Motivation and (di)stress

A figure has been sticking with me from a reading for my pedagogy course about how student motivation affects learning. In How Learning Works Chapter 4 (“What Factors Motivate Students to Learn?”), the authors summarize research about motivation and provide an explanatory model of undergraduate student behavior in classrooms.  The diagram summarizes interactions of motivation components–goals, task value, expectations of success, and environmental support–to result in a student behavioral response. In the text, the authors give examples of what those responses look like as typical classroom behaviors. A talented student who cares tremendously might think to themselves, “I’ll show them,” in defiance toward a teacher who seems disapproving. A student disengages entirely from a required course that is above their readiness with an unapproachable teacher. An aspiring journalism student submits an essay to the student newspaper after their instructor writes, “you should publish this! Let me know how I can help!” at the top of their paper. I can see this being a useful tool for an instructor to get curious about what aspects of the course context they can influence about motivation concerns among their students.

	Unsupportive environment		Supportive environment
	Low expectancy	High expectancy	Low expectancy	High expectancy
High task value	Hopeless	Defiant (fight)	Fragile (fawn)	Motivated
Low task value	Rejecting	Evading	Rejecting	Evading

This motivation model characterizes much of what I’ve noticed in the behaviors of many PhD students in relationship to their PhD activities. While working in a teaching center and graduate school, I encountered lots of PhD students who were looking for support to shift their experience toward the “motivated” box. Something in their lives had become insufficient, dissatisfying, or intolerable and it was affecting their mood state, their engagement, and their progress toward goals. They were motivated to make a change. A graduate student suffering in a neglectful mentoring environment with failed experiments feels hopeless and lost about whether to continue in their studies and achieve their goal to be the first in their family to complete college let alone a PhD (“hopeless”). An enthusiastic graduate student interested in a teaching-focused academic career was encouraged by their mentor, with supporting recommendations from several friends, to attend professional development workshops to prepare for a teaching opportunity in the department the upcoming semester (“motivated”). These graduate students communicated their readiness to make an adjustment toward pursuing their goals, clarifying their motivations, and addressing issues with the goals, task value, expectancy, and support.

As mentors, coaches, and consultants to graduate students, we support their process of discernment and resourcing to support their internal motivations. We help them identify and clarify the intrinsic and utility values of a task they want to do or are expected to engage in. We help them set reasonable expectations for their success by helping them identify their existing strengths as well as needed skills for new tasks. And we are an affirming space that helps them develop a plan for connecting with additional resources and assistance. We ask open-ended questions like:

1. How important is this task to you? Why? What goals are you trying to meet? (task value)
2. What skills are needed for this task? Where have you brought those skills into play before? Where do you feel the most need in this situation? (expectations for success)
3. What kinds of support and help do you already have? What additional support do you need and where could you find that? How can I help you create a plan of action? (supportive environment)

In the original figure from Lovett et al.’s How Learning Works, the three inputs for motivation are task value, expectations of success, and environment; these three inputs serve as ingredients that are additive to motivation and subsequently goal achievement. Something noticeable to me about their model is that there is only one out of eight ways to be at “the sweet spot” with a student – and seven of eight interaction sets that result in some sort of fear or shame response. The prevalence of fear-avoidance behavior possibilities in the table felt noisy to me.

With hardly a hesitation, I felt drawn to remake the table with the expectations of success as a layer outside of environmental support. And then I realized something. I had redrawn the table to represent what complex PTSD and codependency look and feel like to me (yes, hi, that’s me on the recovery path). In my representation, the expectations of success were experienced downstream from the environmental support. In my own trauma-influenced formulation of the model, the supportiveness and predictability of the environment became the drivers of my motivation and the activating switch for my fight/flight-state brain. Furthermore, expectancy – what is expected for success and my own efficacy – became an output that was dependent on ensuring the supportiveness of the external environment.

	Low expectations for success		High expectations for success
	Unsupportive environment	Supportive environment	Unsupportive environment	Supportive environment
High task value	Hopeless	Fragile (fawn)	Defiant (fight)	Motivated
Low task value	Rejecting	Rejecting	Evading	Evading

In environments that feel emotionally and/or physically unsupportive to me (neglectful, toxic, abusive, violent, scary, unpredictable, invisibilizing, overwhelming, disempowering – in other words, when I feel “other”), my lizard-brain motivations shift to dependence on the “other’s” view of the world and a dual consciousness of their mood state – my perceptions of their supportiveness, what I think are their expectations of my success, what values I think they hold for this task. When my brain has shifted to fear-mode, it is motivated by and prioritizes avoidance of conflict, failure, disappointment, humiliation, uncertainty, change, and shame. First and foremost, self-preservation and belonging. Go along to get along. Through people-pleasing and over-responsibility, create a safe-enough space that gives the illusion of a predictable and supportive environment. In this fear state, my self-perceptions of everything else in the motivation model become downshifted: choices, accurate assessment of capabilities, realistic prediction of success, and even whose values are attached to the task in the first place. I lose access to my internal drive. Remember those open-ended coaching questions at the beginning? Below in parentheses is what those questions sound like when I’m in that triggered state:

1. Is this task genuinely important to me? Does this task support my goals?
   1. (Would they agree and say this task is important to them?)
2. Is the task achievable? Do I think I am able to achieve it?
   1. (Would they agree this task is achievable? Do they think I am able to achieve it?)
3. Do I have what I need in resources and emotional support to achieve the task?
   1. (Will they provide resources and emotional support to help me achieve the task?)

I’ve been deliberating a lot about whether sharing these insights might either be empowering or be wielded to disempower. Furthermore, there’s a sense of shame I carry right now even writing about how my worldview shifts, almost automatically, in a PTSD episode. How can someone my age with my social privileges and my level of education and career attainment struggle substantial, prolonged stress with self-concept, self-esteem, self-determination, and self-assertion? Well, there it is, I do have these struggles. This is how early traumatic experiences with fear and shame gave patterning to my brain and nervous system. Maybe what I offer here is helpful to someone who needs to hear it. I acknowledge this people-pleasing behavior is inauthentic and manipulative, even if it’s a subconscious, survival-mode behavior developed in early childhood that’s based on an inaccurate assessment of threat and that has outlived its appropriateness. When distressed, I give away my power to speak authentically about my goals, interests, strengths, and needs and lose sense of my internal motivations and goals. It’s self-abandonment under stress. When my environment is supportive, I have a clear idea of my goals, the value of the task to me, and what of my own strengths will be useful to the task. When I’m in the flow of a calm yet energized state, I have full access to my internal motivation capabilities. No need to recommend cognitive-based therapies; I am participating in multi-modal therapies that simultaneously develop mindfulness, nervous system calming, choicefulness under stress, and reprocessing to resolve the frozen emotional and somatic states of distressing past events.

Remember the motivation model in which seven of those eight interaction sets resulted in fear-based behavior outcomes? I think there’s something my experience with PTSD adds. A teacher who permits or creates an unsupportive environment – chaotic, reactive, shaming, neglectful, humiliating – might be activating deep self-protective, shame-avoidant, fear-based behaviors in some students. In a supportive environment – calm, thoughtful, affirming, attuned, predictable, structured – instructors open up possibilities for students to be and express their most authentic selves and learn more deeply about their own goals, values, strengths, interests, and motivations.