Mindfulness as an intervention in English teachers’ quality motivation for lesson preparation

Abstract

In this experimental study, an 8-minute mindfulness guided meditation which aimed to increase teachers’ emotional well-being and help them connect to their genuine selves before they prepare their lesson plans was developed and implemented into an online platform for 50 English teachers living in Ankara, Turkey. While 25 of them were assigned to the to listen to the mindfulness guided meditation recording as the experiment group, the control group listened to a Ted Talks speech about the “growth mindset”, before and after which the participants’ controlled and autonomous motivations were measured through Comprehensive Relative Autonomy Index (C-RAI). The findings in the study revealed that the teachers’ autonomous motivation levels were not affected by an 8-minute mindfulness guided meditation, although a decrease in both autonomous and controlled motivations was observed after the intervention for all the teachers in the control and the experiment groups. Also, the teachers’ introjected, identified, and intrinsic motivations were found to be correlated with their gender, age, and workload.