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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
What do you know? Where do you find this information? Where do you need help with? How can I support you? And this is really depending on the information you get, calibrating your behavior to what is needed to that specific student on that specific moment.
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with Dr. Nathalie Aelterman of Impetus Academy in Belgium.
Ryan:They discuss the teaching compass that she's worked to develop, which helps to visualize different variables in motivation. Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Rob, we are continuing our series on stirring motivation. We have gone international in this series. We've had guests from Australia, even Ohio. But now we are in Europe and talking with someone in Belgium, Doctor. Nathalie Aelterman, who I know I've butchered her name and she'll pronounce it correctly.
Jared:So why
Rob:don't we let her do that?
Jared:Yes. Doctor. Aelterman, give us a bit who you are, a bit of a bio if you want, and the floor is yours.
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. Thank you for the invitation. My name is indeed Nathalie Aelterman. That's how you pronounce it. It was close.
Nathalie Aelterman:And now you weren't. I have worked as a researcher at the University of Ghent in Belgium for about thirteen years, Basically, really diving into why, do people do what they do and more specifically, why do students engage or don't engage in the activities that we want them to engage in? And I developed a tool to assess motivating and less motivating teaching behaviors. I also did some intervention studies with workshops where we looked into the question whether we can be whether teachers can learn to become more motivating in their teaching. And at the '19, I, decided to leave academia.
Nathalie Aelterman:And then we founded Impetus Academy, which is a spin off of the university. And what we do, is we deliver, workshops and trainings, coachings with, teachers, but also with, leaders, in the private sector on how to create more motivating learning and working environments. So that's in a big nutshell.
Jared:Yeah. Wow.
Rob:That's great.
Jared:Well, thanks for joining us. Tell us what the Teaching Compass is in plain language.
Nathalie Aelterman:In plain language. Well, actually, it is a data driven model. This is not plain language. It's something that we were able to prove based on scientific research, because we were looking at what are behaviors that teachers adopt in their classes that are likely to motivate students and what are behaviors that are likely to be more demotivating students. And we wanted to look at these different kinds of behaviors from a more integrative perspective.
Nathalie Aelterman:So we developed an assessment tool to assess motivating and less motivating behaviors. And based on these analysis, we found a circular structure, which I can tell you more about. But because we found this circular structure, we translated that into a more practical tool, which is a compass, because it's in practice, it can give direction to behaviours of teacher teachers in a more proactive way. So when they are preparing their classes, but also in more reactive situations, so where they need to intervene because a problem occurs in the classroom. It's kind of a click hanger still.
Rob:Right. But it sounds like a tool for preparing to motivate your class in terms of when you're preparing for your your course or your content. So you already have some ideas about how you're going to approach it with your students. And then also you have, I guess, some tools, tests, if you will, that you'd be able to use, in the midst of interacting with your students and reacting to what what presents itself. Is that is that about right?
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. Indeed. Yes.
Jared:K. What was the I'm curious about the genesis of this idea. Was it to find just the to have the end all product when it comes to what is it that motivates or demotivates? Or was there something where someone had this idea? Go back to the very beginning and tell me where this project started.
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. Good question. Well, it is grounded in self determination theory. And this theory is a very well validated theory on human motivation. And it has its roots like forty years ago.
Nathalie Aelterman:So there has been many or a lot of research about what are specific behaviours, not only teachers, but also parents or sports coaches can engage into to really foster sustainable motivation in children and youngsters. And there has been a lot of experimental studies, for example, showing that providing choice is a motivating strategy or providing motivating feedback is a motivating strategy or on the opposite, leaving students in the dark. So providing unclear or inconsistent instructions or less motivating or using very commanding language also gives students a sense of losing their autonomy and sense of choice and volition in what they do. So there's a long tradition of experimental studies looking at these very isolated behaviours and what the motivating impact of these isolated behaviours is on students. And that was actually the starting point like, okay, let's look at a more integrative perspective because we can imagine some situations, in which teachers provide choice to students.
Nathalie Aelterman:But they also provided a kind of framework so that students feel comfortable and students feel confident to make a meaningful choice in that specific situation. And that is what we tried to capture with our assessment. So our questionnaire is to look at specific situations and assess how teachers would react in that specific situation by combining different strategies.
