Let’s face it: the learning materials itself can teach students something but they cannot motivate them. Without motivation, the learning process sometimes turns into a dull and unpleasant thing with students simply waiting for the lesson to end.
Many teachers dread this happening – however, it’s the teachers who are able to prevent or even change that, awaking students’ interest in studying. Sure, this is easier said than done but once you know what to do it would be much easier for you to focus on those things, encouraging and motivating your students.
So here’s what you can do to enhance your students’ experience.
1. Make the environment threat-free.
While it’s important to ensure that the rules are followed, it is also important to make students feel comfortable during your classes. You can achieve that by delivering the rules to the students clearly, voicing the punishments they are going to face, and making sure that you are fair in delivering this punishment to all students.
However, it’s also important to not focus on punishments much. Sure, you need to establish the rules and give students all the information regarding them – but after that try not to focus on this until necessary. Instead, focus on being supportive and friendly, voicing your encouragement and helping students believe in themselves.
2. Praise and acknowledge.
This is also very important for creating a friendly environment and increasing students’ motivation. It might be surprising but praise can do wonders to students. They will realize that they efforts were noticed and acknowledged. They will also realize that they are skilled and talented.
This might seem like an obvious thing but actually, not all students are praised enough at home. Getting acknowledged for their success could not only motivate them more but also raise their self-esteem greatly.
3. Get to know your students.
If you want students to trust you and hear the messages you’re trying to deliver, you need to get to know them. Students always feel if a teacher is actually interested in them and cares about their academic and personal success. By doing so you’ll be able to gain their trust and affect their lives in a positive way.
4. Give proper feedback.
Sometimes the students don’t perform well not because they aren’t smart enough. Everyone has to know their flaws in order to eliminate them and that’s impossible when they don’t receive enough feedback. Moreover, this could cause them to feel frustrated with themselves, therefore losing their motivation.
Remember that by giving students proper feedback you’ll show them when they went wrong and helping them to improve it in the future. Just make sure that the feedback is given properly: don’t focus on flaws only or the students can become frustrated.
5. Offer different experience.
Unfortunately, our educational system doesn’t allow students much flexibility during the learning process. This often makes it hard for them to express themselves. For example, if a person is extremely shy and present their thoughts on paper much better than during oral communication, their skills might not get noticed if all the assignments require them to speak, not write. Moreover, this simply makes the learning process dull and boring to many students.
In order to avoid that, try offering your students different learning experience. Mix writing assignments with group work, try to implement technology in your lessons, and so on. This will help students pay attention and stay interested. And also arrange special School formal Party for year 10, 11 & 12 students at popular school formal venues in Sydney
6. Encourage positive competition.
Some teachers see any competition as a bad thing but it isn’t always like that. When a competition is positive and friendly, it could motivate students to work harder in order to succeed. Try creating this kind of competition in your class: for example, by coming up with the group games or group assignments.
7. Make it fun.
Sure, turning all lessons into jokes and games won’t help the students treat the whole learning process seriously. However, some fun definitely won’t harm them.
When you add a bit of fun to your lessons, you make them more interesting to attend and make students anticipate them. When they have something pleasant to attend at school, they start looking at the learning process in a more positive way.
In order to achieve this, you can add some games to the learning process or try reorganizing some lessons, making them more modern. You can also try referring to pop culture in your classes: this way the students will remember the lessons better as well as enjoy them more.
8. Be excited.
Of course, no matter which tools you use to boost the students’ motivation, they won’t work unless you are motivated yourself. You have to become their example, to share your enthusiasm with them. When they see that you really enjoy teaching and are excited about the whole process, they’ll become more interested in learning too.
Sure, encouraging students to learn harder and to engage into classes more is just as complicated as finding a really good and cheap essay writing service. And sure, you’ll probably have some bad days when it would be hard to feel enthusiastic about the whole process. However, it doesn’t matter.
Even if you won’t be able to motivate your students all the time, this will still work well as long as you try to implement most of these strategies (or all of them) into the learning process. Sooner or later you’ll notice that they do work in a long run, even if you aren’t able to implement them every day.
Maybe you too have some tips on how to increase students’ motivation? In this case please share them with us in the comment section below.
