One of my biggest worries about teaching is that I will not be able to get my students motivated to learn. While I have ideas that I think will help student motivation, they are only ideas, and what works with one student may not work with another.
In my pre-student teaching placement, I have already observed how this problem can affect a classroom. My CT does an awesome job of bringing in fun activities and making the material relevant, but even this is not enough to get every single student involved. From what I've observed, some students simply do not want to work, no matter how you present the material.
I think that a lot of students feel that blowing off schoolwork is cool. In my class, I've noticed that the few students who repeatedly choose not to turn anything in spend the majority of their time talking to those around them. When they are asked to work, they refuse, or make some excuse for why they have not started, and then look at their fellow students and smile. What's most frustrating about this is that their classmates then laugh, encouraging the behavior.
I'm a firm believer that all kids are good kids, and that all of my students can produce excellent work. It is simply a matter of finding ways to reach out and connect the material to the student. As I have had to work one on one with some reluctant students in the hallway already, I want to figure out how I can make this happen in my pre-student teaching classroom.
In order to attempt to improve student motivation in my classroom, I began looking for ideas on educational websites. During my search I came across an article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi titled "Motivating People to Learn" (http://www.edutopia.org/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-motivating-people-learn). He expresses some great ideas for getting students motivated, and focuses on "the flow experience." According to Csikszentmihalyi, "The flow experience is when a person is completely involved in what he or she is doing, when the concentration is very high." The article explains that kids generally experience the most "flow" in their extracurriculars, the activities they were able to pick based on their interests.
However, academic classes can increase motivation by working on projects in groups or even working on individual projects. This allows students to use their creativity, which makes them want to participate. Lectures and worksheets tend to cause students to shut down, as they are not fully involved in the process.
I thought this article had a lot of good information and ideas. I'm definitely for project based instruction, and I always like to see what kids can create. I plan to keep working on ideas to help increase students' motivation to work, and hopefully these ideas will pay off in the classroom!
If any of you have ideas or experiences with this that you wouldn't mind sharing, please let me know!
