Often, teachers make the mistake of
assuming that our only task is to transmit knowledge, and we believe it has
been successful when students are able to transmit them, usually by
examination. But our responsibility goes much further, because the process of
teacher-student interaction involves many personal factors that should also be taken
into consideration. Because... what happens when a student with normal
cognitive abilities is not able to engage to classes? Should we consider him as
a failure of the educational system from such an early age? To what extent can
we require a student to find by himself an intrinsic motivation in the school?
Is not also our job to do everything possible to try to motivate each of our
students? I strongly think so, and if it fails, it won’t be the fault of the
students, but ours.
During these four years of training, I
have realized that in our profession the sentence "I have tried
everything" often justify our bad or inadequate interventions. Nothing
like this phrase devalues more our work, because there are thousands of
strategies and methods to motivate students. Every child is different and comes
to school with certain specific circumstances, so each one needs an
individualized motivation. After all, curiosity and desire to learn is innate
in humans and especially in children, so we must work towards converting the classrooms
in spaces where the interest is aroused, not killed.
One of the reasons why I decided to study
Teaching was because I consider it a very creative profession, in which each of
our students is a different challenge for us, and I am particularly attracted
by this idea. There is an innate desire in me to make students learn, not only
mathematics or language, but anything else that allows them to have equal
opportunities to be an active part of society in the future, regardless of
their social conditions, and to avoid them to see the school as a boring place
where every day is the same, and where they are tried and punished for not being
interested in something that they just don’t find interesting... That, I think,
is vocation. And whoever that don’t share these same objectives, should not
even consider being a teacher.
All in all, one of our main objectives as
teachers is to mitigate the extrinsic motivation based on rewards and
punishments, and promote intrinsic motivation that allows them to spend much
time concentrated in an activity, just because they love it. I assume this
challenge, so I want to propose different activities in pursuit of this
objective, carry them out in Primary Education real classrooms, and analyze the
results. Thus, is essential to establish some features to keep in mind when
considering these activities.
One of the main keys is to propose
activities that arouse children’s curiosity,
encouraging this way their emotional mechanisms that will enable them to focus
their attention. To that, it’s essential to plan active and varied classes, to ask
questions that make them think, to use attractive resources for them such as
videos and games, to use anecdotes or examples, etc. It is also very important
to know what their interests are, giving them the importance they deserve, and work
the content we want from them.
Moreover, we must always propose tasks
with clear and achievable objectives
adjusted to each student’s possibilities, allowing them to show their strengths.
Students can demotivated if tasks’ requirements are excessive or insufficient. It
is also essential to promote their
autonomy and self-esteem, making them active participants in the learning process,
respecting all their questions and interventions, leaving them to intervene in
the creation of standards, etc. It is very important to appreciate and commend
all students for their effort, and not just a few for their abilities, so we
should take a formative assessment to take into account the individual progress
of each student.
Finally, encourage teamwork in the classroom is also a good strategy to help
students to motivate, as the results of their involvement not only benefits
them individually, but the whole group.
With all this in mind, my two proposals
of activities to carry out during my practices are:
REMEMBER, we must never say that a child is demotivated.
He’s simply not motivated to do what we want him to do at the precise moment we
want him to do it.
I like your observation around the sentence, “I have tried everything”, which actually means “I am bored of repeating the same strategy for as long as I can remember—that is to say, I am tired of myself”. Teachers, however, take this self-boredom and tiredness as an excuse for making the students responsible for their lack of engagement, lack of discipline, etc. I think teachers’ responsibility is always to look at apparent “learning problems” as if they were “teaching problems”, i.e., to explore to the utmost degree the share of responsibility that they and their pedagogy may have on what is taking place inside their classrooms. If only because this is the only option that can lead to improvement and learning—the rest means leaving things as they are.
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