Proven Strategies to Motivate Students
When students are empowered to utilize their intrinsic motivators, rather than passively responding to extrinsic motivators, they become better life-long learners.
Children are born curious, yet somewhere along the way it can seem like they lose motivation for learning new things. Many start asking questions like “Why do I have to learn this?” at an early age, and teachers and parents alike may feel compelled to coax or bribe their students into completing educational tasks with incentives. In a recent webinar, Mike Anderson, author of Tackling the Motivation Crisis, discussed the intrinsic motivators that drive students, and practices that can encourage self-driven learning. This post represents our summary and analysis of Mike’s presentation.
Extrinsic motivators are tools like pizza parties, sticker charts, or other rewards for good behavior. Detentions or other consequences for poor behavior are likewise considered extrinsic motivators. The issue with external rewards and consequences to motivate learning, is that students often become more focused on these external factors rather than the learning itself. Over time, students lose the ability to tap into their intrinsic motivators. As a result, their ability to learn and perform well in school can similarly diminish.
So what are intrinsic motivators, and how do we encourage our students without external incentives?
Six Intrinsic Motivators
Autonomy: Students want to feel that they have control over their education. Autonomy can be encouraged by giving students practical choices, like allowing them to pick five math problems to complete out of a full page worksheet. Independence can also be cultivated more broadly by centering student input in educational conversations and curriculum.
Purpose: Students want to have a reason for why they learn what they do. Students can be given purpose by project-based learning that incorporates a topic of interests, or by community-based learning in which students teach others what they’ve learned. (Known as the protégé effect, students work harder to understand material when they know they’ll need to teach it to someone else.)
Belonging: According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a feeling of belonging is essential on the path to self-actualization. It’s no different for learners! Students want to feel that they are an important member of their school community. Belonging can be fostered by assigning group projects, conducting partner discussions, hosting group debates, or creating classroom challenges.
Competence: Students are empowered by watching themselves grow and learn. Educators can help students feel confident by making sure that they are in their “just right” learning zone. When students are given tasks that are too difficult for them, they enter a zone where they become too frustrated to learn. As parents and tutors, we need to ensure students are being given challenging (but not overwhelming) tasks.
Curiosity: Humans are inherently curious, and each student has topics that they find particularly interesting. Encourage students to explore interests by allowing them to choose research topics, create their own reading lists, and ask open-ended questions.
Fun: People of all ages are driven by fun. Many students think they need to complete their work in order to be rewarded with fun time; however, fun-centered learning motivates students to participate! Common use-cases include educational games, hands-on activities, or illustrative skits.
External rewards implicitly message that learning must be so terrible that students must be “bribed” into it. Hence, students who receive such rewards often lose the desire to learn over time. However, when we implement pedagogical strategies that tap into students’ intrinsic motivators, they become life-long learners – not to reap a reward, but simply to experience the joy of learning.
