He discussed reasons why he thought students were not motivated. Some of those reasons are: motivation and priot experiences with success and failure, motivation and differences between home and school values, and motivation and teacher expectations. I found these very important to take under consideration when I am teaching.
- Motivation and Prior Experience with Success and Failure: Motivation can be connected to student's success and failures. Students who try to learn without the proper ways of learning(learning strategies) spend a great amount of time struggling during their school years. When it is time for them to reinforce these learning strategies, they become unsuccessful because of the many years of trying and not being able to accomplish their goals. Conely notes," Years of feeling unsuccessful in certain subjets or even throughout a school career can take a heavy toll."
- Motivation and Differences between Home and School Values: The reason why many teachers can not motivate their students is because of dilemmas with different values with education at home and at school. Conley notes, " For example, families living in proverty might actually fear education as a way of losing thie relationship with their children." This is extremely true. Not only losing the relationship, some families do not proverty families do not value education at all. They only send their children to school because it is a law. Therefore the children feel the same way, which makes it hard for the teacher when they are teaching them.
- Motivation and Teacher Expectations: We as teachers sometimes makes the students feel like failures. We give students expectations and may communicate them in the wrong way. Some teachers pay less attention to those who are low achievers than high achievers when it should be the opposite. This makes the low achieving students feel like the teacher is not paying attention so why try. Question: Why pay attention to the high achieving students when they are already achieving above average. Why not try to get the low achieving students to try to reach for a higher goal?
Ways to activate prior knowledge:
- Anticipation Guides
- Prep(Pre Reading Plan)
- K-W-L (My favorite, especially for younger students)
******Let's increase activation prior knowledge and motivation. The students need it, and it will make us more successful as teachers. It will make our lessons go much easier and much smoother!!!!******
"Years of feeling unsuccessful in certain subjets or even throughout a school career can take a heavy toll."
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. I think we have all experienced some sort of failure in school that led to resentment of that subject and/or the teacher. For instance, I believe that the reason I performed so poorly in my high school math classes was due to the fact that I had never been very successful in math. I struggled through pre-algebra in middle school and barely passed with a low C. My parents and teachers were very disappointed with me, and it made me feel terrible. So, I started to resent math and blamed my poor performance on disinterest. And although I find math extremely dull, that was not the main reason I had problems with it. I didn't understand math; numbers do not make sense to me the way words do. And instead of trying my hardest to understand math, I gave up.
When teachers encounter students with this problem, I am sure it is very difficult to alleviate those feelings of failure. How can teachers motivate students to put forth effort in a subject that they have no interest in and see no relevance for? I suppose it all goes back to somehow incorporating students' interests into the lessons. We need to get our students engaged as early as possible! Because, a hatred of math will lead to poor performance in basic math, then pre-algebra, then Algebra, Geometry, and so on. And math skills are built upon eachother; if students do not understand basic skills, they will have many problems in more difficult math classes. This is generally the same for all subject areas. Basically, the future success of our students can depend on what happens in our classrooms.