Jared:Let's walk through those. We'll we'll put a link and probably a picture of the Compass, but you have eight sub areas in the Compass. Could you walk through and maybe give us a sentence each for each one of those?
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. So in general, it's like I said, it's a circular structure. So we make a distinction between behaviors that are more what we call need supportive. So these are behaviors that are more likely to, foster a sense of, autonomy, belongingness and competence in students, on the one side and the, the more need thwarting behaviours on the other side, which are behaviours that are more likely to frustrate these needs for autonomy, belongingness and competence in students. We also can make it so that's what the horizontal dimension.
Nathalie Aelterman:We also can make a distinction between behaviours that are high and directiveness. So it means that it is really the teacher who is taking the lead, is giving the direction and showing where to go. And on the opposite side, behaviours that are likely to be more low in directiveness. So where it's more the students who can take the initiative and who can. So it's actually the teacher taking a step aside and giving more room to students to take initiative and to to make decisions themselves.
Nathalie Aelterman:So when you cross these two dimensions, you get like four overarching, areas which are each indeed subdivided in two more specific sub areas. And so the first would be, where you have a combination of low directiveness and high support, which is called autonomy support. So that is the case where a teacher gives. Yeah, room to students to participate in. Or by providing inputs or making meaningful choices or when choice is not possible, the teacher can give a meaningful rationale so that students are more willing to engage into an activity, even though they didn't have the choice themselves.
Nathalie Aelterman:So this is a way of giving room to students in a supportive way. When we go to another area where we combine this need support with a high directiveness, we enter into the structure parts. So structure means giving direction to students, providing a framework, communicating clear expectations. What are the goals? What are the criteria?
Nathalie Aelterman:So being clarifying about what you want students to do, which is necessary for students to feel competent in realising these expectations and goals. But it's also about providing guidance, providing positive feedback, which also is guiding a student in a certain direction, but in a supportive way. When we move to the other side, we enter the dark side with the the more neat thwarting areas. And teachers can be highly directive, but in a way that likely undermines the students need for autonomy. And that is the case when teachers are being controlling.
Nathalie Aelterman:They are using commanding language. They are threatening with sanctions. They also do not tolerate any input from students, which would be an imposing or demanding approach. Or teachers, teachers could also induce feelings of guilt and shame in students and take a more personal attack on students, which is more characteristic of a domineering approach. So you can immediately feel that these are behaviours that are likely to take away students feeling of I can be myself in this classroom.
Nathalie Aelterman:And then the final area is chaos. Chaos is low in directiveness, but it's also undermining for students' needs. So students are given some room to take decisions and to determine what am I going to do and how am I going to do it. But there's no support at all. So it means that students will lose their competence feeling because they don't know what they are doing or what is actually expected from them, which is likely to have a negative impact on their motivation.
Rob:I've seen this
Nathalie Aelterman:It's more than a nutshell.
Jared:I've experimented with giving students room in teaching, and I've had some success and I've also had some failures and it's very easy to dwell on those failures, like the chaos that happens and think I'm never doing this ever again. What would you say to instructors like that who have been maybe burnt by the idea of getting students, giving students, choice because they see how maybe it, like in my case, it went down a path I wasn't expecting. And I was like, well, I want to give them the chance to like, because the big thing, you know, one of my favorite quotes is failure isn't just failure, it's feedback. So I wanted to give students a chance to fail a little and so I could bring them back, but then I ended up redoing what I wanted to do anyway. So I lost a lot of time.
Jared:You know, we got tests, you've got standards, all the stuff we have to meet. What would you say to instructors who are maybe like, yeah, I've done that once and I'm probably never going to do it again? How would you encourage Well,
Nathalie Aelterman:what we sometimes see is that teachers thinking about what can I do to motivate my students is like engaging in big diff doing things totally differently than they have than they have done before? Whereas sometimes it can be something adding something really small to what you have been doing so far. In your specific example, you could like ask the students afterwards, okay, what did you appreciate about what we have done? What did you miss? And what can we improve when we try this out next time?
Nathalie Aelterman:Because this, and this is really that attuning part where you are trying to take the perspective of the student and see things from their perspective, which is very valuable to make decisions on, Okay, what is it that I need to do next to be able to better align with what they need at that very moment. So my my advice would be to not give up and to check with the students what worked well and what small things you could do more, more, less or differently to be able to better match what they needed in that specific situation.
