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Motivation: The steps towards it and what strategies to use Angela Rosales SED 3301 Dr. Anjoo Sikka Motivation paper

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Today teachers have to face a classroom full of students whom just want to go home and play games on the internet and text each other. Their drive, their motivation is so have fun and they cannot connect fun with school by any level. Students find school as a big prison cell in which they have to stay in for a certain amount of time before they can go home and actually have fun. This is the challenge teacher face now, how can teacher motivate students whom dont have the drive to do anything in school. My experts say that it is the teacher job to make lessons interesting and others say it just takes a bit of a push in the right direction and they will learn how to walk on their own. There are several factors that control motivation its self, before and after. There are five methods to motivation but one other motivational factor that the book talks about through the whole book is suggesting that teachers learn who they are teaching. To think while creating a lesson, whether or not Carlos will like the activity or of Brenda will find this fun or not, its the teachers job to understand her students and to create engaging lessons. It is also the teachers job to create an environment where the students can feel safe and where their minds have space to think and learn under the guidance of the teacher. So what are the beginning factors teachers need to consider while thinking about how to motivate their students? Some experts do start off with the lesson and the environment, some start off with Maslows hierarchy of needs, for the purposes of this paper; we will start with self-efficacy and self-esteem. What is Self-Efficacy? As defined by the book, self-efficacy is said to be a persons sense of being able to deal effectively with a particular task. It is our belief on how competent we are in a certain area, whether we fail or succeed. Bandura, from the book Educational Psychology, defines self-efficacy as peoples beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of

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performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. Most if not all people can explain how this would be the first step towards motivation. If we feel we cannot take the next step, teachers can give that helping hand to students while they walk over the tight rope to success. This helps teachers identify what students need help with and what students feel safe in. Why guide a student through material that is as easy if the teacher can guild them through another topic that is as difficult as learning a different language. Bandura and many other experts have focused on the role of self-efficacy in human agency, the capacity to coordinate learning skills, motivation and emotions to reach their goals. Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose their choices on the world. Students have a choice to hold the teacher hand while crossing the tight rope; students have a choice to ignore the teacher and the topic all together. Its all based on what the student wants to do, what he or she is willing to do, how much they are willing to work and how far they are willing to go. Another factor to consider is the relationship that self-esteem plays when talking about self-efficacy. The one thing to establish is that these two concepts are not the same and there is not clear or direct relationship between the two. Why bring it up? Many educators get these concepts confused and dont see the lack of a connection between these concepts. Self-efficacy is concerned with judgments of personal competence and self-esteem is concerned with judgments of self-worth. It is possible to have a topic mastered and to feel very low when it comes to self-esteem. Self-esteem can sometimes hinder the students learning in some cases but its not the driving factor as it why the student may be doing poorly in school.

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There are four sources of self efficacy that be implemented in a lesson that will help push the student in the right direction and enable the student to become more motivated at a later point. The four sources of self-efficacy are, Mastery Experience, Vicarious experiences, social persuasion and physiological arousal. The book explains that, Master experience entails that the student is directed by their own experiences. To increase efficacy using this method the success must be attributed to the ability, effort choices and strategies of the individual. Meaning that if the student is successful, they must acknowledge their own success and if they fail they must also acknowledge their failure. Vicarious experiences can be explained when a student sees another person their age doing a hand-stand, some may acknowledge they may not be able to do it but others will think that they have the capabilities of accomplishing the same thing. Vicarious Experiences just means that the students observes other students and depending on their failure or success, will drive other students to push towards the same goal. Social persuasion is normally directed by teacher but it can also come from peers. Social persuasion, how encouragement and different forms of feedback from a trusted individual can affect the students self-efficacy, It can often be seen as pep talk. In most cases but alone this cannot increase self-efficacy but it can help the student motivate themselves to push forward. The last of the 4 sources of self-efficacy is physiological arousal. Physiological arousals about how the student is feeling if they are excited or bored, hyper or docile, it depends on their positive or negative arousal. If the student feels excited about class, there is more of a chance that they will not only behave well but they will also are likely to do the work but if the student feels bored, the students has a very low drive to complete the task and motivation alone would be hard to push the student in the right direction. All four of these sources not only help

