Walter Geerts & René van Kralingen - The Teachers' Handbook

1.1  A powerful learning environment motivates

Motivating the student Students can be motivated to learn in a number of ways (see also Chapter 12). We saw how a transparent learning process can significantly improve their moti vation. When the teacher has good insights into students’ learning processes, he will be able to divide the curriculum into manageable portions. This is crucial, as viable steps have an extremely motivating effect on students. We’ll discuss three more motivating factors: ■■ The teacher’s enthusiasm : A teacher who is enthusiastic about his own pro fession clearly conveys a positive message about the subject. All of his behav iour should demonstrate this enthusiasm, as students will see right through a teacher who doesn’t act in a genuine way. A teacher will show his enthusi asm by bringing newspaper cuttings to the lesson, telling personal anecdotes, showing appropriate props in the lesson, giving positive feedback on com pleted assignments, and thanking his students for their efforts. ■■ Making content meaningful : The curriculum will motivate students if they find it worth the effort to learn. Some coercion might be useful – having a test to look forward to could be all that is needed – but this form of extrinsic mo tivation on its own is not enough. The idea is to stimulate intrinsic motivation in the students. This can be achieved by making the curriculum meaningful, by letting the student experience its added value for him as an individual. He needs to see its application in his daily life, or alternatively, the content should give meaning to his personal functioning. Teachers should make the teaching content relevant on a regular basis. This creates ownership: the student will feel he is the owner of his own meaningful learning process. This in turn will motivate him. ■■ The teacher’s expectations : As a teacher, you give off constant signals to convey your expectations of a student. A well-known study by Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) clearly demonstrates that a teacher who has clear expecta

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tions of a student will express this in his behav iour, positively influencing actual achievements in that student. Students responding to the teacher’s positive expectations is known as the Pygmalion (or Rosenthal) effect. Pygmalion was a Greek mythological king who sculpted such a beautiful female figure that he became hopelessly infatuated with it. This doesn’t mean you should impose too high an expectation on your students; your expectations should spur them on and encourage them into the zone of proximal development (see section 1.4.3). If, however, your demands are too high, the stu dent will end up in the panic zone, which would be detrimental to his learning process.

Rosenthal and Jacobson gave a gener al skills test at an elementary school in San Francisco at the start of the 1968 1969 school year. They implied to the teachers that they were able to predict which of the students would make great strides in the coming year. In reality, the test was totally unsuitable for this pur pose. In addition, the five names from each class were random choices. By the end of the school year the teachers re ported better results with those five randomly chosen students than with the rest of the students.

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