How do we motivate our students? This question, along with the side-effects of it, are the main reason teachers leave the profession. Many teachers go in to the field because they love watching children learn and progress, or simply because they love explaining things. However, this enthusiasm tends to wane when the glazed over looks of students are all one sees. And this is if you are lucky! Unmotivated students are much more likely to become disruptions and even initiate violence than motivated students. After several years of boredom, frustration and unruly behavior many teachers call it quits.
Perhaps, if they had better resources and training in this matter they could avoid the problems that unmotivated students cause. In the few paragraphs below I will describe the best way I have found to motivate students in my two and a half years of teaching: Hands-on activites
Hands-on activities are great because they are simply more fun than worksheets and also connect what the students are learning to real-life in a much more concrete way. I am by no means an expert in student motivation but I can think of nothing more productive to do than sharing what has worked for me. These will mostly be specific to teaching math, but I hopefully teachers of other disciplines can benefit as well.
1. When Teaching Probability use actual cards and dice and tie the learning into actual games.
These are objects that most of us grew up playing with. Students often find it interesting to learn about the probability of games they used to, or perhaps still do, play. A great web device is Johnnie's probability page. http://jmathpage.com/JIMSProbabilitypage.html It has almost 30 different games and activities. Below is a picture of an activity I created using a game on that page.
2. When teaching geometry stay away from worksheets as much as possible!
Geometry is inherently connected to the real world. It is the study of angles, shapes and distances. Why teach such an interesting topic with a worksheet. Below is a list of ideas.
a. Use the tiles on your floor to teach perimeter and area. Most tiles in schools are exact 1 foot squares.
b. Teach them the Pythagorean Theoremand then use it to determine distances otherwise unmeasureable.
c. Get actual solids in the class when teaching volume and surface area. Show them that a rectangular prism is just a box with 6 rectangles, get a coffee can and peal off the label in order to show that a cylinder is really 2 circles and a rectangle, etc.
d. When teaching medians and perpendicular bisectors of triangles have the students cut out actual triangles and fold them to learn the actual essence of the terms.
3. When teaching regressions in algebra use actual data that the students collect.
For example I had the students measure their heights and wingspans on the wall. We were able to run a regression which allowed us to make predictions.
There are many, many more examples but hopefully I have given you a taste of how hands-on activities can enrich a classroom.
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