The 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.

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.

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.

`The book is a pleasure to read and whether the model is adopted in whole or in part, as a lens through which to examine and understand what is going on in a learning community it has much to offer′ - Improving Schools `As a head of department in a comprehensive school in an education action zone, this book has made me think about not only the way I relate to the students I work with but also about relationships with the teachers in my department. I therefore warmly recommend to teachers and especially to headteachers and others in positions of leadership in both primary and secondary phases′ - Emotional & Behavioural Difficulties `The Motivated School is an important book. It addresses a number of key issues which are central to Scottish educational policy, including Better Behaviour: Better Learning, Inclusion and Raising Attainment. It is also a controversial book, challenging as it does "woolly thinking" on issues such as self-esteem, rewards and motivation to learn′ - Scottish Education Review `This book is well written and demonstrates the author′s commitment and dedication to an individual′s psychological well-being and positive, effective learning environments′ - The Psychology of Education Review `The best education books frequently challenge our assumptions. Alan McLean′s The Motivated School demonstrates with a kind of forensic exactness, the way we over-emphasize the importance of student′s self-esteem. We can′t make students motivated: we can only create the right conditions. There is much to admire in this book. It isn′t difficult to read, and the format is generous and accessible. I suspect all school leaders will learn something from it′ - Geoff Barton, Times Educational Supplement, Friday Magazine Some students do not achieve their full potential, while others of similar ability achieve more than predicted. This book shows how important students′ motivational mindsets can be in influencing the way they learn. The author brings together evidence from recent research, shows how successful learning contexts can be created, and provides real-life suggestions for teachers working with disengaged learners. Increasing pressure to meet targets has sent schools down the path of trying to motivate students `from the outside′. By recognizing that genuine motivation comes `from the inside′ and that self-motivation needs to be nurtured, this book provides a practical guide to both teacher and student motivation. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking to develop their skills in motivating young people to learn. It will be of particular interest to teachers, educators and management at all levels.

Written specifically for teachers, this book offers a wealth of research-based principles for motivating students to learn within the realities of a classroom learning community. Its focus on motivational principles rather than motivational theorists or

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.

Written specifically for teachers, Motivating Students to Learn offers a wealth of research-based principles on the subject of student motivation for use by classroom teachers. Now in its fourth edition, this book discusses specific classroom strategies by tying these principles to the realities of contemporary schools, curriculum goals, and classroom dynamics. The authors lay out effective extrinsic and intrinsic strategies to guide teachers in their day-to-day practice, provide guidelines for adapting to group and individual differences, and discuss ways to reach students who have become discouraged or disaffected learners. This edition features new material on the roles that classroom goal setting, developing students’ interest, and teacher-student and peer relationships play in student motivation. It has been reorganized to address six key questions that combine to explain why students may or may not be motivated to learn. By focusing more closely on the teacher as the motivator, this text presents a wide range of motivational methods to help students see value in the curriculum and lessons taught in the classroom.

This work brings together the experience of educators, trainers and students searching for ways of increasing student motivation. Links between motivation and training, learning and assessment processes are examined through case studies set in a broad range of subject discipline contexts.