Teachers should always try to inspire their students to learn. Sadly, not all students are willing to put in the effort it takes to do so and so teachers have a job to motivate their students. Students need to want to learn, because this will facilitate their learning and make it easier for them to get something out of the lesson. Teacher's have a responsibility to encourage students in a way that promotes understanding and involvement in the subject. Student's effort is directly linked to their motivation. If students are bored by the lesson and feel unmotivated, then this will be reflected in the amount of effort they put into an assigned task. As a teacher I will be teaching High School English. This is a tough class to teach because some students think that they already know English and that they do not need to learn anymore about it. Coming into the classroom with this outlook directly affects how much effort they will put in to my class. It is my job to make English a subject that they need to and should know; to show them that there are many things they still do not know and then motivate them to find out what those things are. Students in high school encounter many different types of text. They will be exposed to narratives, texts that are information based, as well as texts that are expository. While this does allow for a variety of ways to introduce the subject, it also presents the teacher with the problem of how to present them, and which forms of these texts will be most effective together as a whole. By using different types of texts, students do not get bored as easily with the subject as they are seeing it in various ways.
[...] Intrinsic motivation can be promoted by allowing students to have some autonomy in the classroom, by letting them feel that they are in charge of what they are learning, or that they at least have a choice. This can be used in a simple writing assignment. After giving students the goals and a rubric that they can follow (extrinsic), allow students a variety of topics that they can write on or give them a choice. For example, if you are reading a book in class, ask them to take a character in the book and write a character analysis. [...]
[...] By laying out clear and concise goals at the beginning, students know what is going on in the classroom. They are not left in the dark about what they are learning. This way they can actively participate because they have the goals to refer to in order to help them understand what they should be learning. Ongoing assessment directly relates as well because students will need the assessment to see how well they are achieving their goals. They will be motivated to do better if they see that they are struggling and they are encouraged to do so. [...]
[...] The classroom environment also has a big part to play in how motivated students will be to learn. If students feel threatened or that they will be ridiculed for their ideas, then they will not respond in class and will not be motivated to try. Teachers should try to encourage an open atmosphere in their classrooms. They should remind their students that every opinion matters and they should have respect for their fellow students and their ideas. By creating this open atmosphere, students will feel more comfortable sharing their ideas and by doing so they will become motivated to do better and speak their minds. [...]
[...] In the first article by Beverly Lucey, entitled to teach vocabulary and terms, w/o losing your voice (and boring your students)”, Lucey explains a way to engage students in learning vocabulary besides using a dictionary. She starts out by giving an example of how the dictionary can be confusing to a student. Most students find it boring to read through a dictionary and sometimes there are multiple meanings which can confuse the student even further. She goes on to explain that she tried to use diagrams and examples and gave them the words on a piece of paper with space to write on. [...]
[...] Extrinsic motivation can be fostered in the classroom by giving the students activities or clear goals for them to achieve. If you have an activity in which you are trying to teach your students the eight parts of speech, you should lay out the goals at the beginning before you start the lesson. These could be, to learn the eight parts of speech and to understand how they make up a sentence, and the student will be able to separate different parts of speech in any given sentence. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
