5 Tips to Keep Students Motivated
In this article, we’ve prepared a list of some of the best practices to help keep students motivated in the classroom. This will be of great help if you’re a teacher.
Being a teacher can be one of the most vocational and rewarding professions. However, it’s not always easy to stay in control and calm in the classroom.
The most important thing is keeping your students motivated and interested in class. If you get their attention, you’ll get them to behave. Here you’ll find some helpful tips.
5 tips to keep students motivated
1. Don’t beg
The very first thing to keep your students motivated is to never beg them to behave. In fact, making desperate pleas to behave can have the opposite effect: it can make them act even worse.
Likewise, in these cases, the best defense is a good offense. You have to prepare several classroom management strategies. For example, you could try to give bonus points to the students who follow your instructions. At the end of class, the team with the most points gets a reward.
2. Build a good relationship with your students
There’s no doubt that having a good relationship with children and teenagers is essential to being a successful teacher and keeping your students motivated. If you don’t, you’ll probably notice that your students will complain about everything you do or propose to do.
Showing real interest in them and their lives will really improve the teacher-student relationship. Students can tell whether you’re being genuine or you’re pretending to have interest.
For example, it’s advisable to use the first minutes of class to have a little chat about their lives. Take your time to get to know them, what they’re really like, and use this in your planning.
3. Beware of threats
Thirdly, you have to be careful with using inapplicable or inappropriate threats with your students. If this happens, you’ll lose control of the situation because you won’t be capable to carry out what you’ve said. Imagine that you use a threat to get a child to sit and remain seated, pretending you’ll call their parents to sit next to them for the rest of the lecture.
In a sense, it’s necessary that you plan and explain in advance your expectations and the relevant consequences. Then, reinforce student’s appropriate behavior and manage the established consequences if necessary.
“Making desperate pleas to behave can have the opposite effect: it can make them act worse instead.”
4. Define your rules
For any good teacher, it’s essential to stay in control of the classroom. For this to be possible, you have to define the ground rules in a way that all lectures can continue normally and without interruptions. Make sure to define these rules and to make them clear on the first day of class.
Establishing a normative means to set certain codes of conduct that need to be respected. It’s a simple thing that needs to be applied since the very first time students enter your classroom.
5. Be patient and empathetic
The last tip to keep your students motivated is to be patient and have empathy. It’s a simple and effective strategy, but it means you need to wait and see, and not look for an easy way out. It’s really about not overwhelming your students and letting them improve their behavior with patience and compassion.
In a way, it’s very important that you learn to sympathize with your students and remind yourself you were once a student as well. Often, we praise grown-ups for keeping up with their convictions, but we condemn students for their attitudes.
To be a successful teacher, you need to find a middle ground. With patience, empathy and compassion, it’ll be possible to modify some of those behaviors that can make you lose your cool.
At last, don’t forget about this list with the best tricks to keep your students motivated. These are just a few recommendations that can help you in the classroom. Although, every teacher can use their own. Practice them and your relationship with your students will surely improve.