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students but it helps teachers open a crack to the doorway to motivation, it helps shed the light to those that the teacher needs to reach. In each sources, it can be turned into a negative thing and have a negative impact on the student. The teacher needs to closely monitor as much as she or he can to ensure that these sources are seen in a positive light. If a student were to get bad advice from someone they trust, there is a very low chance that student will trust the same person again. If the student continuously comes to class bored and nothing is done to change this, the student will be trained to think that the subject matter is dull and they are increasing their chances of failing the course. As you can see there are many factors that entail motivation and there are many other factors that play a role in self-efficacy. As noted above, there are positives and negative to everything; if something blocks the students potential then it stops a series of steps the students must take to be successful in school. The thing about habits in school is, bad habits are hard to break but its easy to convert a good habit into a bad habit. Its easy to make something negative but its ten times harder to make it into a positive again. Assuming that the teacher is capability of controlling these sources, the next step in moving towards motivation is selfregulation. Self-regulation can be defined in different way but the underlying definition is the process in which the individual monitors their progress when working toward a specific goal. An example of this could be when a student is reading a text book, when I read a textbook I decide how much time I will invest in a given chapter and if I have not completed in the time I set, I try to find an alternative to help me understand what I am reading better in order to learn and go

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through the material within a time frame what I did was I set a gal and monitored my progress toward that goal and if the goal was not met, I reevaluated my strategy to get to my goal and established new goal. Students in the class room do this on a daily basis. It can be when they are thinking about how much work they think they can do within a given time or being asked to review their answers over a test. In order to be self-regulated learners, students must need the knowledge about themselves, the subject, the task, and the strategies being used and how to reevaluate a goal that has not been met. This step can be difficult for students if they dont have the skills needed to regulate themselves or how to use strategies. Another aspect that can help students in difficult tasks is knowledge on different types of strategies they can use. This step is a very big step towards motivation and there are 3 influences that impact this step towards self-regulated and motivated learns. Students knowledge about themselves, the subject, the task, the strategies and the context in which they will apply their learning. Students that have knowledge of all these key points are considered to be expert students. Expert student know how to tackle a problem and how to solve it in a timely manner, they have a different approach in solving different problems and know that learning is a difficult task they must accomplish with the skills they have at the moment. Normally, I a class, you will have a couple of students that are considered expert students but the teacher must help other students in reaching a level close to being expert so they may be able to succeed later in school and in life. This is where different strategies in motivation help the students push through their difficulties and reach a high level of selfefficacy, self-regulation and motivation. Regulated learners are motivated learned. Motivation is another influence in self-regulated learners. These students find many tasks in school

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interesting because they value learning and not just completing a task to get a grade. As noted, there will be a couple of students whom are motivated in a class but as stated before it is the teacher job to learn about her students and learn how they can help their students reach this high level of thinking and motivation. For those students that need help in motivation, there are several strategies that can be used to help these students succeed in school. The last major influence in self-regulate learning is called Volition. Volition is simply defined as will power; selfdiscipline. Self-regulated learners know how to keep away from distractions an how to keep anxiety, laziness and drowsiness at bay. This is the step that I have seen many students struggle with. Students want to complete the work but they are bored, tired, and lazy and its not just in high schools, adults face this problem as well. As you can see these influences increase in difficulty and help teaches analyze at what level their students are and how they can help their students. The following step is implementing different motivation strategies that can be used with students to encourage, arouse and maintain behavior, which is how motivation is defined in the book. There are two ways in order to divide the strategies, one is called intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is associated with activities that are their own reward. Another way of explaining this type of motivation is when people, in general, get a sense of gratification completing a task or achieving a goal with no reward associate with it. In school when students complete a difficult task, students may feel accomplished because they finished the difficult task and they expect no reward. The other category for motivation is extrinsic motivation; this is the opposite of intrinsic motivation. The students seek an external reward; an example of extrinsic motivation would be if a student turn in all his homework for a week then the teacher

