In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Miguel Órdenes explores the factors influencing teacher motivation in the context of educational reform. Órdenes argues that while extrinsic incentives can play a role in motivating teachers, they must be balanced with intrinsic factors, such as a sense of purpose and service. Órdenes is an Assistant Professor and faculty member of the Educational Leadership Program at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago Chile. He holds a Sociology degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a Master’s degree and PhD in Education from the University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on the relationship between educational policy, school
improvement, and teacher motivation. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2025 AERA theme is “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.” This theme urges scholars to consider the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, repairing harm to communities and institutions, and contributing to a more just future in education. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Miguel Órdenes (MO): I believe that education researchers have made significant progress in deepening our understanding of the large-scale oppressive forces that produce and perpetuate harm for disadvantaged communities. However, we still have a considerable gap in understanding how change can emerge under such challenging conditions. School leaders and teachers facing socioeconomic adversity are constrained by these oppressive forces, which limit their capacity to drive change. For instance, the pernicious effect of high poverty, inequality, marginalization, or institutionalized racism are forces that systematically oppress and constrain the possibilities of action of millions of educators worldwide. Yet, educators must strive to create fairer, more humanized environments where students can succeed beyond societal expectations. This raises critical questions for researchers: How can we support the concrete efforts of educators in the face of these struggles? How can we provide actionable solutions to their practical dilemmas and help them find a way forward?
Addressing large-scale oppressive forces requires considerable energy from educators within schools and local systems. My research has precisely focused on understanding this energy, which is manifested in teacher commitment and work motivation. Teacher commitment functions as a stabilizing force in shaping behavior, enabling educators to maintain consistent, high-quality behaviors over time (Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001). My focus is specifically on teacher commitment to students facing socioeconomic adversity. While such commitment is crucial for supporting disadvantaged students, sustaining it can be challenging when educators are systematically exposed to overwhelming students’ needs that exceed their professional and personal capacities. In my work in Chile, I have explored the social and organizational conditions, as well as the personal characteristics, that either nurture or weaken teacher commitment to students (Órdenes, 2018).
Teacher work motivation is another critical form of energy that drives educators’ effort in their work. Understanding this phenomenon is crucial for creating work environments that unleash individuals’ full potential and direct their efforts where they are more impactful. For example, some of my research has examined how governance mechanisms and organizational designs in the U.S. and Chile can enhance or undermine teacher motivation, with the aim of providing insights to policymakers and educational leaders (as I discuss further below).
While understanding these sources of energy—commitment and motivation—is essential, it is only part of the equation. As W.E. Deming famously remarked, education often sets miracle goals without providing a method to achieve them (Bryk, 2021). To address this challenge, I have turned to continuous improvement frameworks, particularly the Design-Based School Improvement approach (Mintrop, 2016). This methodology offers a way to channel the energy within educational organizations into productive problem-solving efforts aimed at improving schools. In Chile, I have engaged in Research-Practice Partnerships (Coburn et al., 2013) to explore how these ideas help school leaders address practical challenges and pressing needs. I have also incorporated these ideas into leadership training programs for Chilean educators, developing resources to support school leaders in improving their schools. I firmly believe that deep, lasting change comes from within. By understanding the sources of energy in schools—teacher commitment and motivation—and using continuous improvement methods to direct that energy, we can contribute to building more equitable and successful learning environments. I am convinced that if we want to support remedy and repair for schools and communities, this intersection of human energy and continuous improvement is a crucial area where researchers may focus to help educators create meaningful and lasting change.
“I firmly believe that deep, lasting change comes from within. By understanding the sources of energy in schools—teacher commitment and motivation—and using continuous improvement methods to direct that energy, we can contribute to building more equitable and successful learning environments.”
LtC: Much of your research has examined the intersection of extrinsic drivers in education and teacher motivation in high-poverty schools and districts operating in a variety of contexts, including in Chile and the United States. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work?
MO: One of the central questions that drives my passion is how, and under what conditions, we can unleash people’s potential in schools and local systems—to resist oppression or to support meaningful change in education. To address these questions, I have focused on school improvement, specifically examining teacher motivation and commitment within the broader tensions between incentive-based policies, value-normative frameworks, and the effects and experiences of poverty. This is a vast topic, but I will highlight a key insight derived from research conducted by my colleagues and I in the U.S. and Chile (e.g., Mintrop, Órdenes, et al., 2018; Mintrop & Órdenes, 2017; Órdenes et al., 2023; Órdenes & Ulloa, 2024), which I believe is crucial for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners.
