Motivating students

This unit has been one of my favorite units as I have always been interested in motivation. My degree in business had a concentration in human resource management and this was a topic that interested me in the business setting too - why do employees want to work. It is interesting to see how it is very similar in the educational setting when you consider motivation.

Environment can create initial motivation. As a teacher it is up to us to make our classroom a warm and friendly environment. I thought the comment in the article by Matthew Weller that a business like environment works well for students surprised me a little as I was thinking more of an educational setting, but I think students like to see order and this would fit in with the environment as well.

It is important to help our students set realistic goals which can help to motivate them to achieve those goals and in effect achieve learning as well. Matthew Weller had a quote that said "Success is more predictably motivating than is failure." He states that students will choose an activity of intermediate uncertainty versus one of high difficulty or too easy of an activity.

So in thinking about this I really need to consider how I assist the students in setting goals for the class. I have taken many classes where we need to set a goal for the class, and it never really meant much to me, and often the goals were never looked at past the first class session. I think it would be helpful for the students to continue to refer back to their initial goals, and revise them as needed. This needs to be done throughout the semester. This is an area I really want to spend some time working on and coming up with a good method for.

The other interesting thing I read was the article by Barbara Gross where she discussed de-emphasizing the grades and instead mastering the content of the class. I do try to focus on the main ideas,but so often grades get caught in the middle of it. I think it is helpful to go back over a test and put the question back into the content, or the chapter where it came from. This helps the student see where the question is coming from, as well as it helps me see how many questions are from a certain area of content.