Motivate Students to Learn

Strange as it may seem many school children and students are surprisingly keen about learning. Sadly however, too many learners need or expect their tutors to encourage, challenge, and arouse them. In today’s environment where students are faced with many distracters effective learning in the classroom definitely depends on the educator’s ability to preserve the keenness that brought learners to the course in the first place. Whatever level of motivation your students bring to the classroom, it will be altered either negatively or positively, by what happens in that classroom.

Disappointingly, there is not a recipe for motivating students. Many factors affect a given student’s motivation to try hard and to study. These include interest in the topic/subject, knowledge of its usefulness, a general wish to achieve something, and of course self-confidence and self-esteem, as well as staying power and resolve. Of course, not all students are motivated by the same principles, needs, wishes, or wants. Some students will be motivated by the endorsement of others, some by winning all the challenges they might face.

Researchers have discovered that to encourage students to become self-motivated self-sufficient learners, teachers can do the following:

• Give positive feedback that supports students’ ‘do well beliefs’.

• Make sure there are opportunities for students’ success by giving tasks that stretch them a little.

• Help students find personal meaning and worth in the material.

• Generate an atmosphere that is open and positive.

• Help students feel that they are a valued part of a learning community.

Research has also shown that good teaching practices can do more to offset student indifference than extraordinary efforts to attack motivation directly. Most students react positively to a well-organized lesson taught by an animated teacher who has an authentic interest in students and what they learn. Thus activities you carry out to encourage learning will also augment students’ motivation.

Students learn best when motivations for learning in a classroom gratify their own motives for signing up for the course. Some of the desires your students may bring to the classroom are the need to learn something in order to finish a particular task or activity, the need to seek new experiences, the need to hone skills, the need to overcome challenges, the need to become accomplished, the need to achieve something and do well, the need to feel involved and to network with other people. Satisfying such needs is rewarding to both the educator and the learner and rewards such as these maintain learning more effectively than do grades. Create projects, in-class tasks, and debate questions to address these kinds of needs.