The Quality School

William Glasser, M.D. made the case in his seminal work The Quality School that one of the major reasons why so few students are involved in high-quality honors or advanced-placement classes is that schools historically use boss management. Students, just like teachers and other adults, have a quality world where they place things that are important to them. A student may place a specific teacher or subject in his quality world. Once this occurs, he will be intrinsically motivated to excel in that subject or for that teacher. This is what Glasser calls Control Theory.

No human is unmotivated. Boss-teachers and administrators might lament that students are not motivated but what they are really saying is that they do not know how to persuade students to work. And as long as they believe in coercion, they never will. It is always what we want at the time the causes our behavior. If keeping quiet is in the student's best interest, he will do so.

Managers can count on coercion to achieve only the simplest tasks. The same goes for reward. It isn't the reward that motivates; it is the individuals perception of how much he wants the reward that determines his behavior. What happens to us from outside has a lot to do with what we choose to do, but the outside event does not cause our behavior.

Lead-managers and lead-teachers prefer to give the workers or students the kind of information that will persuade them to do as they are directed because it is as much or more to their benefit as it is to the teacher's. Students will do things for a teacher they like and care about that they would never do for a teacher they do not care about.

Why are some students so motivated in their extra-curricular (sports, music, drama, etc.) activities? Students will tell you they feel important in these activities. Ask them and they will tell you that in these situations where they work together as a group or on a team, they work harder and accomplish more because they help each other and have more fun. This same type of work ethic can occur in academic classes as well, when students are actively engaged in their learning in a supportive and enjoyable environment.

It is not always easy to conduct school business in this fashion. Sometimes we do not have enough time or outside interests or pressure dictate what we must do, but the more we can help each student to place school into his quality world, the more effective we will be and the more the student will derive from his education.