Motivating teachers to invest effort in their work and direct it productively is not an easy task. Since Lortie’s (1975)foundational work, we know that teachers are primarily motivated by intrinsic factors such as joy, purpose, and service commitments. However, this is not the whole story. Like any other workers, teachers are also concerned with practical matters, including workload, working conditions, and compensation (Mintrop & Órdenes, 2017; Watt & Richardson, 2008). In other words, they are sensitive to extrinsic aspects of their job. These two sources of energy—intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives—combine to fuel the complex process of teaching in schools.
The challenge of motivating teachers, therefore, lies in designing strategies that balance intrinsic motivation with external drivers in a way that reinforces, rather than undermines, teachers’ inherent desire to teach. If we idealize teachers through moralistic lenses—such as viewing them just as heroes or social justice warriors—we risk dehumanizing them, particularly those working in difficult conditions. Teachers are also professionals who need supportive working conditions, opportunities for career advancement, and environments that allow them to thrive personally and professionally. To foster effective, high-quality teaching, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations must be recognized. Policies and organizational designs that rely on extrinsic drivers—such as summative evaluations, performance goals, and rewards—must address this dual challenge: they must both mobilize intrinsic motivations to sustain effort and use external incentives to reinforce teachers’ ethical and effective commitment to their work.
Any motivational strategy must be designed with a deep understanding of teachers as professionals driven by a range of motives, and attention must be paid to the complexity of their work. This requires policymakers, scholars, and practitioners to challenge prevailing moral assumptions about teachers and instead develop an empirical understanding of the teaching workforce. It also requires making explicit the implicit assumptions underlying teachers’ work to better understand what is necessary to improve practice.
“Any motivational strategy must be designed with a deep understanding of teachers as professionals driven by a range of motives, and attention must be paid to the complexity of their work”
LtC: In 2021, you co-authored the book, Resoluci Resolución de problemas para la mejora continua: Una guía práctica para líderes escolares, with Rick Mintrop and published by LOM Ediciones. This book is an adaptation and Spanish-language version of Rick Mintrop’s Design-based School Improvement: A Practical Guide for Education Leaders, published by Harvard Education Press in 2016. The book describes a design-based model for continuous improvement in schools and districts and cases of educational leaders engaging in these methods. How did your earlier research shape your interest in this model? What do you hope practitioners and scholars in Latin America and beyond can take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?
MO: I am a sociologist focused on educational change. Before becoming a sociologist, however, I was trained as a software developer, which provided me with an intuitive understanding of design principles. There is a complementary relationship between software development and design thinking (Parizi et al., 2022), as both approaches focus on solving complex problems through user-centered innovation. Design thinking offers a mindset and methodology that can enhance the software development process by introducing creativity, empathy, and rapid prototyping to the technical and logical aspects of building software.
The parallels between my previous work as a software developer and my current focus on applying continuous improvement ideas to educational change are significant. This earlier experience shaped my attention to practice and my approach to educational change research. Obviously, the human complexity involved in school change processes far exceeds the scope of software development. Applying design principles to human systems requires consideration of cultural aspects, interpersonal relationships, subjective perspectives, and moral concerns that are intricately intertwined with practitioners’ behaviors, all of which can significantly influence school improvement processes and outcomes. So, applying these principles to support change processes with human beings within schools have been a very challenging but rewarding process.
Regarding the book, the original 2016 version was written in English with a focus on schools and leaders in a North American context. To make the book relevant for and responsive to the needs and challenges of a Latin American audience, we meticulously worked to adapt the ideas and concepts to the policy and cultural context and added real-life cases based in Chile. Additionally, the updated version includes lessons learned from the years following the 2016 edition’s publication. Our primary aim with this book is to support and inspire educational leaders in Latin America to foster bottom up and collective agency within schools and local systems (Mintrop & Órdenes, 2021). Latin America has a legacy of authoritarian regimes and top-down hierarchical decision-making that has likely influenced educators’ ways of thinking about leadership and improvement. Therefore, our book is a step forward in offering an alternative approach that humanizes improvement processes by centering leaders’ attention on people, their practical work, and their motivation to generate meaningful change.
