Chapter 12 of the Woolfolk textbook was all about motivation. The two main factors of motivation are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation expresses Woolfolk on page 463. The intrinsic is the internal motivation and extrinsic is the external motivation. The reasons behind the students motivation is also differing. The intrinsic motivation is the natural tendency to conquer personal interests and capabilities that we don't have to do but personally want to. The extrinsic motivation on the other hand, is motivation to do it because of what someone will get out of it rather than an interest in the activity or subject matter.
Everyday I can see the difference of the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in my students. For example, one of our students hates to do the five minuet rotation in occupational therapy. The only way we can actually get him to even transition into the group is by letting him know that if he goes and completes his work he can get his preferred activity or toy. However, I have also recognized his intrinsic motivation kick in when he realizes that his work is doing arts and crafts in occupational therapy. Then, he wants to rotate to occupational therapy and even tries to escape the other stations to get back to occupational therapy.
Additionally, chapter 12 of the Woolfolk textbook also discussed the teacher's attributions triggers the student's attributions. At first it seems trivial to explain that teachers act with sympathy when progress is due to external factors outside of the students control and reprimand the students who's progress is due to factors within the student's control, such as laziness, (Woolfolk, p.477). As I continued to read and comprehend this bit of the chapter I realized I never thought what affect this would have on the student. This action can actually indirectly be telling students that they are incapable of succeeding and the teacher will take pity on them by overlooking their failures. This is obviously not the message that teachers want to be passing along to their students.
Further, as a future teacher I will try hard to navigate how to motivate my students to get the most out of their own individual learning. I hope to be able to carefully navigate how to get students to want to learn and contribute to their society with intrinsic motivation intact because I would hate to lose it by over rewarding a student while assuming I am catering to their extrinsic motivation.
I did my research paper on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I did find it interesting how intrinsic motivation could get affected by extrinsic rewards. I know with my kids we use extrinsic rewards all of the time to get them to do the work we are working on. Some of this is either time on the computer or candy of some sort. This is not a good way to go about getting a kid motivated though because there are times we do not have what the kid wants and this ends up leading to the student getting mad because they are not getting what the want. That is awesome about your student. Sometimes we do just have to get the student to know the fun parts of the activity to have them do it. This is why as a teacher I do hope I do, in a responsible learning environment way, get my students to love my class.
ReplyDeleteThe teacher should never react or give sympathy to the student if the student feels incapable. We, as teachers, should always be encouraging our students to do their very best and show them they are capable of anything and everything.