While teachers continuously try to make learning activity a fun-filled process for the students, every class has pupils who seem uninterested in the same. Students who are disorganised, lazy or apathetic to their lessons have natural difficulties in learning. The main challenge for a teacher is to motivating students to learn.
As a teacher, you may feel overwhelmed while handling such students, and it is entirely understandable. However, you should not quit trying and know how to motivate the students to learn because school motivation works great on students interest with learning difficulties rather than any other process.
10 Ways of Motivating Students to Learn
Here, we are discussing ten such ideas for motivating students to learn.
1. Encourage Them for Learning
Sometimes the students feel incredibly discouraged or frustrated because of their learning difficulties which make them lazy or disorganised regarding learning. If you encourage them and let them realise that they can also perform well and flawlessly execute the given tasks, then they will start feeling motivated soon. Their initial success leads them to attempt big tasks, and they feel confident. Thus student engages more learning-based course material.
2. Let Them Do the Work
Your students will not learn a particular thing until they do it on their own. Whether it is science, math, literature or art and craft; you must make them do the tasks on their own. Please help them to believe that you are there; right beside them.
But it is their task, and they have to do it on their own. Only listening to lectures will not help them in learning the things you want them to know in your class. Their active participation is necessary.
3. Make Learning Fun
Students often find it challenging to learn because they see the process tedious. If you can present learning activity in front of them in a fun-filled manner, they will start enjoying the lessons and find them attractive.
A teacher should feel passionate and confident about what he or she is teaching and learning in class. Showing students the passion and confidence, students also start to feel enthusiastic about learning. Add some humour in your class and make the session a bit interactive.
4. Introduce Friendly Competition
Children are naturally competitive. They love to find themselves winning the race. Use this instinct of your students as a method of motivating them for learning.
Introduce healthy and friendly competition in classes and let them participate in the same. This can be a robust tool for learning motivation for students in the class while the conventional procedures are not working.
5. Use Understandable Materials
If you use understandable materials in classes, then your students will automatically feel motivated to learn new things from you. Give a lot of real-life examples, use reference books and tell them stories that can help them to understand the matter well. Slowly students achieve their goal based on learning.
6. Give Them Opportunities to Share Their Views
Call the shyest girl in your class and ask her to share her views on a particular topic after you teach them the same. Let her feel comfortable and confident about sharing her thoughts. This will motivate her to concentrate on the class and your teaching better than before. Therefore, she will feel motivated to learn.
7. Have an One-On-One Conversation
To understand the problem of a particular student, you must talk to him or her personally. One-on-one conversation helps the teachers to understand the issues faced by a specific student. At the same time, this kind of communication between teacher and student helps the student to open up in front of the teacher while no one else is listening to them.
Ask them what they need to change their situation or reduce their difficulties in learning. You both can develop a plan together to overcome the issues.
8. Make the Parents Involved
Getting the parents involved in the child’s learning process is the best thing you can do as a teacher. Learning should be a constant process for every child, which should not be restricted inside the four walls of the classrooms.
Hence, the parents should also know what the difficulties their children facing while learning and how they can help them to overcome the are same.
9. Take Help of Technology
Without the help of modern technologies, it seems impossible to make learning interesting for the students. For this reason, you can take the use of modern technologies like Smartphones, Tablets, E-books, digital lessons to reduce the level of difficulties for a student. Technology can quickly increase student’s attraction towards learning.
10. Believe Your Students
To motivate a student, you have to believe in him or her. Have full faith in them. Believe them when they are sharing their difficulties with you. Listen to them carefully and try to find out the right direction jointly. When you show your faith in them, you can motivate them in the best possible manner.
Different students may have additional problems regarding learning, and they need different types of solutions too. But these tips mentioned above are useful for typical situations and can help you to encourage students to learn new things in class. You can also suggest students watch a motivational video of the famous award-winning English and social study teacher Larry Ferlazzo on YOUTUBE.