Satya Raj Joshi
What is motivation? it’s the inner power that pushes you toward taking action and towards achievement. Motivation is power by desire and ambition, which accelerates us towards transcendental life. In the field of education too, motivation to students as well as teachers is extremely important to attain the specified outcome.
This requires essential technique to motivate student and teachers that should be applied according to time and as per situation i.e., there is no such specific valid method. For enhancing effective teaching and learning process in academic sector, motivation of both teachers and students is urgent.
If we burn wooden log, it burns brightly for a certain time and gradually starts to extinguish. If we stare those only- it starts to burn brighter. Human beings are also like burning wooden log. Sometimes they seem active and sometime passive. In order to bring them to energized form, like wooden logs that need to be moved; i.e. new desires to be created. Such a process of creating a new desire, which drive them to achieve it, is motivation. Likewise, (Griffin, 1970) says, “Motivation is the set of forces that cause people to behave in certain ways.” Thus, motivation is the internal and external factors that stimulate desire and energy in people to be continually interested and committed to a task, role or subject, or to make an effort to attain goal.
In the field of education, where there are learning activities, for better result or for effective teaching learning, insight motivation of students as well as teachers plays an important role. If anyone the party i.e. either students or teachers are demotivated, the effective teaching learning process remain as a dream only.
Why is motivation important for teachers and students?
Motivation contributes to a dynamic class environment. It increases interest in students in learning particular knowledge i.e. they pay more attention and exhibit eagerness to perform and activity repeatedly. Motivation even boosts up student’s energy level contributing to the effort a student put forth. Educational psychologists say that motivation enhances the quality of learning in students i.e. they pay attention more and retain more information. Such motivate students not only create an engaging learning environment for themselves but also their eagerness helps them to develop positive attitude towards teachers, who put their heart and soul in teaching, are as well encouraged. Thus, in turn benefits the students, as enthusiastic teachers positively affect student learning.
How to motivate students as well as teacher?
In order to motivate students, first of all we need to determine why the students are not motivated. As per Maslow’s hierarchy of need theory, one should identify what type of need they are demanding which is demotivating them like problem at home, school, health issue, having low self-esteem, a learning disability etc. After identifying the issue, teachers can deal as per to motivate them.
Likewise, teachers need to evaluate their teaching strategy and make necessary adjustments as per time. As John Keller’s ARCS motivation theory – teachers can develop different methods and strategies related to Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction to stimulate students i.e. to be motivated, the learner must attend to material, see its relevance, be confident that they will learn it and achieve satisfaction from the training.
Similarly, Teachers should tell students that s/he has faith on them repeatedly and try to give students challenging and achievable assignments to complete and need to provide them emotional support. We can also use incentive theory of motivation by providing rewards to students for doing a good job in class. Rewards may be even simple verbal praise such as “great job”, “excellent” or providing pencils, giving stickers or other educational materials.
Recently, even the concept of multiple intelligence in learning is developed which can also be one effective method in teaching learning process. According to Harvard teacher and researcher Howard Gardener, there are seven distinct learning styles: spatial (visual), kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, naturalist and mathematical. So, mixing up teaching styles and using different teaching and experimentation techniques, such as hands-on learning, can help students to stay engaged for a longer period of time. So, there are so many techniques to motivate students for learning but one thing should be kept in mind that there is no one specific technique to motivate all students as they are different in nature. Teachers need to identify situation, find out what students want to learn about and what activities they enjoy doing, then build those into their curriculum as much as possible. (Brophy, 2010). Similarly, in order to motivate students teachers should empathize with learners and offer ‘unconditional positive regard’; facilitate rather than dictate the learning experience; be authentic and honest in their interactions with learners; help students identify and clarify their own experiences and values (Feinberg and W. Feinberg, 2001).
Even we can follow following strategies to motivate students like Promote a culture of openness and respect where bullying is unacceptable, respect different viewpoints while allowing them to be challenged, teach social, communication and collaborative skills, promote a sense of classroom community (e.g. use ‘we’ in teacher talk) allow ‘friendship’ groups for educational support but vary their composition, create a sense of identity (school houses, or academic departments), use inter-group competition and cooperation, encourage clubs and societies, encourage study groups and homework clubs etc. By varying teaching methods, creating assignments that are appropriately challenging, providing constructive, timely feedback and making lesson relevant to situation too may help in motivating students.
In order to motivate students, the teachers should also be motivated as they are also one important pillar in education field. It is very important need to get excited about the classroom lectures and activities because this help to gain the students attention and keep them interested in learning. So, to motivate teacher’s school management should also play important role. School management should take teachers as the asset of the school but not as easily obtainable goods or labor and should try to retain teachers in school as long as possible because frequent teachers turn over create waste of time and money in adjustment and so on. School management can motivate teachers by different ways. Some of the techniques are as follow:
- Encourage teachers to hunt out professional development courses or workshops.
- Organize interactive staff meeting with an idea that raise the praise, minimize criticism.
- Developing the sense of team work
- Respect them, use positive, respectful language, remove the category conflict i.e. senior and junior, etc..
- Select a “teacher of the month”
- Send cards to teacher to welcome them back after an illness; celebrate a birthday or any important events or achievement.
- Pay them for what they deserve by proper evaluation. etc
If trustable environment between teacher and management is made, a sense of team develops which not only motivate teacher, even increase creativity. As a result, effective teaching is possible.
In this way, if teachers don’t seem to be motivated, effective teaching won’t be possible and if students aren’t motivated, effective learning won’t be possible, for effective teaching and learning process and to attain desired output, motivation is incredibly important in education.
Works Cited:
Brophy, J. (2010). motivating students to learning. New York: Routledge publication.
Feinberg, E., & W.Feinberg. (2001). Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present. Abingdon: Routledge.
Griffin, R. W. (1997). Management. Delhi: AITBS Publishers and distributors.
Keller, J. (1983). Use of the ARCS Model of Motivation in Teacher Training. IDD&E Working Paper
[Satya Raj Joshi, an M. Phil. in English Literature, is a lecturer, critic and translator. Joshi began his literary career from his school days and continuously writing poems, doing translations and publishing critical opinions on language and literature on different newspapers and journals. Currently he works for CG education.]