ABSTRACT
Education systems support teachers to be or become effective when teachers are willing and able to do what is needed to be effective. Willingness relates to teachers' motivation. This chapter focuses on motivation by addressing the question: how can schools and education systems motivate teachers to be(come) effective? Currently, in many countries, educational accountability systems are experienced as being dominated by distrust of teachers and schools, suggesting a negative relationship between trust and accountability, sometimes even leading to worse outcomes. This, however, is not inevitable. This chapter argues that schools and education systems can motivate teachers to be(come) effective when accountability and trust reinforce each other, creating a work context that supports teachers' basic psychological needs. The different perspectives on the relationship between trust and accountability are first addressed and then self-determination theory (SDT) in introduced as the theoretical basis for understanding when the relationship is positive or negative. SDT is a motivation theory and can be applied to trust-based accountability regimes in the mesosystem (i.e. school) and the regulatory dimension of the exosystem. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how this contributes to the quest that is central to this book.
