How to Motivate Students and Increase Learning Potential

It seems more and more teachers are starting work in the classroom without having the benefit of methods courses. Methods courses help potential instructors learn how to give students motivation for learning the material and different ways of teaching that material. One of the best ways to increase interest, motivation and understanding is to start with a preset, a brief lesson plan that illustrates the basic idea, often by relating it to students' understanding or daily lives.

For example, a lesson plan might call for the concept of including specific detail in an essay or paragraph. The preset needs to illustrate the importance of such detail. Draw a series of five boxes, all touching each other in various places.

Choose a student to go to the front of the class and describe the picture for the rest of the students to draw. The describer can't use any gestures, and the class can't ask any questions. Once they are finished, have them draw the picture again. Gestures are still not allowed, but this time the class can ask for clarification. The second picture should turn out much closer to the original than the first attempt, the preset illustrating the idea that more specific language makes it easier for readers to understand the mental picture or idea writers are attempting to explain.

To introduce a lesson plan on study skills, a preset might be made of an impossible test. It should include information from a variety of disciplines so that most students will not feel comfortable with all answers. It should be long, impossible to be completed in the time frame given, and suggested as an easy test by the instructor. These elements challenge students' frustration level, even those who are typically good students. Questions might include a business model that uses jargon like "the cost-push model of inflation . . . a) increase aggregate supply etc, b) decrease aggregate supply etc,," a long sentence requiring students to mark all parts of speech "including participles, gerunds, and infinitives (include their objects)," a question in a foreign language, a complicated math story problem. This exercise allows most students to feel the kind of pressure so many do with ordinary tests since their motivation is typically high, and it paves the way to discuss test anxiety and the importance of studying well.

A lesson plan on memory would benefit from a preset that starts with numbers scattered about on an overhead or behind a screen on a chalkboard. Give students a minute to look at the numbers, and then hide them and ask students to write down what they remember. Discuss why they got the ones they did. Chances are that there will be some personal relevance to the connections ("it's the first four numbers of my locker combination," for example). Look at the numbers again and talk about context, how the numbers might be more easily remembered if they are put in a familiar format. Here are some examples: 6498721 (phone number), 089375416 (social security number), 13579 (odd numbers in order) or 51466 (a birth date). This preset stresses the importance of connecting ideas in order to achieve best memory retrieval.

Playing the game Deep, but not Profound is an excellent preset for a lesson plan on disabilities. Tell students, "The only rule of the game is that you can't tell anyone else the rules. When you think you know how the game is played, give an example." Then start to give examples, such as "It is deep, but not profound; it is pool, but not lake; it is creep, but not crawl; it is green, but not yellow." (The rule is that the words have double vowels.) Go on until everyone gets it or the frustration level seems to be getting too high. Then discuss the insights. For instance, it is frustrating to learn when you don't know the rules. It is psychologically unwise to say, "It's easy"; if someone didn't get it, then he feels stupid, and if he did get it after such a comment, the payoff is lessened. You can also try writing the words on a chalkboard since some people are visual learners and may see the answer that way. This preset helps students see how it feels to be left out of the learning experience, how people learn differently, and how something seemingly easy can confound others.

Presets stimulate motivation, which is one of the keys to learning. When further discussing lesson plans, conversations can be directed back to the preset to help cement understand. Whether teachers never learned the value of a preset from a methods class or have simply forgotten to use presets for lesson plans, they are useful tools that should be an integral part of the classroom in order to increase motivation and learning.