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 knowledges 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...
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...
…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 arent 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…