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will give the student a homework pass. Another example of this type of motivation would be, if the students got an average score of 85 on 3 tests, he or she may skip the next test. Its about the reward and the gratification of getting something. Something is the keep word in distinguishing both, in intrinsic they dont get a something and in extrinsic they get a something. Next, I will talk about the different types of motivation. In motivation there are five views/strategies to motivation that teacher can use in their classroom. The five views are Behavioral, Humanistic, Cognitive, Social Cognitive and Sociocultural. I will start off by explain the view that I believe would be most effective in a classroom and work down the list to the view I believe would be least effective. All five have their positives and negative but as I said, this would be my personal view on which type of motivation would be most effective and which type I would use in a classroom. I will start off with the Cognitive approach to motivation. This approach emphasizes that the students behavior is not determined by the reward or punishment but by the students thinking, their belief. I strongly believe that if a student believes in him or herself they will be capable of amounting to anything. For moment place yourself in a 9th grade biology classroom, the teacher is about to administer a test and you spent all week studying for it. As soon as you look at that first question your mind goes blank, the same goes for the second question and the third. At this point you may take one of two sides. You may either believe you can be successful and get a good grade or you may believe that you have already failed and wont try anymore. The student that believes they can accomplish the task will take a deep breath and work the test around their knowledge instead of letting the test overwhelm them and fail. What person

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believe is key to everything we do, if we believe we can lose 5 lbs., we will but if I decide to eat pizza and believe I failed, I will probably just keep eating pizza and gain 5 lbs. I actually used this theory when I was reading on the different types of motivation, with my dyslexia I have to believe that I can accomplish reading a chapter in a book. If I were to be the student that didnt believe I could accomplish this, I would probably try to find an easy way out of the assignment or I may not even be in a university all together. As you can note, this view falls under intrinsic motivation. In the examples I have provided, none of the cases empathize a reward. A way to implement this type of motivation is by reinforcing your student that can accomplish the task by helping the student set realistic goals and provide them with the strategies in achieving their goals. The teacher could also take small steps into bigger concepts and daily ask the students to reflect what they have done and what they have learned, this will help the student believe that they can accomplish set goals or tasks and monitor their own achievements. The negative side to this would be that this is based on the students perception of themselves and what they are feeling and in some cases it is difficult to see what the student is feeling, which is why when using this type of motivation, it is important the teacher be very observant of her class. Sociocultural is the next type of motivation I wish to talk about. This type of motivation has the student actively participate in learning communities but still maintaining the students identity while being in the group. The leaning community emphasizes what they perceive themselves to be, for example, I am an artist; I would more than likely hang out with a community that supports how I perceive myself and learn from my community. The community acts as a support group for the students aspirations and acts as a group of advisors when you need help. The good thing about this type of motivation is the support system.

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Students also become social and learn from their peers how to be successful. They support each other and stop each other from failing; another word for this would be a clique. A clique is a group of students that act a certain way and want to be a certain thing. The way to implement this in your class is by developing groups of students that want to be a certain thing or develop groups that have the same style of learning and have them help each other. By using this type of motivation, the students see their peers excelling and motivate the other students into thinking, wow I can do that too. There are some things that are wrong with this model, the first being fights within groups. In any group there will always be that one person that refuses to do any work or it could be that the student doesnt see himself in that particular group anymore and ends up fighting with his peers and get isolated and because all the other groups are close then it would be some time and some effort before he could join another group. You run the danger of the student feeling isolated and alone. Another problem to this type of motivation is what if the student doesnt see him or herself in a group? What is that student going to do then? He has two options, either change him to fit into a group or remain isolated. This type of motivation is also intrinsic because the students are working to be like their peers in their groups, they want to be as successful and if they feel like they are failing they are more than likely to ask for him from their peers and try again to excel on a task. The humanistic type of motivation emphasizes personal freedom, choice and selfdetermination. This type of motivation explains why people act the way they do and why. Its a students why of obtaining their personal needs for self-actualization. Students learn to be themselves no matter what and do what they need to do in order to survive, to be happy and to learn. This is the motivation style that is in the middle of it all, meaning out of five types of

