Motivation

Motivation, how do you do it? This is one of the biggest problems I see in the classroom. Scare tactics and external motivation only go so far. How do we make students want to learn? How do we create value in learning? This is something that is easy for us as college students to understand, but how do we convince small children that focusing and learning really does matter? This reading took me back to the expectancy x value framework we learned about during TE 301. How can we show students that the effort they put in will payoff in the end? I decided to pull out my literary reference project I created last year to see what I thought about it at the time. What I wrote about the model was; expectancy(does the student expect to be successful) x value (why is it valuable for the student to complete the task?) I think that this is an excellent representation of how motivation actually works. Even when I want to try new things or push myself, I must first believe I can accomplish the task. If I am down on myself from the beginning then it almost is not worth trying. But once again HOW do we teach our students to believe they can be sucessful. As for value, teaching young students the value of education is often difficult. This is often covered up with grades, stickers, and staying out of trouble. These things might be enough for awhile, but eventually students will have to understand the real reason it is important to accomplish the task at hand.