Motivated Student

Offers teachers practical advice on how they can motivate students in any grade and help them become more focused and ready to learn.

This is a book about teachers’ classroom motivating styles. Motivating style is the interpersonal tone and face-to-face behavior the teacher relies on when trying to motivate students to engage in classroom activities and procedures. The over-arching goal of the book is to help teachers work through the professional developmental process to learn how to provide instruction in ways that students will find to be motivationally-enriching, satisfying, and engagement-generating. To realize this goal, the book features six parts: Part 1: Introduction, introduces what teachers are to support—namely, student motivation; Part 2: Motivating Style, explains what a supportive motivating style is; Part 3: “How to,” overviews the recommended motivationally-supportive instructional strategies one-by-one and step-by-step; Part 4: Workshop, walks the reader through the skill-building workshop experience; Part 5: Benefits, details all the student, teacher, and classroom benefits that come from an improved motivating style; and Part 6: Getting Started, discusses ways to begin using these skills in the classroom. Based on a successful workshop program run by the authors, teachers successfully improve their classroom motivating style. In doing so, they experience gains in their teaching skill and efficacy, job satisfaction, a renewed passion for teaching, and a more satisfying relationship with their students. This multiauthored book provides teachers with the practical, concrete, step-by-step, skill-based "how to" they need to develop a highly supportive motivating style.

Research has shown time and again that the traditional reward-punishment model does nothing to boost student achievement. In The Motivated Student: Unlocking the Enthusiasm for Learning, veteran educator Bob Sullo suggests a different approach: cultivating students' inner drive to learn by addressing their essential psychological needs.Drawing from in-depth interviews with successful educators, counselors, and administrators and a careful analysis of the research on classroom motivation, Sullo provides an indispensable blueprint for ensuring that students in grades 4-12 are engaged in the classroom. He offers practical, clear-cut strategies for getting students focused and ready to learn byEliminating external rewards for learning,Building positive relationships with students,Creating realistic expectations for your students,Developing lesson plans that are relevant to students' lives, andPlanning with students' psychological needs in mind.As every teacher knows, students learn best when they actually want to learn. Whether at the elementary or high school level, this book will make you think about who your students really are and help you develop a culture of inquiry, trust, and engagement that will release each child's enthusiasm for learning.

What really motivates students to learn? What gets them interested—and keeps them interested—in pursuing knowledge and understanding? Recent neuroscientific findings have uncovered the source of our motivation to learn, or as neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp terms it, the drive to seek. Seeking is what gets us out of bed in the morning, the engine that powers our actions, and the need that manifests as curiosity. Informed by new findings on the nature of the brain's seeking system, internationally renowned educators Gayle Gregory and Martha Kaufeldt have identified key brain-friendly strategies for improving student motivation, knowledge acquisition, retention, and academic success. In this book, readers will learn * The science behind the motivated brain and how it relates to student learning. * Strategies for preparing a motivational environment and lesson. * Strategies for creating engaging learning experiences that capitalize on the brain's natural ways of learning. * Strategies for improving depth of knowledge, complex thinking, and synthesis to get students into the ever-desired state of flow. * How attention to the neuroscience of motivation will improve the classroom environment and student learning. The Motivated Brain shows teachers how to harness the power of their students' intrinsic motivation to make learning fun, engaging, and meaningful.

Do your math students offer one- or two-word responses in class? Do your carefully planned lessons feel unsuccessful? "I've tried everything," you think. "Shouldn't math be a little more engaging?" Ilana Seidel Horn understands your frustration. Participating in math class feels socially risky to students. Staying silent often feels safer. In Motivated, Ilana shows why certain teaching strategies create classroom climates where students want to join in. Five factors of motivational math classrooms She introduces six different math teachers, in a range of school settings, who found that motivation requires more than an interesting problem. Their experiences highlight five factors that lower the risks and raise the benefits of participation: Belongingness comes from students' frequent, pleasant interactions with their peers and teachers. Meaningfulness answers the question, "When are we going to use this?" Competence helps all students discover their mathematical strengths. Accountability inspires students to participate in classroom life. Autonomy produces learners with tools for making sense of their work and seeing it through. These features of motivational math classrooms are explored in-depth. You'll find suggestions for identifying what impedes each factor, along with strategies for weaving them into your instruction. You'll also be introduced to an online community who support each other's efforts to teach this way. A guidebook for motivating math students Motivated is a guidebook for teachers unsatisfied with questions met by silence. By examining what works in other classrooms and following the example of been-there teachers, you'll start changing slumped shoulders and blank stares into energetic, engaged learners.

Written specifically for teachers, this book offers a wealth of research-based principles for motivating students to learn. Its focus on motivational principles rather than motivation theorists or theories leads naturally into discussion of specific classroom strategies. Throughout the book these principles and strategies are tied to the realities of contemporary schools (e.g., curriculum goals) and classrooms (e.g., student differences, classroom dynamics). The author employs an eclectic approach to motivation that shows how to effectively integrate the use of extrinsic and intrinsic strategies. Guidelines are provided for adapting motivational principles to group and individual differences and for doing "repair work" with students who have become discouraged or disaffected learners.

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition was published and its influence has been wide and deep. The report summarized insights on the nature of learning in school-aged children; described principles for the design of effective learning environments; and provided examples of how that could be implemented in the classroom. Since then, researchers have continued to investigate the nature of learning and have generated new findings related to the neurological processes involved in learning, individual and cultural variability related to learning, and educational technologies. In addition to expanding scientific understanding of the mechanisms of learning and how the brain adapts throughout the lifespan, there have been important discoveries about influences on learning, particularly sociocultural factors and the structure of learning environments. How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures provides a much-needed update incorporating insights gained from this research over the past decade. The book expands on the foundation laid out in the 2000 report and takes an in-depth look at the constellation of influences that affect individual learning. How People Learn II will become an indispensable resource to understand learning throughout the lifespan for educators of students and adults.