Motivating Students
Effective Teaching Strategies
Internal & External Motivation
External or Extrinsic Motivation: These include praise, good grades, material goods, and extra privileges.
Internal or Intrinsic Motivation: is fueled by an individual's curiosity, and sense of accomplishment. Also expressed as "the love of learning for learning's sake."
What Can an Educator Do to Raise Student's Motivation?
- Be cautious the amount of praise you provide students. "Some ways of praising hide negative messages." Use encouragement over praising students because it can help children develop self-pride and internal motivation.
- Treat students equally by providing clear expectations to all students. Avoid lowering expectations due to labels given to students, other teacher's comments, and previous grades or test scores.
- Differentiate Instruction within the classroom. This is an "approach that facilitates learning and motivates children to become lifelong learners, regardless of learning style, ability level, or interests."
- Allow students to participate in group work. Students can use their talents within a group to complete a project effectively. Students will feel important and feel they can contribute to the task. This allows for a positive and safe classroom environment.
- While teaching keep the learning styles in mind. Gardner classified learning styles into 8 multiple intelligences: Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalistic.
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Give Students Choices
- When students have control of their education they are happier and produce more.
- As an educator it is your job to "teach students to make responsible choices and take control of their own learning."
- Provide studies a variety of themes throughout their experiences. Theme studies act as a natural motivator and builds on student interest and choices. Theme studies "can lead to a passion for lifelong learning."
- Combine multiple subjects into multipurpose lessons- integrate! Integrating social studies, science, art and music with core subjects such as reading, writing and math provides students with choices.
Promote Thinking, Asking, Creating and Imagining
- Our thinking skills affect how well we can receive and process new information. Thus educators should teach effective thinking skills.
- Ask questions that require more than factual recall. Questions can "assess what students know, set the stage for a new lesson, and stimulate higher-order thinking.
- Encourage creativity by practicing divergent thinking, solving open-ended problems, and posing what if questions.
- Imagination allows students to create and thus better the world around us. Create positive, open-minded classroom environments to ensure imagination is not stifled.
Touchy Subjects- Technology and Homework
- Use technologies of various forms to motivate and engage students. The internet can be a valuable resource for students across every subject.
- Homework is an opportunity for students to practice newly learned skills. Homework is not for only students having trouble, for a punishment, or a way for students to teach themselves. Show students that homework is important and ask guardians to establish the same idea within the home.