Teaching and learning are relatively complex process since they require collaboration between different stakeholders including school administrators, teachers, and students. In this regard, teachers need to develop their knowledge and skills in order to develop suitable teaching strategies and practices. This course has played an important role in my development of knowledge and skills in teaching practice. The course has focused on different aspects of teaching and learning with respect to the development and use of suitable strategies and practices. This paper provides a personal reflection on the various things I have learned in this course, particularly in relation to student motivation and engagement, enhancing the participation of the disengaged learner, and mastery goal and performance goal practices. Connections Among Motivation, Engagement and Learning

One of the most important aspect toward achievement of desired learning outcomes and improvement of a school’s overall performance is student engagement and motivation. Student engagement and motivation play a critical role in determining the effectiveness of teaching practices and mastery of learning content by students in the classroom setting. Engagement is a term utilized to refer to the tendency by students to cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally participate in learning activities and tasks (Stephens, 2015). In this case, it’s the degree with which students are cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally prepared to participate in academic activities. This implies that students perceive academic activities as crucial components for the learning and participate in these activities in a desired manner.

Existing literature in the field of education demonstrate that there is a strong link between student motivation and engagement. As a result, student engagement has emerged as a major construct in motivation research in the field of education (Stephens, 2015). Saeed & Zyngier (2012) state that student motivation and engagement is considered in existing literature in the educational field...

The link between student motivation and engagement is the fact that motivation is the pre-requisite for student engagement in academic activities. When students are highly motivated, they tend to increasingly engage in learning activities/tasks and vice versa. Motivation is an intrinsic factor that influences a student’s cognition, emotion, and behavior in participating in academic activities (Saeed & Zyngier, 2012). Additionally, motivation is the premise with which students make a psychological investment in learning by increasing their participation in learning activities/tasks.
In light of these factors, there is also a strong link between student engagement in academic activities and learning. Engagement determines the extent with which a student will master the learning content/material and his/her overall learning outcomes. This essentially means that engagement influences the degree with which learning occurs. Student engagement is the extent with which students are willing, desire and participate in the learning process to enhance their level of understanding (Saeed & Zyngier, 2012). Therefore, it influences the degree with which students learn and achieve learning outcomes and objectives.

How to Engage the Disengaged Learner

Even though student engagement is an important factor in student learning and overall learning outcomes, the classroom setting still comprises of disengaged learners. Teachers are sometimes faced with the need to devise suitable strategies and teaching practices to engage the disengaged learner. For a teacher who is trying to engage a disengaged learner in a class where everyone is engaged, identifying the level of the student’s motivation in different subjects is the first step towards enhancing his/her engagement in academic activities. Once this is examined, the teacher should seek to understand the root causes of the student’s disengagement and develop suitable measures for addressing it. The identification of…