Jared:I think what you also said about being willing to move across the compass when those situations I think that was that was really stuck with me because I feel like sometimes, you know, we have these ideas and we wanna stick to these ideas and change changing as an instructor looks weak to the students. We have this idea that like, well, that didn't work. So we're going to do this instead. It looks very demeaning, you know, something like that. But but I think what you said about being willing to go more towards the directive and the guiding is super crucial.
Jared:And I I I think that rings true.
Nathalie Aelterman:What I want to add to that is that as teachers, we often make assumptions based on what we see in the behaviour of our students. And we adjust our behaviour according to these, assumptions that we make. For example, if we give an assignment to a student, to our students and we notice that they are very resistant. Oh, no, not again. And why do we have to do this?
Nathalie Aelterman:And we immediately have that tendency to see that as, oh, this is irritating. It's again, the same class who is not willing to engage into this assignment that I'm giving to them. But we could also look at this from a different perspective, like, this is interesting, not irritating, because what is underlying the resistance that I see and that I hear in my students? And if we dig deeper by asking questions to students, we might notice that it's not a no, but it's more a yes, but. So if we if we ask students questions, they might say like, oh, you know, this assignment is just one other assignment that we get with the deadline in the same week as these two other assignments.
Nathalie Aelterman:And this is really growing above our heads. We don't know how and how. Okay, so this is their need for autonomy that is being frustrated because they are being overloaded with assignments in the same week. So when we listen to that, we might be willing to maybe postpone the deadline with one week so that students have more time and that they get. So it's not a matter of choice in doing the assignment or not, but it's like looking at what is a more feasible moment for them to deliver the assignment.
Nathalie Aelterman:Or we might also hear students say like, I really don't know how to start with this. This is so difficult. I cannot do it. That's the competence need that you hear being frustrated, students being insecure, students doubting whether they are able to do it. So then it's not a matter of me being more participative and listening to what they would prefer better, but it's entering more into that guiding area like, okay, what is now what is the first step you are going to take?
Nathalie Aelterman:If you would divide this assignment in different steps, what is the first thing you're going to do? What do you know? Where do you find this information? Where do you need help with? How can I support you?
Nathalie Aelterman:And this is really depending on the information you get, calibrating your behavior to what is needed to that specific student on that specific moment.
Jared:Calibrating your behavior.
Rob:Calibrating your But I'm gonna I'm gonna throw a wrench in it here a little bit and ask you well, let me just say it this way. I'm a teacher who doesn't have time. Mhmm. I've got let's say, I've got 88 students, and I physically do not have time to evaluate 88 students and their individual needs inside of my class. So help me.
Rob:How do I handle a large class? I mean, how do faculty handle large classes in in this and and not I mean, because to some degree, you have to have a lot more structure in there. So help me understand the difference between structure and control. Where can I be more attentive to those things? It feels like I have to do it more instead of individualistically in groups where I've got to find homogenous groups of some sort within my my class and tend to them.
Rob:Is that am I on the right track there? Or
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. Well, I I don't want to make it sound like you as a teacher of so many students, you need to calibrate with each individual in a classroom. I agree that is not feasible And maybe also not desirable. But it says something about or it also gives direction to how to handle a group, Because you can also calibrate at the group level, finding a balance between giving direction, structure, giving direction in a supportive way, giving the framework. And in addition to that, looking at how can I involve my students in these and then students, of course, I mean, the group of students in what is it that is needed to for them to be able and willing to get along with these expectations that I have?
Nathalie Aelterman:So this compass does not claim that it is wrong to be highly directive on the opposites. Directiveness is important. We need it. We need these expectations or students need these expectations. They need a goal.
Nathalie Aelterman:They need criteria, they need clear instructions, and to be able to visualize what the desired outcome looks like. This is what they need, because that makes them feel competent along the way of approaching that specific goal. But the way how we communicate about these expectations can be either very imposing and very rigid, starting very much from our own agenda and not leaving any room for students to be involved, Which can frustrate our students and can make them unwilling to participate or to engage into what you're asking. So it is a matter of within that framework that is clear. And that is of course clear for all the students in your class.
