Intrinsic Motivation and Creativity in the Classroom: Have We Come Full Circle?

Abstract

As I sat down to organize my ideas in preparation for writing this chapter, I came to realize that my thinking and my research efforts have come full circle – or at the very least, that circle is closer than ever before to becoming closed. Almost thirty years ago, I moved to Denver, Colorado, to begin my career as a fledgling teacher. My experiences in my mixed-age classroom filled with 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds kindled within me a deep interest in motivation and creativity of performance. My concerns about what our educational system was not doing to promote student growth in these areas became so great that I eventually left my elementary classroom to return to school myself. I was convinced that it was the field of psychology, and more specifically the study of the social psychology of creativity, that could best provide the answers I was looking for. As a graduate student and later as a professor of psychology, I have been almost single-minded in my attempts to answer empirically the question of how best to structure classrooms so that they are most conducive to student motivation and creativity. Over the past thirty-five years, researchers have contributed literally hundreds of investigations to the psychological and educational psychology literatures; for my own part, in the last few years, I have even been bold enough to end a few chapters or monographs with a “laundry list” of what teachers should and should not do if student intrinsic motivation and creativity are the goal.

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