Increase Interest and Motivation

So the scenario is that you are a newly licensed teacher, eager to start teaching your very first class at your very first school.  You spent hours crafting out the perfect unit, full of exciting things you want your class to experience.  It will not take you long to realize that there are students that will simply not be willing to learn, no matter how enthralling you personally believe the subject to be.  This raises the age-old question: how do I capture my students interest and make them care?

In attempt to answer this, you will need to examine your class.  Who is it that is doing well, and who is it that does not seem engaged?  Time and time again, it will be those students that are confident in their academic abilities that are motivated and trying, and those that do not have confidence that are not doing as well.  This feeling of confidence is known as self-efficacy, and it directly correlates with the amount of effort a student puts into his or her work.  What this means for an English teacher is that those students that are struggling with skills such as reading typically have a lower level of self-efficacy, and therefore are less motivated to read any of the material that is assigned.  To combat this, teachers must take measures to increase motivation.

A good way to increase a student's motivation is to make sure that the text is relevant to his or her life, activating the student's prior knowledge.  When a student feels as though he know what is going on and he can make meaningful connections to a text and himself, self-efficacy is raised, as well as his motivation.  The three important ways to activating prior knowledge include arousing curiosity, generating questions, and making predictions.

Arousing curiosity "gives students the chance to consider what they already know about the material to be read" (Mraz, Vacca & Vacca, 2011, p. 173).  A curious student is more likely to put effort in their work so as to satisfy their curiosity; they are self-motivated by this drive for knowledge rather than by an extrinsic reward.  Using imagery to help students visualize the text, having students make story impressions, and establishing problematic perspectives for students to explore are all good ways to arouse curiosity.

Making predictions requires students to access and utilize their prior knowledge (hence why they are called "educated guesses").  A good way to facilitate prediction making is by creating an anticipation guide.  If I were to create one for a novel I was going to teach, I would give the class a series of statements related to the book and have them decide whether or not they believed each one to be true/false or likely/unlikely.

Generating questions about the content not only arouses curiosity, but is a good way to activate prior knowledge; in order to ask a question, the student must first reference what they already know about the topic.  Forming questions gives students an internal purpose to read, greatly increasing their motivation.

Using these strategies to activate prior knowledge is an excellent way to increase motivation and self-efficacy in your students.  Once there is interest established in the student, he or she will be motivated to learn more.  Arousing curiosity and having students make predictions and generate questions about a topic is how you make students care.