What is Motivation?
It is some kind of internal derive which pushes someone towards something to achieve a goal. In other words, it is the will and wants to do something. The main idea of motivation is to capture the child‘s attention and curiosity and to channel their energy towards learning.
Motivation is simply the key to learning. Lack of motivation is perhaps the biggest obstacle faced by teachers, counsellors, school administrators and parents.
So, it is very important to consider motivating our students all the time. If you want to know how to do that continue reading and find my 10 tips to motivate your students.
Types of Motivation:
- Extrinsic motivation: is caused by any number of outside factors, for example, the need to pass an exam, the hope of financial reward, etc.
- Intrinsic motivation: comes from within the individual. The person might be motivated by the enjoyment of the learning process itself or by the desire to make himself feel better.
Sources of Motivation:
- The Society.
- The teacher.
- Methods.
- Significant others.
10 Tips to Motivate Your Students
1. Motivate yourself first:
Make personal development every day, think of the difference you make in others, and set goals for yourself.
2. Develop a good rapport with your students:
Your success as an educator is more dependent on positive, caring, trustworthy, relationships with students than any other skill, idea, tip, or tool.
The teacher-student relationship must be taken into consideration. A relaxed friendly atmosphere can encourage a lot of learning to take place. A smile is contagious.
3. Change the learning environment:
Researchers suggest that your learning environment should be changed every 2-4 weeks to keep the brain curious and learners engaged.
4. Present and communicate :
You are never the main event but your students’ minds are.
The stand-and-deliver method is dead, you are no longer the centre of the show, instead, you should work backstage to coordinate a well-organized performance that paves the way to a lifelong lasting show.
5. Plan your work and work your plan:
Are you planning a lesson or planning learning? The old way is to plan what to teach and teach it, but the new thinking is to know what students should learn and how they learn it.
6. Use positive wordings:
A common pattern of ineffective teachers is the use of negation telling learners what not to do. The best teachers put most of what they say in a positive form.
7. Handle wrong answers:
Use some possibilities such as:
- Hotter-colder game.
- Non-verbal clues.
- “Your answer is a good effort.”
8. Be in your students’ shoes:
The teacher must be fully aware of her students’ involvement, attitudes, and learning aptitude. The teacher must have an idea of his students‘ aspirations, feelings and creative abilities to cater for them in the activities tackled.
9. Apply Cooperative learning:
The group process may be the best means of promoting low-stress learning.
Supporting working in a team to encourage students to cooperate with the aim of creating a product or organizing an event and applying cooperative learning so that students can learn and develop collaborative skills. This will increase motivation for sure.
10. Use energizers:
Here are 20 energizer activities you can use in the classroom to increase students’ motivation and practice target language as well:
- Ask students to name as many objects in the classroom as they can.
- Ask students to write one question they would feel comfortable answering, without writing their names, on index cards and put them in a bag, have students draw cards, and ask another student the question on the card.
- Ask your students if there are any songs running through their heads today. Encourage them to sing or hum a little bit, and ask others to identify it.
- At the end of the class, erase the board and challenge students to recall everything you wrote on the board.
- Bring a cellular phone to class, and pretend to receive calls. Students can only listen to one side of the conversation, they must guess who is calling and why.
- Bring a fork, knife, spoon, bowl, and plate and pretend to eat different kinds of food and allow students to guess what kind of food you are eating.
- Ask students to choose a famous character then ask some students to interview it.
- Bring in some snacks which you think students haven‘t tried before, and invite students to taste them and give their opinion.
- Copy a dialogue from a comic book, white out parts of the dialogue or the whole dialogue, make copies for the students then have them supply utterances for the characters.
- Copy interesting pictures of people and let each student choose one and write what this person might be doing, saying, or even thinking of.
- Describe something in the classroom and have students identify it.
- Play a listening activity with the lights turned off.
- Ask each student to bring an item that is not needed at home. Advertise this item and try to convince students to buy it.
- Supply each student with a copy of the entertainment section in the newspaper and ask them to decide where they would like to go this weekend.
- Ask students to tell you about something you know nothing about.
- Practice storytelling that students help in building sentence by sentence orally.
- Use headless sentences that learners fill in groups or pairs, e.g. ………….. are good friends of man.
- Ask students to role-play how a machine works, e.g. a computer, typewriter, etc.
- Use commercial breaks.
- Use brainstorming around a word.
Thanks For Reading
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