Blog Post 1, Intrinsic Motivation

I understand all of the concepts, but I still feel as if I don't know how to encourage intrinsic motivation in students. What are some specific examples? I know that's one of our blog examples, but I think getting some other perspectives of ideas would be helpful.

Intrinsic motivation is important because it's essentially what teachers strive for students to have. We want students to want to learn, not to learn so that they can receive an A or some other reward. It's really important to strive for intrinsic motivation so that when there are no extrinsic rewards, students will still want to complete tasks. For example, now that we're in college and we're choosing a career, there are extracurricular things (such as clubs about our major, masterclasses, etc) that we should want to go to, not because it looks good on our resume, but because we will grow as future educators (or doctors, lawyers, etc.). It will help our careers in the future to go to those things, so having intrinsic motivation is really important. As far as the school setting, we really want to encourage academic intrinsic motivation, especially in high school where less of that seems to exist. It's important for all subjects, because students are more likely to get more out of the class when they're studying simply to learn more, not to obtain a reward. As far as when it's best used, I think I'd say at the beginning of a course when students are naturally interested in the topic. For me at least, whenever I take a new class, I'm interested in learning for a little while- but, if I decide I don't like it, that's when I begin to lose my intrinsic motivation. If teachers really encourage intrinsic motivation right from the start, I think it would have more staying power throughout the course. Also, things such as masterclasses or movies about the topic being studied would have greater attendance if students have intrinsic motivation. Usually, things like this have extra credit attached to them (for example, if you go see the movie out about the brain, i'll give you 5 extra points). However, if students have good intrinsic motivation, they'll want to go see the movie because they want to learn. This happened to me in high school - a hypnotist came, and my psychology teacher encouraged us to go (we were learning about hypnotism at the time), and I went not for extra credit or any other external reward, but simply so I could witness it and learn more. This would be great for students, because they'd learn so much more about the topic in a new and interesting way.

Something that I thought of as far as intrinsic motivation is grading. Grading seems to be a huge form of extrinsic motivation - students want that A, so work hard. In a choir setting, I think a good way to increase intrinsic motivation is to not grade on how well they sing (or attendance, or any of that), but how much they've improved or grown over the semester. Naturally, if I tell the students this, they'll want an A, so they'll try really hard to improve (which is extrinsic motivation, not intrinsic). So, I think a good way to do this would be to not tell students what I'm grading them on. I could explain to them that their grade is on a number of factors, but never really get into specifics. Also, I can tell them it's not very important to the class. Therefore, students won't know what they're being graded on, so hopefully they just work to improve instead of working to receive an A. My choir teacher did this, and it really helped students to become more intrinsically motivated - at first, they were curious as to what they were being graded on, but after a few weeks they stopped caring about the grade and just worked on becoming better singers.