Nine Reasons Why Teachers Are Often Controlling Toward Students
A Self-Determination Theory Perspective


1. Teachers are themselves subjected to controlling, pressuring conditions within their jobs, as from performance standards, curriculum demands, telephone calls from parents, deadlines, test/evaluation schedules, large class sizes, accountability pressures, etc.
 

2. When students are disengaged, they pull control out of the teacher.
The idea: If there is no autonomy to support, then how can you be autonomy supportive?
 
3. Parents and students both rate controlling teachers as significantly more competent as teachers than they rate autonomy-supportive teachers. So, if you want good ratings from parents and students, then you need to be more of a teacher and less of a facilitator.
 
4. Parents and students both adhere to the "minimax" principle of motivation, which is basically the belief that "the larger the incentive, the greater the motivation." This facilitates a controlling style because of the assumption that a lack of motivation is best countered by a reward, and the less the motivation the bigger needs to be the reward.
 
5. Prevalence of behavior modification principles within teacher training programs. Also, initial observations of oftentimes unruly classrooms during their practicums leads pre-service teachers toward a more favorable view on the merits of controlling students' behavior.
 
6. Relative absence in these same teacher training programs of how to design instruction to promote students' autonomy. This is a problem because even if teachers think autonomy support is an effective motivational strategy they are left wondering, "OK, how can I promote students' autonomy? What would I do?"
 
7. The culture (U.S.) identifies teachers as powerful actors and students as weak actors. This contributes to a controlling style, because people placed into powerful societal roles do powerful things like teach, instruct, and give directives whereas people placed into weak societal roles do weak things like listen, observe, and obey.
 
8. Teachers (like everyone else) often underestimate students' abilities to motivate themselves (i.e., teachers underestimate the motivational utility of intrinsic motivation, mastery goals, possible selves).
 
9. (Some) teachers deeply and sincerely believe that researchers just don't really understand, as in "If you tried that (i.e., autonomy support) in my classroom, then all heck would break loose." This is a problem because teachers associated controlling strategies with high structure and autonomy-supportive strategies with a laissez faire approach.