How can I as a teacher encourage intrinsic motivation by focusing on effort rather than intelligence, when my high school students will feel discouraged because they feel effort as a sign of low ability? What are some ways/examples to get my high school students to be motivated intrinsically without them feeling unmotivated by their effort being praised?
The main reason that motivating students intrinsically is usually considered more effective and beneficial than extrinsically is because intrinsic involves increasing a student’s self-efficacy so they can learn to naturally motivate themselves with the confidence and knowledge that their issues are controllable more times than they realize. Extrinsic motivation involves rewarding students with tangible rewards and leads the student to only working hard with effort only because they know they will get the desired tangible rewards, even if the rewards are praising their intelligence (which is bad to do anyway…you should praise their effort instead). This isn’t a great idea because once the teacher stops giving the tangible rewards, the students will eventually stop working with effort and they will end up exerting even less effort than before the rewards were starting to be given out.
To increase intrinsic motivation for my students, I would want to make sure to do whatever it takes for the students to attribute their outcomes to factors that they can control, and to help increase their self-efficacy and self-determination. When I introduce new musical ideas in my performing ensemble classes, I need to right then show an example of how that musical idea plays a significant role in a piece of music. The same can be done for music theory classes I might teach. Helping the students to become “mastery” oriented by challenging their zone of proximal development can also really help, but without setting unrealistic goals for them. Finally, I need to praise the students effort in learning music and practicing consistently, rather than praising them for how musically knowledgeable/intelligent they are.
Perhaps you can point out how hard someone is working. You can definitely tell when someone is trying really hard. I'd make an example of them as a hard worker (watch who you do this too though, people like my best friend, Josh hate attention, and will perform worse to avoid it.), and talk to those who aren't putting a lot of effort into what they're doing about ways to get better.
ReplyDeleteI'm not quite sure I understand your question. Do you mean you believe students tend to feel that they only NEED to put in a lot of effort if they have low ability? Well, the only thing you can do in those situations is communicate your expectations for success in your classroom.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how mastery orientation connections with ZPD. The orientation describes WHY the students wants to learn the information. Scaffolding through the ZPD is a method of teaching. I can imagine that a performance orientation may connect with challenges within a group of students in their ZPD if competition is created....
Otherwise I really like your ideas here.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I understand your quesiton either. But another question that goes along with this is, how could someone be intrincally motivated when the do put a lot of effort into something and then they do not do good on an assignment. From this I would have my students set up meetings with me to help them understand the material they did not understand. If you help them find the areas which are causing them confusion then if they fix the confusion they may feel more confident and will be intrincally motivated to do well.
ReplyDeleteI, also, was a little bit confused about your question. In my opinion, if a teacher praises all of their students on effort, they won't be discouraged. I can see how if the teacher praises some on effort and some on intelligence, the ones praised for effort would get discouraged. However, I think the book is stressing to praise everyone for effort, and not to praise anyone for intelligence. This would eliminate the discouragement, I think?
ReplyDeleteI think the main thing you need to do is make it clear that effort is NOT indicative of unintelligence. Hard work and effort are traits that need to me encouraged, and they are used and valued in every aspect of life. It is very easy for high school students to get stuck on the "effort means I'm stupid" idea,and we need to get them out of it.
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