Nathalie Aelterman:It's room. It's also looking at, okay, how, what is it that I'm willing to How I would not say negotiate because that's not what I wanted to say, but like, where is it? Where do I see possibilities to give my students responsibility to stimulate their initiative, to provide them with choices, to ask for their input and involve them in that whole process of how are we going to make it work. And that does not necessarily have to take much more time because being a policeman in your classroom also takes time.
Rob:Oh, yeah. It's true. If if students can police themselves I mean, because it sounds like what you're talking about is just helping students mature to adulthood. Right? Because an adult essentially takes autonomy to its fullest conclusion.
Rob:Like, you feed yourself, you dress yourself, you get yourself up, and and you you meet expectations that you have. Right? And Yep. You do so without having to always be prompted or prodded or or say, hey. You need to go do this.
Rob:It's internal. You do this because Yeah. You are an adult. And so maybe that's the vision that keeps coming to my mind is you're you're watching and you're helping them grow into this, and you wanna take that into account, which means it's it's it's student centered. Right?
Rob:Right. We've talked about this so many times. Yep. Yes. It's not just about the content and about you as the instructor.
Rob:It's you helping the students move from where they're at to where they should be Right. As adults.
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. Because what you were saying also resonated to me when when you were saying that we are helping students to move into adulthood. And this is like when we are expecting students to do everything independently from the beginning on, well, then some students will, well, we discussed it earlier, they will feel lost and left to their own device. So we need that structure first, and we need the guidance for them to be able to become more self regulating, more and more self regulating in their learning process. And on the other sides, we if we are constantly looking over their shoulder and controlling them, like, have you done what I've asked you to do?
Nathalie Aelterman:Well, then they become anxious and stressed and they and very tensed. And then they will do what you ask them to do. They will be very compliant. But only when you are looking over their shoulder. And the question is, what are they going?
Nathalie Aelterman:What are they doing when you are no longer looking over their shoulder? So that is what we what we want is create a conditions in which students find it worthwhile to get into motion themselves. And they need the framework and they need room to make decisions. So we need to find a good balance between that structure and that autonomy, which is very, very crucial. And that doesn't mean that they can decide everything.
Nathalie Aelterman:Because if there's no choice possible, or if there's no it's not desirable or not feasible to involve them and make decisions, well, then, you can explain them why that is the case. Why have I made why have we made this decision? Or why is this, or how is this useful to you? Or can this be useful to you? So it does not mean that you let go of your expectations.
Nathalie Aelterman:It just means that you would try to frame them so that they see the added value of it and they find it more worthwhile themselves to engage into it.
Jared:In some of your research, you looked at teachers' need supportive approaches, and how our own, need satisfaction and working conditions can influence and predict where and how they teach to their students. Yes. Please explain that because I think that's fascinating.
Nathalie Aelterman:Yep. So what we found is that when teachers experience pressure in their own working environments, and then I'm talking about pressure from peers, pressure from students, disengaged students, for example, that might cause frustration in their own need for autonomy, belongingness and competence, which radiates to their sensitivity and patience that they have for students. So when as a teacher, you feel like everything is being imposed on you. You don't have much room to be creative and to do things that you that really interest you and that you that you really value, that has an impact on your autonomy needs when you feel you're on your own and you cannot ask for help for your colleagues, for example, or when you have the feeling that the many things you do fail or do not land as you wish them to land or you cannot reach your goals or there are other things standing in the way. Well, then this frustration will lead you to or increases the likelihood that you might be more imposing towards your students, yourself, or that you have that you lack the energy to invest a lot in what do my students need at this point because you are depleted yourself.
Nathalie Aelterman:So that is what we found. But on the opposite, when teachers themselves feel like I can truly be myself, I feel a sense of connection, I I make progress in the things I do, that is predictive of satisfaction of their needs and, also for being more, supportive towards their students themselves.
Jared:Thank you so much, doctor Aelterman, for coming on, with us.
Rob:Conversation has been excellent.
Jared:The conversation has been excellent. So thank you for coming on with us. I appreciate it.
Nathalie Aelterman:Yeah. Thank you for the invitation.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments about our episode with Doctor. Aelterman, you're welcome to send us an email at CTLPodcastcedarville dot edu. You can also send us a message on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog.
Ryan:Thanks for listening.