Reflection: How much of the responsibility for motivation and engagement rests with the educator?
Reflection: How much of the responsibility for motivation and engagement rests with the educator? This reflection is a critical response to a question posed by Maggie in response to a reading critique I posted for online activity 3.1, which really challenged my thinking about who is responsible for motivating and engaging learners. Motivation is defined by Brophy (2010, p.3; as sighted in Hartnett, 2019) as "a theoretical construct to explain the initiation, direction, intensity, persistence, and quality of behaviour, especially goal-directed behaviour." Spring et al. (2018, p.1488) conceptualises engagement "as the quality and quantity of energy exerted" by a learner. To answer the question above 'How much of the responsibility for motivation and engagement rests with the educator?', I feel the theory of transactional distance discussed by Hartnett (2019) makes a good point where autonomous learners rely less on a teacher than learners who are less auto...