Teaching Methods

How can productive motivational patterns be fostered?

Classroom Focus:

Creating an environment that allows questions to be asked, students to be vulnerable and comfortable to learn from each other.
How students view learning in the activities they do, while thinking of learning as a process in itself.
Identify and describe how to shift towards a mastery goal orientation in your instruction.
Teachers need to be flexible with a wide range of instructional strategies to foster students’ interests.
Create an environment that allows students to view themselves in qualitative ways, such as by engaging in learning and responding to learning activities and situations, rather than by focusing on academic success.
Creating a classroom that allows students to measure their success, while the teachers reinforce such concepts, rather than being reliant on success from achievement.

Ames, Carole. "Classrooms: Goals, Structures, and Student Motivation." Journal of Educational Psychology 84, no. 3 (1992): 261-271.

Schoolwide Focus:

Best way to identify potential motivational issues surrounding schools is to TARGET the causes...

Task, Authority, Recognition, Grouping, Evaluation, Time

Task:

“What are students asked to do in school?”
This framework allows use as educators to question if we are challenging our students with activities that will promote growth and interest. 412.

Authority:

How schoolwide rules and guidelines create limitations on students that remove agency and limit their responsibility. Developing ways to give students responsibilities will help reinforce their development of self-regulation and independent judgment.

Recognition:

1. What is recognized?

2. Who is being recognized?

Examples: Students are recognized for academic achievement centered on ability, such as the Honor Roll.
The ability to achieve high grades was being recognized, even for students who may have struggled in a specific subject or who identify as students with disabilities.
While it was the students with such abilities who were being recognized, reinforcing a hierarchy.

Grouping:

How students are grouped among their classes and peers.
When laptops were introduced in various schools, students who received them were at the top of the class, while everyone else was left out. This aspect shows how grouping students by ability fostered negative reinforcement in the school, while integrating technology will benefit all, rather than the select few.

Evaluation:

The relationship between school policy and how teachers evaluate students inherently affects how students learn and their motivation. Dictated around various philosophies about education that are still being debated.

Time:

How a rigid schedule dictates the flexible instruction. In the secondary school system, this is ever-present because the time is centered on instruction, which promotes lectures, reading, and assignments while leaving out project-based assignments that may motivate a variety of students.

Maehr, Martin L. and Carol Midgley. "Enhancing Student Motivation: A Schoolwide Approach." Educational Psychologist 26, no. 3-4 (1991): 399-427.

Educator Focus:

Identify what motivates students, tailor lessons around various instructional methods that.
The chart below serves as a way to question the environmental conditions placed on students, and your instruction can impact how students can become motivated through tailoring your lessons.

Sources:

Ames, Carole. "Classrooms: Goals, Structures, and Student Motivation." Journal of Educational Psychology 84, no. 3 (1992): 261-271. https://learningandexperienceblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ames92.pdf.
“Goal Orientation Activities” Accessed February https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BS76ZuQTqt6au1UHzsm7nj0KSVGTatt4/view.
Maehr, Martin L. and Carol Midgley. "Enhancing Student Motivation: A Schoolwide Approach." Educational Psychologist 26, no. 3-4 (1991): 399-427. https://learningandexperienceblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/maehr_midgley91.pdf.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse