Eric is an educator and author based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro. He has written a book on education practice and reform, and his blog can be found here.

Throughout George W. Bush’s presidency, I read pretty well everything I could get my hands on in an attempt to understand why the American electorate was buying into his rhetoric. The element of the Bush administration I became most fascinated with was its message/communications machine. It seemed to play such a crucial role in all the political matters I was frustrated with, after all; and it was so damned successful somehow that I was hungry to know more about how it was doing what it was doing. Unlike typical ‘spin doctors’, Bush’s message guys weren’t out to fix anything broken. Rather, they sought to alter humans’ behaviors—even get said humans to act against what they considered to be their values. As much as this disgusted me on one hand (I was on the side that was getting creamed, after all), learning about it at least brought many of my political frustrations into sharper focus. And, I had to admit...whatever these guys were doing presented some great potential for my job at the time: teaching high school English.

High challenge, high motivation: Is it even possible?

My personal experiences had informed me well about academic and non-academic expectations in the post-secondary world. And though I won’t pretend I was yet regularly engaging with education research back then, I did know a thing or two about what longitudinal research had said about academic intensity and successful post-secondary study (1) and what scholars like E.D. Hirsch had reported about background knowledge’s relationship to effective reading comprehension and institutional participation (2). If I was truly committed to my students’ success beyond my class, I told myself, it was essential that I stay firm on these levels of challenge.

Still, though, I needed some help with activating students’ motivation to perform the tasks I was designing. I decided right then that I had to read more about the Bush noise machine’s language know-how and strategies, and I had to figure out how my own classroom could feature it. Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t into controlling my students’ minds. But I had to be real with myself on the motivation question. However good I may have been getting at creating ‘desirable difficulties’, and however confident I was in my justifications for creating them, no quantities or qualities of my rational arguments were bound to go very far on their own.

Could political strategists provide me with the help I needed? The words they choose and combine are structured deliberately to find voters’ emotions, not reason. See, for instance, Frank Luntz, one of the aforementioned message masterminds, in a 2004 interview with PBS’s ‘Frontline’:

“It's all emotion. […] We know that words and emotion together are the most powerful force known to mankind.” (3)