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While continuing to give ample treatment to motivational strategies that focus on individual learners, many also point out that teachers need to help the classroom community negotiate worthwhile goals, acknowledging that the students themselves help create and change these very goals.

the widely held distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was too crude to be of much use in developing intentional learning environments. Both of these seminal considerations of situated learning suggested that the motivational strategies from earlier individually oriented theories of motivation might actually interfere with efforts to motivate engagement in situated learning. Given that situative theorists consider all learning to be socially situated, situative perspectives on learning seemed to have profound implications for motivating classroom learning.

Hickey and McCaslin (2001) also described the basic tension between earlier behavioral and cognitive views of motivation. As illustrated by the seemingly intractable debate over extrinsic incentives (e.g., prizes, competition, and grades), they argued that these tensions were a major obstacle to educational reform. Reflecting their very different views of learning, cognitive theorists have long argued that incentives interfere with natural learning processes, while behavioral theorists have long argued that incentive are useful for encouraging learning. Hickey and McCaslin argued that a relatively neutral situative view of motivation might offer a more useful lens for studying and comparing behavioral and cognitive strategies for motivating engagement. From a situative perspective, incentives and competition are not inherently good or bad. Rather, all motivational practices should first be analyzed in terms of their impact on students' success at negotiating meaningfulness of the language and concepts of the particular academic domain. Importantly, a situative theory of motivation assumes that the success of these negotiations is the primary source of individual motivation towards the domain. Therefore it is the collective success of these negotiations that predicts whether or not those individuals will be motivated to engage in the practices of the domain in the future.