students must be motivated
Lisa,
How do you do that with your students?
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
We should encourage our students with positive feedback to motivate them.
Paula,
Yes we should. Will you share some examples of how you do this? Thanks.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
I find that as a night instructor you have to fight 2 battles. The first one is boredom, that you need to engage each student when they walk into the room and take a mental assessment to see where people are comming from? The second one is the actual topic that you are teaching that night? I try to explain the importance of fixing or installing a switch/recepticale/stove. Then i give them some personal examples of finding a stove in an apartment that needed a new cable installation. The resident was cooking 5 to 6 Turkey dinners for profit from here kitchen before Thursday. I got the call at 4:30 pm on Wednesday explained it was now 5pm.
I hope that my personal experience's can motivate them in seeing real examples of work that they will perform.
William,
I teach from 4 until 10 pm so I can relate to your challenges of being a night instructor. Boredom and fatigue are both challenges with night students. You do have to keep doing an assessment of their moods and interest so you can make adjustments as needed so they will remain engaged in the class. Stories from the field, like the one you shared in this forum are great ways to get their interest and show them how the content can be applied.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
I agree that keeping the passion alive in your perpective career will spill through to your students.
Cornella,
Yes it does and the results are great in terms of knowledge acquisition.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
I like to get the students buy-in by asking about their end-goal. If they know what outcome they want, then I can help them see that my course is relevant in their lives. I teach general education (sociology and career development). These courses give the students a professional philosophy to take with them into a chosen career. Therefore, each student that has a possible outcome in mind regarding why they are in college will be able to decipher how my class(es) will help them in the end. This is a question to ask them the first day of class.
Samara,
Very good question to ask the first day as it gets the students to thinking about how much importance they attach to being in school. They need to see that they are preparing to enter a career area they have chosen so they need to work as hard as they can to be successful in the course if they want to make progress toward their career goals. They need to personalize their education.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
I agree that we need to show our students how passionate we are about the class subject material. I teach beginning audio students a lot of technical aspects of the equipment and field. I demonstrate how the technical knowledge lets me do my work in a faster and more creative way. I make sure that the students can perform the new tasks that I am presenting. They get very motivated when I take a subject that could be boring, but I show them the relevance of the subject and then they can execute the tasks of the subject. This gives them small victories and they know that they are on the road to a bigger victory.
The instructors role is to walk and talk the industry. The excitement about what the students are going to do, its application int he industry and the overall benefits all come from their interaction with the instructor. Ultimately learning how to translate these messages into things that stir students to investigate and be more interested is the instructors role. By selecting the program, the students have already indicated a motivation, our role is to continuously stoke this motivation so that they can achieve favorable results. I bring real world examples, guest speakers, use videos, field trips all as tools to keep them motivated.
Identifying skills developed earlier in the program and showing how they apply to the task at hand help motivate my students. As the program goes further, I can hint on how particular aspects of a skill will apply to much more complicated and exciting challenges. Much of the time I will deconstruct a complicated operation to its basic elements, so the student is no longer intimidated by the challenge and motivated to take on the operation/challenge. With practice, previous intimidating operations become the norm, and even more complicated challenges seem doable.
One of the ways in which I motivate my students is to inject humor into the course. This is especially critical in the traditional classroom. Students respond more enthusiastically when I connect with them interactively and with humor because they see me as being enthused about my topic, and find me approachable.
Thomas,
I like bringing in real-world examples, too. This is especially helpful for my Marketing students as we discuss pricing and ethical considerations.
Best,
Rhonda
Rhonda,
A shared laugh can go a long way in helping students to settle into the course and refocus their thinking. Learning should be fun and humor can help much it be such.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
I think one of the ways to motivate students is to show the "end" first. Show them the applicable skills by either modeling it for them in class or showing a video(youtube or other) to show how "working professionals" use the skills they are about to learn. I know this is something I failed to do, and I didn't realize that a good majority of my students needed to be motivated in this way. The result was ultimately an inattentive class.
Jonathan,
You make a very good point about how to increase the value of the course to students. By them knowing the outcome via the syllabus, goals and objectives plus application examples they will see the relevance in what they are being asked to learn.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
As educators we must be entertainers, thus making us edutainers. In the online setting I make statements such as "great answer, you got me doing my happy dance!". In the traditional setting, I participate with the students and become just as excited as they do during activities. I will give prizes and so forth which really get them going.
Nikki,
Right you are about the need to be entertaining while delivering content. Some educators disagree with this in that they believe that the deliver it and it is up to the students to receive it. I am a believer in helping to make the learning process enjoyable as well as relevant to the students. Along the way if we share a laugh and learn something from one another even the better.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
