One of the most important parts of a teacher’s job is motivating their students to aspire to academic greatness. After all, all of the lessons and lectures in the world won’t make much of a difference if the students themselves aren’t motivated to seek success.
To a certain extent, much of it is out of your hands, because there’s no easy way of knowing what’s going on inside a pupil’s head. They could be having problems at home or be struggling with some underlying condition such as undiagnosed dyslexia.
Still, there’s a lot that you can control, and it’s those factors that we’re going to cover today. After all, a good teacher is motivated themselves, to be the best teacher that they possibly can be. Here are a few of our top tips to help you to motivate your students and to push them to be at their best.
Best tips to increase students’ motivation
Vary your teaching style
Research suggests that varying your teaching style can help to improve academic results across the entire classroom. It makes sense when you think about it. We all learn in different ways, whether we’re visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners, and an important part of being a teacher is remembering that and consciously varying your teaching style as a result of it.
Vary your environment
Staying in the same environment day in and day out can be dull and uninspiring: just ask any office worker. Of course, a certain amount of work has to be done in the classroom and there’s only so much that you can do to liven up the environment there, but consider using field trips or even just holding lessons outside if the weather’s good. It’ll help to keep things fresh and exciting for students.
Hold students accountable
As human beings, we all tend to perform better when we’re being held accountable for the work that we’re doing, which is one of the reasons why people work with personal trainers when they want to get in shape. As a teacher, it’s your job to hold students accountable by giving them grades and deadlines, even if you’re just taking topics from professional custom writing service and asking them to complete assignments that won’t go towards their final grade.
Encourage friendly competitions
According to research highlighted by essay writing help uk, friendly competition can help to improve grades, but only up to a point. Competition helps to push us to be our best, but if the competition is taken too seriously then it can lead to performance anxiety. Know when to draw the line. For example, having a public leaderboard of test scores could be counterproductive and even lead to bullying amongst students.
Add context
It’s hard for kids to want to learn if they don’t think there’s any reason for them to know what they’re learning. That’s why it’s a good idea to put lessons in context, perhaps by discussing real-world problems or relating your lessons back to topics that your kids are interested in. In other words, if you have to talk about Fortnite to get them to pay attention, don’t be afraid to do it.
Listen to feedback
Whether you’re a teacher asking the kids how you’re doing or whether you’re a student reading Edu Birdie reviews, it’s vital that you listen to feedback and learn from it. That means that as a teacher, you need to listen to feedback from both students and their parents and then do what you can to learn from it.
Conclusion
Increasing students’ motivation isn’t always easy, and it’s important to remember that we can’t always know what’s going in their personal lives. As a general rule, nobody wants to fail, and poor grades are often down to something other than a lack of motivation, in which case it’s your job to spot it and to help the students out in any way you can.
The good news is that with the tips that we’ve shared in this article, you should have all of the information you need to motivate your students to try to reach their full potential. Now you just need to get started. Good luck.