Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom: Motivating Students to Learn
1. Use behavioral techniques to help students exert themselves and work toward remote goals.
2. Make sure that students know what they are to do, how to proceed, and how to determine when they have achieved goals.
3. Do everything possible to satisfy deficiency needs — physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem.
a. Accommodate the instructional program to the physiological needs of your students.
b. Make your room physically and psychologically safe.
c. Show your students that you take an interest in them and that they belong in your classroom.
d. Arrange learning experiences so that all students can gain at least a degree of esteem.
4. Enhance the attractions and minimize the dangers of growth choices.
5. Direct learning experiences toward feelings of success in an effort to encourage an orientation toward achievement, a positive self-concept, and a strong sense of self-efficacy.
a. Make use of objectives that are challenging but attainable and, when appropriate, that involve student input.
b. Provide knowledge of results by emphasizing the positive.
6. Try to encourage the development of need achievement, self-confidence, and self-direction in students who need these qualities.
a. Use achievement-motivation training techniques.
b. Use cooperative-learning methods.
7. Try to make learning interesting by emphasizing activity, investigation, adventure, social interaction, and usefulness.
This was excerpted from Chapter 11 of Biehler/Snowman, PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO TEACHING, 8/e, Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
