Abstract:

Teachers assume personal responsibility in four domains: student motivation, student achievement, relationships with students, and the quality of their own teaching. In all existing research, pre-service and practicing teachers score lowest in the motivation domain. This may be because some teachers view motivation as a shared responsibility or one that is contingent on external factors. Thus, the purpose of this research was to examine pre-service teachers’ reflections on two different perspectives on personal responsibility for student motivation - one that reflected high internal unmitigated responsibility and one that reflected shared and contextualized responsibility. Pre-service teachers watched two video vignettes, and then reflected on the perspectives in an open-ended written format. The descriptive statistics confirmed that responsibility for motivation was the lowest of the four domains. Moreover, the percentage pre-service teacher felt responsible for student motivation predicted which video vignette they selected. Thematic analysis of pre-service teachers’ reflection revealed four themes that give insight to how pre-service teachers make sense of responsibility for student motivation: people responsible, external factors, strategies to support motivation, and emotions. The results are discussed in light of methodological, theoretical, and practical implications.

Keywords: