This Is Me #4

Teaching Methodology: Motivation

For students or anyone looking to learn something new, motivation is always at the forefront of why we subject ourselves to homework, exams, projects, and generally everything we dislike experiencing in life. Motivation can differ greatly from person to person. Some people seek education to please their parents or please their job/boss/company's requirements. Others learn new things because they have an interest in those subjects. Whatever the motivation is and for whatever reason there is motivation, learning is much more efficient and effective when motivation simply exists. Therefore, it is in teachers' best interests to learn to motivate students if their goal is to pass on complete knowledge and understanding; and, indeed, there are many ways in which teachers can motivate students.

Encouragement: This word can mean many different things and they are all applicable to helping a teacher also be a motivation. Anything from helping students who ask for help or merely giving positive reinforcement for tasks completed correctly could be seen as encouragement. The point of encouragement is to build students' confidence in the subject they are learning. Without encouragement, students are more likely to simply give up because they don't know how to solve a problem. However, with encouragement, students are allowed to take baby steps, making the larger problem less daunting. Additionally, they are given an external push to complete the problem along the lines of what a coach does for an athlete.

Challenge: Students often think a subject they are learning is boring for a plethora of reasons. Perhaps it is uninteresting to them or perhaps they think it is too hard for them to grasp. Another way of looking at this is through a "challenge level". If a subject is uninteresting and boring, it is likely that the subject is not challenging enough. If it is too hard and students give up before they even try, the material is likely too challenging. Balancing the challenge level at a proper point will motivate students to overcome this challenge and feel fulfilled when the challenge has been bested. This idea can easily be illustrated through completing a puzzle made of X pieces. If the puzzle where 2 pieces large, it would hardly be a challenge and hardly worth one's effort. If it was made of 1,000,000,000 pieces, the puzzle would also not be worth one's effort, but this time because the amount of effort required would be too large. However, many people love puzzles of 100 or 1000 pieces because that is a reasonable challenge level. It is not daunting enough to warrant immediate resignation and daunting enough to feel a sense of completion when it has been finished. Completing challenges will, much like encouragement, give students confidence as well.

Confidence: This is the idea that "I'm good at this". Confidence creates huge motivation because larger and larger challenges can be completed and a larger and larger sense of fulfillment can be obtained from completing these challenges. Many people take jobs in certain areas or study certain subjects in school because "they are good at it". If a student had no confidence in their ability, no matter how simple the challenge, he/she would likely not even attempt to complete it. Encouragement and challenge are tools to create confidence in the student, which in turn, creates motivation.