Educational Psychology Review

And I think if you know about yourself, whether you are a teaching-motivated teacher or a subject-motivated teacher or a combination of the two, then that's going to help you to discover your motivational style, which will help you to impact your students' own motivation.

Melanie Keller and her team went a little bit further with this in a 2016 review that was published in Educational Psychology Review, and they looked at a distinction between teachers' own experienced enthusiasm, so what you are feeling inside when you are teaching, and their displayed enthusiasm, the behavior that you are performing as you are teaching.

And experienced enthusiasm is the starting point to both of those things.

So how you are feeling inside about your own subject, about your own teaching is the first way that you can lead to student motivation.