When I ask teachers what strategies they use to motivate students, one principle that comes up often is making the content relevant. Relevance is less about what content you present but more about how the learning task is presented. Students like to see how what they are learning will benefit them in their career or life. Danelle Maxwell tries to ask at least once for every class, “Why do we need to learn this and how will you use this?” If she does not have a good answer, then she does not teach the topic.
Rebecca Jenkins, the Director of the Occupational Therapy Assistant Program, incorporates case study work into her class to make the material relevant. She uses a “quick fire” technique. Students draw a scenario and then take five minutes to prepare a treatment. After students carry out the treatment plan, they debrief to work through the struggles they had with the plan. Recently, she gave her class scenarios related to fine motor skills and had the students create a “treatment in a box.” They prepared a small box with treatment ideas for decreased hand strength and fine motor manipulation that they could take into a school, nursing home or home health situation. They tried these treatments on a simulated patient and could see immediately how these learning tasks related to their future career.
Crystal Hofegartner, an online history instructor, likes to ramp up the excitement about history by making it personal for her students. She recognizes that, “Some history teachers don’t want people to talk about genealogy or family history because it isn’t real history.” She likes to show students that history isn’t just about famous names and dates but it is also about their families. This makes history come alive for them. On a personal note, I remember my first American History class in college. One of my assignments was to write my own family history. I wrote about my grandfather coming over from Lebanon as an immigrant and arriving in Boston. I have kept that paper to this day even though it has been 40 years since I wrote it because it helped me record my own family’s history and inspired me to love history.
Lane Crisp, our Drafting and Design Instructor, ties all of his assignments together so his students create a portfolio of their work. Students can maintain their portfolio through each of his DDT courses and it helps them to be better prepared for an interview when the time comes. His students tell him that they were hired as a drafter because they were prepared with a portfolio of design work showing the skills they learned in school. He allows students to correct their mistakes and resubmit these assignments at midterm and again during finals. They are more motivated to relearn and perfect their skills since the portfolio is more than a class assignment; they are visual demonstrations of their skills as a drafter to help them get a job.
Bad joke for the week
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Ending Thought
“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” John Dewey