Designing Motivation

I think that any person who goes to school for long enough has to have some kind of motivation that is important to their learning, because at some point, these students will be forced to take some type of class that is part of their general education requirement, but it's not something they're interested in. If the motivation for most classes is that it has something to do with a student's future career, they are very interested in learning the material. Motivation in that instance kind of comes with the territory. However, when it comes to those non-major classes, a student has to switch their tactics for motivation, because they won't be able to buy the fact that they'll use it in their future. The greatest lesson I ever learned in undergrad was that I needed to find some new way to motivate myself for general ed classes. Thankfully, I had some good teachers who knew their classes were general ed, so they tried activities that would make the subject as interesting as possible, or they worked to create activities that were relevant in most people's lives, or they used as much multimedia as they could to to keep our attention. If I didn't have one of the good gen ed teachers, then I had to work on motivating myself. Usually, I could force myself to do about an hour of uninteresting work a day, so if I could make myself space the work out, I could maintain an effective level of motivation. I also tried making a game out of it, like I would see how fast I could finish a certain page number for reading. So, obviously, motivation comes into play along a long enough educational time line.

When it comes to what I tap into to motivate students, there is a lot that depends on my attitude and how I begin a lesson. I can't be too excited, as that always makes students suspicious. However, if I look uninterested, that will never turn out well. Even if I'm having a particularly bad day, I really have to turn on the Oscar performance. If I'm somewhere in the middle, but closer to excited, I can empathize with students by telling them that I understand that they may not be interested, or that they may think the material is too difficult. I can then give them some examples from my own life about how I motivated myself even though the work seemed uninteresting or difficult. I also try to be one of those good teachers that I had by trying to create activities as close to their real lives as possible, or to use a variety of media to teach information and assess their learning. This also helps with managing students as well. I won't have nearly as many discipline problems if I can just get the students to find some motivation somewhere. When I taught Shakespeare in Western Kansas, I especially ran into student motivation problems, whether it was related to disinterest or fear of difficulty. So, I tried to cheer them up with anecdotes about my own first fears of Shakespeare, and how easy they're going to have it compared to the teacher that I had for English classes. I also go over activities with them to practice how to get meaning out of text even when you don't know all of the words used. We also did activities during the reading where they had to adapt a scene or two into a more modern film version. And, of course, even though it broke the flow of the story, I would continuously stop the reading at regular intervals in order to check for understanding and to cheer them on.

I don't think it matters that a student's motivation is different from a teacher's, as long as they are going in the same direction. I'm sure a teacher is worried about how a given student will do on their assessments, and whether their competency is adequate enough, or whether their lesson is effectively reaching the greatest number of students. Students are wondering how lessons will help them get into the school they want, or how the lesson could possibly help them in their future careers. They are vaguely focused in the same direction, but they're coming at goals from different angles. It's only when the student isn't motivated enough toward the goal that causes problems. There are other factors that can cause a gap in learning between student and teacher, but I don't think it's the difference in motivation that's behind it, only the lack of motivation on the part of either the student or the teacher.