The most challenging job for many teachers is to find strategies to motivate students to learn. With increased class sizes and the lack of personal contact in online classes, many students lose learning fun. But that does not have to be the case anymore. In this article, we will tell you how every teacher can motivate students to learn with ease.
Naturally, children absorb everything new to learn inquisitively. While young children ask questions, explore connections, and talk enthusiastically about everything they find out, older children seem to lose this motivation to explore the world this way. This learning from the inner drive is also called intrinsic motivation, which creates the best learning conditions.
21st-century learning leads teachers to question how to increase their students’ motivation and implement different teaching styles to reach this in lesson plans. Below you will find six simple ideas for increasing your student’s motivation to learn creatively without much effort.
6 Simple Ideas to Motivate Every Student to Learn
1. Choose Relevant Learning Material
To increase the motivation to learn, students need to understand the context of the learning material and understand why it is relevant in their everyday life. Tell them what the individual learning steps are. Once you get the students involved in the learning process, they are more engaged, which leads to more motivation to learn the new content.
2. Let Your Students Learn with Head, Heart, and Hand
Create lessons that use methods like learning with senses and project-based learning lessons. If a student gets introduced to new information via different senses, different brain regions activate, and the students process what they have learned more intensively. They will retain the information over the long term. If you want your students to learn how a computer works, try to let them build it themselves with Piper Computer Kit.
3. Pack the Content into Exciting Stories
One method that always works is to package new content into stories. You can do this either in the form of projects or playfully with digital teaching aids. In this way, the motivation to learn can be increased almost automatically.
4. Have a Mix of Methods
The teacher should always use the right mix of methods in teaching. Try a combination of practical, teacher-led, and computer-supported learning units. There are many ways to motivate kids to learn and using as many as possible will yield the best results.
5. Ask Your Students for Feedback
Scary but necessary: Asking for feedback from your students can change a lot. The input can be anonymous. Giving the students a chance to speak makes them more involved, which creates a relationship based on trust.
6. Respond to Your Students Needs
Treat your students as essential individuals and understand that they have different learning styles, interests, and motivations to learn. You can support each student individually by responding to their needs and considering the different types of learning and motivation. Acknowledging each student makes them feel respected and motivates them to learn.
The Danger of the Pressure from Outside
One of the main reasons why the motivation to learn can decrease is too much pressure from outside. The intrinsic motivation soon leaves the student the older the children become—students at a more senior age experience higher pressure to perform. The students now rely on extrinsic motivation, which is the motivation from outside. Rewards such as good grades and recognition with compliments and cute stamps are moving into focus. With the pressure to perform always, many students lose the fun of learning. Too much stress can cause frustration and the loss of motivation to learn. Once the students reach this phase, it is challenging for teachers to motivate them to learn.
Projects relevant to everyday life, digital media, and more independence are what most students want. But, to make learning fun, children, parents, and teachers must work together. With more project work, such as learning how to code and learning content relevant to the student’s everyday life, the motivation to learn will increase in the long term. A broad mix of media and more independent learning are relevant keywords for the teachers to implement into their lesson plan outline.
