Peggy Hughes is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. She has worked in the education sector for her whole career, and loves to help make sense of it to students, teachers and applicants. Read more on her website.
January can be a tough month. Cold commutes and dark mornings persist, the winter seems to stretch both ahead and behind, and the school day ends only a short while before sunset.
In conditions like these, it’s no surprise that student motivation can start to go a little slack. To keep it up – and continue to engage your students – take a look at the following five classroom strategies.
1. Keep it relevant
A student’s ability to relate their learning to their lives has long been proven as a key component of motivation. If students can see how their studies are “useful” or “helpful”, they are far more likely to put in the effort necessary to succeed.
Ed Week suggests that the relevance of learning can be proven to students via something called “self-generation”. This is the process whereby students themselves describe how topics are related to their own lives or likely to prove useful in the future. Students can be asked to do this on a small scale, looking at one particular learning objective, task, or lesson – or with a wider outlook, selecting something from the curriculum at large and connecting it to themselves.
2. Incorporate choice and control where you can
A simple way to prove relevance to students is to let them choose what they learn. If students are able to select content or connect a topic to their own lives, passions, worries, and interests, then that content or topic is inarguably relevant to them.
This works particularly well in tasks, projects, and subjects that involve learning a process, rather than a set of facts. When teaching how to research, for example, allowing students to select their topic of investigation (within reasonable parameters) is highly motivating.
3. Build in short-term reward
In order for student motivation to impact progress, it must translate into effort. For students to want to put effort in, they need to know it will pay off.
Short-term rewards and achievable, specific goals are key here. A student struggling in January may not be persuaded by the promise of a high grade in six months’ time – but tomorrow? Or even, today?
Short-term reward proves to students that the effort they put in results in immediate progress. It grows confidence by giving opportunities to be successful, and builds positive habits by demonstrating to students that effort pays off and so persuading them to repeat their actions.
4. Use deliberate practice
Deliberate practice, more than just simple repetition, is the structured, targeted, and closely-monitored practice of specific skills.
Incorporating deliberate practice into your classroom can be a highly effective way of motivating students this January. Why? Because it will genuinely improve their achievement. Pair this with your short-term reward, in which students can prove their progress to you and to themselves, and your students will realise the impact of their effort and want to repeat it.
The process of deliberate practice can be divided into five sections:
- Identifying the skill which needs improvement – this should be small, specific, and distinct.
- Learning this skill.
- Assessing the skill and providing feedback to the students.
- Performing the skill.
- Practising and recalling the skill through spaced repetition over the following weeks and months.
It is important that students throughout the process are challenging themselves, responding to feedback and reflecting on their own progress.
5. Foster growth mindsets
Fostering a growth mindset in your classroom means encouraging the belief that students can grow their own skills, ability, and intelligence. A growth mindset discards the notion of innate talent and replaces it with the concept that hard work pays off. This way of looking at school work, psychologist Carol Dweck claims, means that students are far more likely to engage with their studies and keep on persevering.
You can cultivate a growth mindset in your classroom by:
- Using language to reframe “impossible tasks” as “learning opportunities”;
- Celebrating mistakes and embracing them as part of the process;
- Praising hard work rather than innate “smartness”;
- Promoting resilience.
