Qualitative research that looks to describe and to interpret the subjective theories of a group of teachers from a public technical high school about school motivation (its role as a motivational agent and the motivation inherent in the pupils), and their expectances about the school success and school failure. The information gathered by means of direct observation of meetings of teachers and of interviews in depth was analyzed by means of the program Atlas-Ti, following orientations from the Grounded Theory. The results show that the over attribution that the teachers do about their responsibility as motivational agents, ignores other variables of the teaching-learning process. It depends so much on the pupils as on the educational context, and that their success-failure expectancies are related directly to the targets of the establishment.
subjective theories; motivation; teacher expectancies
