Motivation is catchy!

I am really interested in this as well - it leans toward teacher identity issues and I wonder whether it makes more sense to describe rather than measure?

I believe teacher motivation in schools is significantly influenced by leadership. This is becoming evident in my school where we have just introduced an autism specific teaching pedagogy across the school.

I think that the best teachers are the ones who have a passion in their subject. They will be enthusiastic at work and will strive to transmit their knowledge to students.

Educators who make their subject as interesting as possible, will be able to entice students' curiosity! :)

While I understand that it is a study specifically investigating the qualities of successful teachers in single sex boys' schools, I would recommend two studies; "Reaching Boys: An International Study of Effective Practices" and "For Whom the Boy Toils". Both research projects by Michael Reichart and Richard Hawley. I would suggest that, anecdotally from my experience in co-educational schools, their findings for the most part are transferable. Their findings are clear - Motivated, engaging, enthusiastic teachers who take the time to connect and for relationships with their students will experience success.

I would view teacher's motivation and enthusiasm as a necessary prerequisite for student's success.

A motivated teacher will be able to guide,and steer stents towards success. Normally speaking teacher's job is not a 9 to 5 job but a 24 x 7 assignment where he needs to engage students beyond class hours and help him realize his/her potential. Though , I may not have any quantitative data to support the above assertion, empirically I have observed this in many instances, especially in engineering schools !

Teachers need to be invested in what they do and through their interests in the subject(s) they teach, they translate their enthusiasm to the students. I also think, teachers who are able to motivate students use "best teaching practices" in their daily routines and are part of their daily repertoire. Many articles I have recently read about instructional leadership indirectly links student success to educational leadership.

differentiated two aspects of motivation: initiating motivation which was concerned with the reasons for doing something and deciding to do something, and sustaining motivation referring to the effort for sustaining or persisting in doing something. Dörnyei and Ushioda (2001, 2011) identified two dimensions of defining motivation on which most researchers would agree: direction and magnitude of human behavior. Accordingly, motivation specifies the reason why people decide to do something, how long people are willing to sustain the activity and how hard they are going to pursue the activity.

As for teacher motivation, Sinclair (2008) defined it in terms of attraction, retention, and concentration as something that determines 'what attracts individuals to teach, how long they remain in their initial teacher education courses and subsequently the teaching profession, and the extent to which they engage with their courses and the teaching profession (2008, p. 37). Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011) highlighted the two dimensions of teacher motivation in accordance with their conceptions of motivation, namely, the motivation to teach and the motivation to remain in the profession. Their review of literature came to a conclusion of four featured components of teacher motivation: prominent intrinsic motivation which was closely related to the inherent interest of teaching; social contextual influences relating to the impact of external conditions and constraints; temporal dimension with emphasis on lifelong commitment; and demotivating factors emanating from negative influences.

The motivation that the teacher exercises with her students, in terms of material and moral quality, drives the students’ internal motivation towards endearing students to science and learning.