Key Questions
- What motivates us to learn?
- How can teachers create motivating learning
environments?
Learning Objectives
- Influences on motivation
– Teachers will understand motivation as something
constructed by both teacher and students. Teachers will
learn how students' expectations for success and interests
in learning can influence motivation.
- Motivating learning environments
– Teachers will understand the characteristics of
learning environments that enhance students' motivation,
including building on students' interests and strengths,
offering choices, encouraging risk taking and improvement
over time, and minimizing competition and comparison.
Session Outline
- Motivation to learn is more than simply excitement
about a particular topic. Rather, being motivated to learn
refers to the degree to which students are dedicated to
and engaged in learning. A willingness to think through
problems and work through challenges to achieve mastery
of a concept or skill goes beyond simply having fun during
learning.
- Teachers can make learning more accessible
to students. These practices include at least the following:
- enhancing students' expectancies for success
by choosing tasks at an appropriate level of difficulty,
scaffolding student learning, and communicating high
and equitable expectations for all students
- enhancing students' interest and the value of the material being studied by
relating classroom work to students' experiences, offering
choices, and assigning varied and interesting tasks
that are active and authentic
- creating a supportive learning environment
that emphasizes learning and encourages risk-taking,
not just getting the right answers; stresses improvement
over time and provides opportunities for revision; and
minimizes competition and comparison
Expectations for success: Can I do
this?
- Students who have confidence in their abilities
to succeed on a task work harder, persist longer, and perform
better than their less efficacious peers.
- Contributions to students' expectations
for success:
- students' beliefs about intelligence
and their capacity to improve their intellectual abilities
- teachers enhancing students' expectations
for success
- students witnessing their own progress
- teachers communicating
that all students can succeed and then enabling them to succeed
Interest in learning:
Do I want to do this?
Students' interest in learning is influenced at least by the
following:
- Students are more likely to be interested
in a task that they find personally relevant or valuable.
- Students are more likely to find an assignment
interesting if they have a say or a choice in what they
get to work on.
- When teachers stress ideas instead of disconnected
facts or procedures, they create room for students to explore
and pursue their own curiosities.
- When introducing a new abstract concept,
or a complex concept, a teacher can help students understand
better by drawing on experiences and concepts that are already
familiar to them.
- Students are more interested in tasks that
are more realistic and challenging.
The Learning Environment: Is
Learning the Primary Focus? Characteristics
of a classroom environments that supports learning:
- Through their choice of tasks, approaches
to instruction, and verbal interactions with their students,
teachers communicate the goals of learning and how to be
successful in their classroom.
- The class focuses on activities designed
to help students understand concepts, improve their thinking
and analytical skills, and concentrate on a particular topic.
The goal is to learn and gradually improve.
- Goals are task-oriented, rather than ability-oriented.
- Teachers help students focus on mastering
concepts and skills by minimizing social comparisons in
the classroom.
- Teachers provide clear criteria on which
their work is being evaluation. Feedback is frequent and
mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn.
- Students have opportunities to learn at their
own pace and are able to recognize when they might need
extra help.
- Students feel that their teachers support
them and care about them as individuals.
Conclusion
Students may enter the classroom with certain beliefs about
themselves, but in a supportive classroom, teachers have opportunities
to help them gain self-confidence and enhance their motivation
to learn.
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Materials for Session 12 |
