How to Motivate the Unmotivatable

Educator Blog Post

Identify three basic human needs that need to be met for students to develop motivation.

Besides the basic Maslovian needs such as air, water, food, students also need a sense of self-efficacy that they can live up to educator expectations and even excel at an assignment. To paragraph former President Obama, students must be assured that, “Yes, they can!” In addition, motivating young learners requires coursework that is relevant to their lives. Certainly, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is worthwhile by any measure, but most teachers are faced with overcrowded classrooms filled with a diverse student body who are already confronted with multiple existential threats (Rubin, 2018). Therefore, motivating these young people to learn requires more than just a stale lecture and coursework must be relevant (Anderson et al., 2022). Finally, after ensuring that students possess the requisite sense of self-efficacy and coursework is relevant, young people should be provided with sufficient autonomy to have a voice in their preferred curricular offerings as discussed below.

Explain how meeting and not meeting these needs affects motivation and engagement.

Instilling a sense of self-efficacy in young learners requires experiences with success as well learning the hard lessons from their failures. In other words, we cannot expect young learners to possess the same level of self-efficacy as a successful entrepreneur or Pulitzer Prize winning journalist despite the bewildering confidence that is routinely exhibited by some young people on the playground. Likewise, ensuring that coursework is relevant to students helps to ensure that they will be engaged and more interested in learning while providing them with some choices in what they are taught is the gold standard of academic motivation. Conversely, the extent to which any one or all of these needs is not met will likely be the extent to which teachers motivate students to learn in the first place.

Explain how sociocultural and cognitive factors can affect student motivation and engagement in the classroom. Describe how teachers can address and overcome these factors in the classroom.

Sociocultural and cognitive factors affect student motivation and engagement in the classroom in multiple ways, including most especially what causes them to pause in their mental miasma and say, “Wait, what?” when a teacher says something and actually pay attention. As noted above, relevance is key to invoking this type of response in classroom settings. Indeed, one of the lesser-discussed but most important challenges that is currently faced by educators at all levels is the diminished attention span that largely has been attributed to social media and digitized content. For instance, according to McSpadden (2015), “People now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain” (para. 2). Overcoming this challenge requires relentless effort on the part of educators to get and then keep students’ attention, and the relevance of the instructional material will have a direct bearing on this outcome

Provide two examples of teacher attributes that promote student motivation and engagement, and two examples that may hinder student motivation and engagement.

Although every classroom setting is unique, there are some teacher attributes that promote student motivation. For example, the quality of student-teacher relationships has consistently been shown to have a significant effect on student engagement and motivation, with teachers who are viewed as pleasant in demeanor and friendly and personal disposition experiencing higher levels of academic performance by their students (Mallik, 2023). Conversely, it is reasonable to suggest that teachers who are viewed as unpleasant and unfriendly will experience suboptimal academic performance by their students. This is not to say, of course, that teachers must be students’ “buddies,” but it is to say that taking an authentic Ted Lasso-like interest in the lives and wellbeing of students is the first step towards determining what is relevant for them and engaging them with a lifetime of learning.

Provide three ways teachers can improve student motivation and engagement at home and at school.

Teachers would be well advised to remember the axiom, “If they aren’t learning the way I teach, I should teach the way they learn.” Therefore, it is essential for teachers to remember that what works best with one set of students may fail miserably in otherwise-identical settings, so flexibility is key to success. Three general ways that teachers can improve student motivate and engagement in the classroom as well as at home include 1) experiential learning assignments that require students to design and build something that they can actually use; 2) essay assignments requiring students to interview local veterans, law enforcement authorities or other first responders and describe their contributions to the community; 3) research assignments requiring students to identify the main constraints to low-cost housing in their communities and determine what can be done to solve this chronic problem.