Motivation

If a teacher wishes to conduct a successful class, he or she must take student motivation into account.  If a student is not motivated to participate in in-class discussions and activities, as well as outside projects, the work will not get done and the classroom environment will suffer for it.  Also, motivation is not only necessary to engage students and to have an enjoyable class time, but it can also play a key role in the efficient assessment of a student’s academic progress; if a student is consistently unmotivated, and either does not complete his or her school work or, if it is completed, does not try their best on an assignment, then an instructor cannot accurately evaluate what a student is and isn’t learning and if the student is showing any real progress.

         

The two theories of motivation that appeal to me are social cognitive theories and cognitive theories.  As Omrod (2011) points out, these two theoretical approaches to the study of motivation “have dominated theory and research in motivation” for the past two or three decades, and for good reason.  Many aspects of social cognitive and cognitive theories Omrod discusses in the text make a lot of sense to me, and explain why a student may or may not be motivated in the class. 

        

There are a few aspects of these theories that I believe could successfully motivate students in the classroom.  One, of course, is extrinsic motivation, the idea that students become motivated if they are promised a reward for carrying out a task or taking part in an in-class activity.  I believe self-handicapping, self-worth, and learned helplessness can also play a significant role in getting students motivated to do assigned work.  In my Education 100 class last fall, I did my service learning in a sophomore English class at Austin-East High School.  When a task was assigned to the class, I witnessed some students reducing their effort on the task as time progressed, procrastinating, and cheating off others, all forms of self-handicapping.  Other students seemed to have little self-worth and a sense of learned helplessness.  When I would try to help some students with a task, they would follow along with me for about half a minute, and then promptly set their pencil down, shrug their shoulders, and say, “I can’t do this.”

         

In my personal belief, the most important factor of motivation is interest.  I think that if a teacher really wants to get his or her students engaged in the material being covered, then that teacher should take the time to learn what each student finds interesting and, somehow, find a way to incorporate these various interests into the classroom. 

         

Here are examples of how I could incorporate my students’ interests into the class: At the beginning of the school year, I could handout a survey to each of my students.  In this survey, the student could describe his or her hobbies, what he or she likes to do after class to unwind, what he or she finds enjoyment in.  I could gather this information, study it, and try to somehow, at least once, adapt a lesson plan to each student’s interest.  For instance, if David writes that he enjoys rap music, I could teach a lesson on the elements of poetry, find an example of a (appropriate and edited) rap song that also incorporates these elements (such as rhythm and rhyme) and play the song for the class or project the lyrics on the board.  If Samantha says she enjoys horseback riding, I could teach a grammar lesson in which all of the incorrect sentences presented deal in some way with horseback riding.  As a general way to garner student interest in my classroom, I will try to assign readings to my students that they are more likely to find interesting and/or relatable.  For example, I think The Hunger Games could be a great book to teach to a high school English class, because many students are already familiar with and like the books and movies, and because I believe the book could still have some literary merits worth discussing (I know, though, that the state sometimes dictates what books teachers can and cannot teach, and that I may only be able to teach only one of these more “fun” texts).  In these ways, I can bring students’ interests into the classroom and get them motivated to do work.