This book encourages leaders to carefully consider and understand the practical problems and needs that education professionals face in their daily work. We invite leaders to think in the change process in the educators’ next level of work (City et al., 2009), considering motivation and adult learning as a launching pad to change. We also encourage leaders to create organizational learning dynamics as an essential part of the continuous improvement process. To achieve these objectives, this book provides a method for structuring the improvement process through a problem-solving logic that consists of sequential learning opportunities created iteratively and refined through trial and error until a satisfactory outcome is achieved. By approaching problem-solving in this way, we hope school leaders will avoid implementation overload and the misalignment between external programs and internal school needs that often hinder school improvement efforts. We also aspire to contribute to the development of a new mindset and skillset among practitioners in Latin America, encouraging them to think about school improvement beyond a compliance mindset, which is deeply rooted among school leaders in the region.
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
MO: My quick answer is to promote collaboration among all actors and help channel their efforts coherently to solve urgent practical problems. However, several challenges preclude productive collaboration among stakeholders involved in educational change. One central challenge, in my view, is bridging the persistent gap between research and practice. As a field, we are acutely aware of the limited usefulness and impact of educational research in improving quality and equity in education (OECD, 2022). Unlike sectors such as engineering or medicine, education lacks established modes of production and institutional channels that facilitate the transfer and use of research evidence to inform practical decision-making (Bauer & Fischer, 2007). Moreover, the traditional model of research production does not enjoy strong credibility among education professionals (Burkhardt & Schoenfeld, 2003). As a result, research activity and its findings often fail to connect productively with the pressing practical challenges encountered by those responsible for delivering educational services.
What I find particularly inspiring is how colleagues in the U.S. are actively shifting towards more collaborative research approaches aimed at directly serving practice (The Collaborative Education Research Collective, 2023). In this context, the rise of Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs) has emerged as a promising strategy for nurturing ecosystems where key stakeholders can collaboratively develop new modes of research production that are more in tuned with practice. Supporting and encouraging such collective efforts is crucial.
While this is an exciting direction, it is not without significant challenges. The research field remains heavily constrained by entrenched traditions: the way researchers are trained, the incentive structures that guide their work, the institutional conditions under which research is conducted, and the cultural norms about the purpose of research. These factors all present obstacles to bridging the research-practice divide.
In Chile, for example, there are no strong incentives for researchers to engage deeply with practice, nor are there research training programs that focus on practice-based research—such as EdDs. Furthermore, we lack funding mechanisms to support sustained collaborations between researchers and practitioners. Despite these barriers, I believe we must persist. As a field, we need to actively support and engage in RPPs as a new institutional pathway for reshaping research production. I am convinced that through these efforts we will improve our chances of having a meaningful chance to support transformation and improvement in educational practice.
“As a field, we need to actively support and engage in RPPs as a new institutional pathway for reshaping research production.”
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
MO: We are currently witnessing an exciting paradigm shift in the field of educational change. The disappointing results of previous approaches to change schools—such as prescriptive programs, focusing on mere ‘implementation’ of best practices, and high-stakes accountability—has led educational actors to seek new ideas for improving schools and systems. Over the last decade, there has been a clear movement away from the so-called “what works” paradigm, which focused on identifying research-based strategies as the gold standard (Yurkofsky et al., 2020). Instead, the field is embracing the continuous improvement movement, which seeks to understand what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
I believe that this shift requires more than just methodological adjustments; it demands a deeper transformation in how we understand and engage with educational practice and practitioners. Two aspects of this shift excite me. First, while the continuous improvement movement aims to create meaningful change solving urgent practical problems in daily educational practice, I wonder, what do we mean by “practice”? Practice is not as straightforward as it seems. It refers to the emergent reality that arises from daily interactions where social structure and individual agency intersect (Bourdieu, 2007; Spillane, 2009). Practice is dynamic, uncertain, and context-specific. In their work there is no question practitioners need guidance and structured processes, but they also must rely on intuition, improvisation, and experiential learning—factors that can sometimes elude traditional research (Schön, 1987). To foster effective change, I believe, we need to more deeply understand the nature of practice itself.
Secondly, fostering change in practice requires understanding how to create conditions that support people’s capacity for change. Here by ‘change’, I refer to changing people’s observable behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes—what they actually do on a daily basis in their work. While the continuous improvement movement offers strong frameworks for structuring change, I believe, it can be enhanced by integrating insights from behavioral change research. Fields such as organizational change, motivation theory, behavioral economics, adult learning, and the like provide valuable ideas for understanding how people learn, adapt, and sustain new behaviors and practice. By drawing on these interdisciplinary perspectives, educational change efforts can address the human factors that drive deeper and sustained transformation. Personally, I find these two potential ways very inspiring for my own research and practice.
References
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