Getting Students Motivated

One of the things I think will be a big challenge in my teaching is getting students motivated to learn and complete tasks and assignments of their own free will (not feeling "forced"). Being able to motivate students is something I would like to master, since I'm under the impression that students will learn better and retain information longer when they are motivated and excited to learn. Students have so many different interests so they wont always be interested in presented topics, while being very interested in others. The goal is to get students motivated to learn about and complete tasks even in subjects they don't love. One of the motivation types discussed in the seminar was situational motivation, which means motivation is activity/moment based, is in response to something "flashy" happening or coming from the teachers teaching style. 

To me this means that, to achieve my goal of being able to motivate students, I should be designing engaging and exciting activities, have appealing visuals and an engaging teaching style. I definitely think I have personally felt these work on me as a student too; if the teacher is lecturing at a slow pace with monotone voice and wordy simple slides, I end up dissociating and not feeling motivated to listen and learn, telling myself I'll just teach myself later. But If a teacher is very engaging and using more class discussion and thinking questions, telling us cool or interesting facts, showing videos and have good visual presentations, I'm much more motivated to listen and take notes and even show up to class in general. As a student with ADHD, I also find that motivation to do a task is imperative for me to get any work done. If I am disinterested in the task, I will not do it until the very last moment when the stress and panic of deadlines approaches and finally "motivates" me (not a great kind of motivation though). And then doing the task feels way more difficult than it actually is, almost torturous, and then I resent the teacher and subject for not being interesting. If I can feel this way as a student, then my students can surely feel this way too. As an aspiring science teacher who loves science and thinks its so fascinating and cool, I want to bring students who don't like science and think its hard and boring, up to my level, or at least somewhere close. Based on information given in the seminar, some ideas I have to achieve this include sharing cool facts, showing exciting videos, connecting content to student personal life, and having students be engaged with the lesson. Also doing as many labs and hands on work as possible, since that was always the most fun for me. 

When giving tasks and assignments, leaving space for students to add their own personal opinions and experiences may make them more motivated, since students aren't just repeating facts or information but are sharing their own thoughts and ideas (also less likely to use AI). Also allowing them to choose how they want to present the assignment, like through classic writing, visual posters, videos, songs/poems, drawings… allows them to mix something they are already motivated to do with the content I presented, which will also hopefully increase their motivation, participation and positive experience. Another term that was talked about many times in class was "flow", which is a state students can enter when the given task closely matches their abilities. Not meaning that the task is easy, it's challenging but accomplishable with effort. The idea here is that students will be able to become so engrossed in their task that they wont be thinking of the outcome, they are actually enjoying the process. I feel like this state is a good display of successfully motivating students, and I really hope to get my students to this state.

                                                                  RebeccaD@OTU