficient autonomy, (3) set worthwhile goals, (4) get feedback, and (5) are affirmed by others" (pp. 16-17). These conditions are explored to various degrees by the essays which follow, which in part I include a summary by McKeachie of research findings related to faculty motivation to teach and an argument by Glazer that traditional motivational theories have not accounted for the impact of gender differences or faculty motivation.

Parts 2 and 3 of the collection explore theories of internal and external motivation. While primarily theoretical, most of these essays suggest practical implications of their theories for improving faculty motivation to teach. Of particular interest among these essays is an application of the psychology of optimal experience or flow by Csikszentmihaly. His flow analysis of teaching will ring true to anyone who has had a successful teaching experience, in or out of the classroom. The feeling of flow is, to Csikszentmihaly, the ultimate intrinsic motivation, "an experience that is an end in itself, a dynamic psychological state that is valued for its immediate rewarding qualities" (p. 73). While flow might seem outside the influence of any external conditions, Csikszentmihaly describes a model of intrinsically rewarding learning, which includes clear goals, immediate feedback, a balance of challenges and skills, an absence of distractions, and opportunities for growth and self-transcendence (pp. 83-84). Although the author finds "no study relating a teacher's motivation to the effectiveness of his or her teaching-in other words, to the students' motivation" (p. 87), his model contains elements that other authors in the volume identify as equally necessary to faculty motivation.

The other essay on intrinsic motivation, by Deci, Kasser, and Ryan, outlines a theory of selfdetermination in which autonomy, competence, and relatedness to colleagues and students motivate the self-determined teacher; however, extrinsic motivators (such as praise, money, new challenges) can influence faculty members to adopt the salient values of their environment if they are presented in ways that encourage faculty to integrate them into their own intrinsic values. In too many cases, the authors note, universities reward research activities more highly than quality teaching or students lack interest in their courses, diminishing faculty members' sense of autonomy and pleasure in teaching.

Of the essays in part 3 exploring extrinsic influences on motivation the most practical, perhaps surprisingly, is Nord's application of behavior modification theory to faculty motivation. While in the "loosely coupled" system of higher education faculty exert substantial influence over their own work and even over the organization, Nord points out that administrators can nonetheless create conditions which may improve performance and use positive reinforcement to reward even early steps in a faculty member's process of improving his or her teaching. They can influence this process by specifying the behaviors that constitute good teaching, creating opportunities for faculty to observe one another modeling the desired behaviors, and using external factors (praise, assistance to improve performance, and other rewards) in ways designed to reinforce good behavior rather than rewarding undesired behavior. Readers will find Nord's suggestions useful despite the skepticism most will have toward the possibility of conditioning faculty to perform desired behaviors. Two other theories of extrinsic motivation addressed in part 3 are expectancy theory (Mowday & Nam) and goalsetting theory (Latham, Daghighi, & Locke).