Motivating Students
Motivating students to learn can be challenging unless you have the right tools!
Keep reading to pick up a new strategy to help with motivating students to learn.
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When is Student Motivation Lower?
Student motivation is lower right before the holidays, right before spring break, and at the end of the school year. Basically whenever students need a break, you will see a decrease in student motivation.
But you still need to teach the curriculum and your students still need to learn!
So what if I told you, I had a strategy to keep your students engaged and motivated to learn during those challenging times of year?
Hint, hint… Use these:
Focus on Learning Behaviors for Motivating Students
With your students, spend a morning meeting time or a few minutes at the beginning of class to brainstorm learning behaviors that are interfering with their learning.
When you involve students in this process, it gives them a chance to own it and increases how successful this strategy will be. It gives them a chance to take responsibility for their own learning – a great skill to have as they get older!
Make a list of specific learning behaviors that need to be fixed. You might have to narrow down the list later, but it’s ok to right everything down at this point.
Learning Behaviors Strategy for Motivation
When I brainstormed with my students, we came up with this list of learning behaviors they wanted to fix:
- participate
- practice
- persevere
- pay attention
- positive attitude
All of those learning behaviors start with the letter P!
It made it easy to create a poster showing these learning behaviors and a memorable way to practice these learning behaviors.
By using something memorable for students, it increased student motivation because they knew what to do and were eager to show me their learning behaviors!
After I created the poster, I shared it with the students and reminded them of all the behaviors they wanted to fix.
We discussed how that was a lot to focus on at one time, so we ranked the behaviors based on what we wanted to fix first.
Once we had the ONE learning behavior, which ours was to participate, we brainstormed what that would look like and sound like in our classroom.
When I caught the students participating and doing the things listed on our chart, I handed them a ticket and they wrote their name on the back and put it in my container.
At the end of the week, I picked a ticket out of the container and that student earned a homework pass.
I tried having students turn in one part of the ticket and hold on to the other part so I could call numbers to find the winners. But my students couldn’t keep track of their tickets and it ended up being easier to just have them write their name on a ticket and turn it in. I ended up getting double the amount of tickets by doing it this way!
Students could earn as many tickets as possible throughout the week just by showing that they were participating in the lessons. If we had a particularly good week and there were a lot of tickets in the container, I picked more than one name at the end of the week.
This motivated the students to show the learning behavior because they wanted to be caught participating.
Once the learning behavior was “fixed”, we picked a new one to focus on.
After we practiced all of the behaviors, they could be caught doing any of the 5 Ps on our list to earn tickets.
This system eliminated the need for me to say things like, “make sure you are participating!” It was definitely helpful when the students saw others earning tickets. When I handed out the tickets, I made sure to verbalize why the student was getting the ticket. Most of the time, this corrected the behavior in other students without me having to point it out. Magic, right?
Motivate Your Students to Learn
Follow these steps to use this strategy in your classroom:
- Brainstorm 1-5 learning behaviors your students are struggling with.
- Have a class discussion and see if your students come up with any other behaviors they want to fix. You might have to guide them to mention the problems you came up with.
- See if you can reword all the learning behaviors to start with the same letter.
- Create a poster showing your learning behaviors.
- Find or purchase a container to hold tickets.
- Purchase tickets to use in the classroom.
- Decide on the reward for showing the learning behaviors – homework pass, prize box, positive note or phone call home, etc.
- Have a class discussion to decide which learning behavior to focus on.
Notes:
- If you don’t want to use tickets, you can use small slips of paper.
- Your reward does not have to be something you purchase – a positive note or phone call home is motivating.
If you try this strategy with your class, I’d love to hear what learning behaviors you are focusing on. Please reply and let me know what letter you are using!