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motivation, its third in my list of effectiveness. With this type of motivation, each student must have Their own goals, their own aspirations; they will all act in a certain way to achieve what they want. I believe that ultimately the children learn to be brats; they get what they want and only think about themselves. The way to implement this type of motivation in your class is by working with each student individually, all 21 of them for at least 4 periods in a day. Helping each student set up their goals and fulfills their individual needs. This type of motivation would go great when paired with either type of motivation previously mentioned. If humanistic was paired with cognitive approach motivation, you can empathize that student push towards thinking positively of themselves and at the same time help fill in the gaps they need to feel fulfilled. Humanistic with sociocultural could work extremely well because as students are in groups, the group can act a support system and also fill many needs of the students and if the student needs extra help the teacher can guild the student onto the right direction and back into the group. This type of motivation is intrinsic as well, this means that as the student are striving to be their selves and fulfilling their needs, those need that are being filled are their rewards, they dont need any external source of a reward. Social Cognitive motivation focuses on, If I try hard, can I succeed?, If I succeed will the outcome be valuable or rewarding to me? This method is based on the students behavior and cognitive approach. They will only do something if they believe the effort they put in equals the type of reward they will receive. The values of the task and reward are weighted out; meaning this type of motivation can either be intrinsic but mostly extrinsic. I believe this type of

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motivation is second to worst type of motivation simply because the student is being taught that they are to act on something if they get something out of it. They can simply feel rewarded by completing the task, they need candy or a pass or a toy or something they believe is fair for the amount of work they put int. that is like me saying, I will only finish this paper if I get a spa appointment from my professor, the reward has to be something the student will like and work for. For how far can this teacher go before the rewards dont mean anything to the student, what will the teacher do then. I dont even believe this can go well paired with any other type of motivation because students should not complete a task for an external reward. The only grade levels I can see this working in would be in elementary school because students at that age will do anything even if its a twenty-five cent toy you get from a ball machine. Once you get to middle school students get more demanding and learn that every task comes with a reward. Personally I dont see how this could be a good type of motivation that I could use in my classroom. The next type of motivation works with a reward system solely and that is the behavioral approach to motivation. This type of motivation works with a reward system, incentive for students to work and finish their task. As the book states, student motivation begins with a careful analysis of the incentive and rewards present in the classroom. This sentence is the second sentence explaining behavioral motivation and its the reason why I think it would be the least effective of the five type of motivation. Unlike social cognitive motivation, students are at least thinking about their actions; in this type of motivation students just do something for a reward. This can be applied to everyday life, some adults will only do something if they receive a reward, and money is the reward in most cases. This is the

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type of motivation many adults choice when studying for a future career. My own sister has asked me, why teach? There is no money in teaching, go into business. Many elementary teachers use a reward system to motivate their classrooms; I do not see anything wrong when using this approach in elementary but with limitations. Teachers should abandon this method once the students are in middle school because they will learn and take with them that if they finish their work, they get a cookie. In conclusion, I have explained the steps needed to work towards motivation and the type of learners that will quickly learn to motivate themselves. I then explained the five views/types of motivation and ranked them in the order I believe works from most effective to least effective and explained why. When I ranked the types of motivation, it was my personal view; it is not based off of scientific data. The steps towards motivation are steps that I learned from the book I use in my class. Teaching is an art, you have to study your class and work around them to create an environment that will promote learning and create a safe space for students to learn. Teaching is an ongoing process that works with students, parents and faculty; teachers must be flexible and need to learn how to take steps towards providing this safe and effective learning environment. Motivation is about fulfilling needs but it is also about teaching students how to motivate themselves as they grow older into adults. Teachers must provide a set or strategies that will benefit the students and help them develop self-efficacy and selfesteem. Motivation is the key to unlocking a world of possibilities but the teacher must know how to use that key.

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References

Merriam-Webster (2012). www.merriam-webster.com/. 2012 Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Retrieved April 20, 2012, from http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/motivation. Woolfolk, A. (2010). Educational psychology. (11 ed., pp. 376-411). New Jersey: Pearson.