Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

This review of the psychological underpinnings of MOTIVATION THEORY is essential for parents as well!

The article identifies elements of good pedagogy ... and good parenting that can be applied at home, e.g. building a solid relationship with each child so the adult encourages growth within the context of the child's authentic interests.

Another benefit of strong adult-child relationships is that it front-loads resiliency -the capacity to bounce back from challenges and set-backs.

Not enough can be said for the magical and multiple gifts inherent in project learning -both at home and in school. Feeling responsible for accumulating a representative series of "grades" Classroom Teachers (CT) often feel reluctant to use project learning as the centerpiece of their classroom curriculum. Let's face it, projects need to be carefully designed...and lots of advance planning, materials, check points, assessment tools require up front planning time. Summer lends itself well to this type of advance organizing, planning, gathering, designing.

Home projects make just as much sense, and require parents to be diligent and consistent in checking on the stages of life-skills projects, e.g. maintaining a clean and organized room. It doesn't happen altogether on a Saturday afternoon, and if it does I am pretty sure we have one overwhelmed child on our hands...and trash bags filling up with a chaotic mass of "good stuff" because it would take a week to restore the hundreds of scattered parts and pieces back to their original boxes/kits. Throwing away "stuff" we paid good money for -as a way of restoring order to a kid's room that got out of hand -challenges our values and principles on many levels. And what is it teaching our children about the stewardship of resources, the value of our hard-earned dollars, conservation of resources, their capacity to manage their lives, and finally our capacity to manage them?

So if you are a parent, grandparent, engaged aunt/uncle, guardian, or babysitter...open the link above and enjoy an invitation to live in a more engaged way.

And if you are a teacher, jot down some key words connected to fascinating project ideas that will underpin any subject's content in much more meaningful ways than a textbook can. Ask the kids to dream up projects that would answer the deep questions they keep under their hats because there's usually no time in a school day set aside to project work. Bring in a baseball cap... everyone can deposit slips of paper describing ideas/asking big questions. On the last day of school this thinking cap goes home with you until one month of full leisure and recovery has passed. By the end of July, your summertime thinking cap will inspire you...and come September you will inspire your students to develop their own MOTIVATION through project-filled learning (and you will have creatively figured out how to gather grades at multiple check-points along the way).