5 Ideas to Improve Student Motivation [Super Simple]

Just like you need to motivate the employees of a company by offering them non-financial and financial rewards, so they can work at their full potential, the same is the case with students.

They need to be motivated in order to understand different concepts better and ace their exams. Some struggling students can even take help from an online tutor. As a teacher, you can incorporate different actionable strategies into your lesson plans and classroom to encourage your students to excel academically.

Therefore, we have mentioned 5 simple ideas to improve your students’ motivation. Read below to discover!

Clearly Define Learning Objectives

As soon as a new class session starts at the beginning of the year, you need to mention learning objectives and rules to your students clearly. Without being aware of the objectives, they will be directionless and won’t be motivated to learn or perform better.

You can also inspire them to do better when defining learning objectives with positive reinforcements. Tell them that they need to trust their abilities and work hard to succeed academically.

Hold Positive Competitions

You need to encourage “positive” competition in the classroom, so your students can try to push their limits without having negative feelings or attitudes toward the other classmates.

For this, you can try group games or quizzes on a weekly basis or at the end of a chapter to ensure all your students try to win these competitions and feel like a winner!

Offer Rewards

Nothing can be more discouraging than not appreciating or praising your students. If you notice your students’ grades getting better with time, you must praise them with positive and motivating phrases.

Moreover, you can also offer them rewards. It can be as simple as putting a golden star sticker on their notebook, giving them chocolates/candies, or arranging a pizza party for them. Your students will appreciate this gesture, and they wouldn’t want to disappoint you. 

Make Your Students Feel Valued

Most students don’t pay attention to class lectures or complete their assigned tasks because they think that their teacher doesn’t really value them to care about their academic progress.

Therefore, no matter how hard you put your efforts into lesson plans and resources, you must hand over some classroom responsibilities to students and keep rotating these tasks from one student to another.

Assigning classroom responsibilities is not a burden for them, it’s more like a privilege because they believe that you value them enough to hand over one of the classroom tasks to them.

Make Learning Fun

Who says classroom learning has to be all about textbooks? If you introduce fun activities to teach a lesson to your students, they will be even more motivated to pay attention to it and try their best to understand those concepts.

Textbook-based learning can feel like a chore to them. Hence, you can try thinking of relevant, fun activities for different subjects.

For instance, you can take them on a field trip, use chart papers or drawings, display a video on a projector, or ask them to play an educational game and share their score.