Talking about motivation motivates me to brainstorm ways to motivate students.... Motivation is key for students to care enough to learn, considering the hard work that is required in learning. So we need to come up with ways to make it fun, to draw attention away from the boring side of it, and paint the curriculum in an interesting light. A huge responsibility we have as teachers is redirecting students' minds away from boredom and toward engagement.
The video we watched on the piano key stairs portrayed "the Fun Theory" -which I totally buy. The goal was to get people to use the stairs over the escalator, and it was successful. Something like 60% more people took the stairs, because the stairs were fun. They were startling, confusing, unexpected, and aroused curiosity instantly. Why would you take the escalator (which now appears to be quite boring) when you could stomp up the stairs and create a classical masterpiece at the same time? Thats what the brains behind the experiment were doing -they were redirecting focus. People still had the same choice -escalator or stairs. But this time, when people approached the decision, (judging from the results) most participants weren't thinking about how late they were to work, or how tired their legs were. They're focus jumped to how they could be a part of something so randomly wonderful.
This is what I want to do in my classroom. I don't plan to trick my students or lie about the lesson in any way, because that isn't necessary. All we need to do is present our lessons, whether its math, science, english, or art, in a way that takes the focus away from the discomfort of tackling new, difficult concepts, and push the focus toward something attractive. That can be any number of things, a number of extrinsic or intrinsic rewards. But in any case, if we can redirect complaining comments to excited remarks about our lessons, we have done a good thing.
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