10 Ways to Increase Student Engagement and Motivation

Introduction

Inconsistent remote and in-person instruction combined with increased absenteeism due to Covid or Covid related isolation has created a frustrating learning pattern that’s hard to keep students engaged and caused apathy and low student motivation. When students feel like their hard work is not worthwhile or when they are unable to see how their learning will impact their future, they may begin to withdraw. In the same way, teachers may be disappointed and frustrated with students who lack motivation for school work and learning. A vicious cycle of disengagement will occur when students do not feel engaged with the teacher or when teachers don’t feel engaged with their students. This creates an environment where students feel their opinions don’t matter and teachers feel their effort is not appreciated, negatively impacting relationships.

This pandemic has been detrimental to everybody’s mental health. Teachers are getting overwhelmed with additional work and are prone to overworking because of uncertainty and confusion. Students have very few coping strategies to deal with stress, frustration, and ambiguities, resulting in procrastination and helplessness. What can schools do to motivate students and teachers and ensure everyone completes the school year strong? How can teachers spend more time learning about their students and consequently, improve their level of student motivation? Student motivation is crucial in academic performance, attendance, and school culture. So if our students are apathetic, it’s time to start working on ways to motivate them. These are 10 possible strategies that consider affective and cognitive process that may help.

Be Empathetic

As teachers, we constantly see students from our teacher-perspective—and that’s completely normal. But sometimes, it can be helpful for us to step into our students’ shoes—to see things from their point of view. A useful strategy for increasing student motivation is an empathy map. This is a simple but powerful tool for understanding our students’ experiences, challenges, relationships, and feelings. Empathy maps help us as teachers get outside our own heads and into those of our students. As a result, we can increase engagement by connecting with students on an emotional level rather than just through cold hard facts. It makes us consider how students might feel in certain situations and how they might view things from their perspective. Wanting to succeed academically, feeling overwhelmed by having too much homework, or being discouraged about not understanding the material can be very tough emotions for students to manage. I adopted current searchable empathy map templates on the internet and created an empathy map for teachers/facilitators to use that applied knowledge of Maslow’s Hierarchy Needs. When using the empathy map, I would especially like to emphasize the need to create a comfortable physical learning environment for students, which would result in their active participation in lessons.

Alternatively, we can engage in constructive professional dialogue with our colleagues and take this opportunity to identify effective strategies to help our students do well in the classroom. For example, we can think back to a learning task that we found challenging and see how it played out differently in subsequent iterations. What behavioral tendencies enabled success, and what behaviors were less advantageous? Why? Favorite Teacher Analysis and Teacher-Tested Motivational Strategies in How to Motivate Your Student paper (Girmus) could also be considered for teacher professional conversations.

Organize restorative circles

Restorative practices have been shown to be effective in increasing student motivation and engagement for academic performance. This is a time for each student to tell their peers about any problems or difficulties they may be having in school. Students are encouraged not only to discuss their academic challenges but also social emotional issues such as conflict with classmates, getting off task, feeling left out in classes or trouble at home that may be affecting their ability to do well at school. After all students have had a chance to speak, everyone participates in coming up with solutions together. When facilitating restorative circles, be sure to think ahead and work out solutions beforehand to break up lengthy arguments before they happen. If, for example, you anticipate arguments over the homework, you can prepare by taking a number of preventative measures, such as identifying patterns and helping them work out resolutions by participating in discussion. The teacher should listen attentively and not defend their beliefs. In addition to giving students a forum for discussing challenging situations, restorative circles help teach them how to solve problems collaboratively and supportively. They also provide opportunities for teachers to listen more closely to what’s going on in their classrooms so they can intervene more effectively when needed. Please see Edutopia’s Building Community With Restorative Circles for the specifics of how to get started.

Create opportunities for social interactions

Collaborating with peers can boost students’ motivation to learn. Students are actively engaged in the material and take a vested interest in their work when working with their learning groups. Groups of students that collaborate on learning tasks typically find that they get along better—and as a result, they get more out of the experience. This process also fosters positive peer relationships, which helps build character traits like respect and trust within a school setting. To foster a culture of compassion and collaboration, teachers should provide a supportive atmosphere where students feel safe and explore strategies to enable the team to work together and accomplish tasks. Some strategies include assigning roles and responsibilities, organizing learning by jigsaw method, structuring peer teaching, etc. Mac Iver and Reuman (1994) add that middle school and high school-age students’ level of engagement in school is highly influenced by peers.” (cited Brewster and Fager) Learning is a social process in which students develop strong relationships with their peers while they share ideas and help each other learn. Students have higher levels of motivation when they are collaborating in groups than when they are working alone or with an adult. When students work collaboratively with one another, it helps them learn more deeply by giving them opportunities to apply what they’ve learned in new situations.

Teaching time-management skills to prioritize learning tasks

Time management is a hugely important skill for students—students who learn how to prioritize tasks are more likely to succeed. As often as not, teachers expect students to have already developed time management skills and understand how to prioritize their tasks. Sadly, this often proves not to be the case because it has rarely been explicitly taught. I refer to it as sink or swim, as it puts struggling students at a disadvantage and/or already failed in some way. Instead of assuming students know how to manage their time, why not teach them? In my blog post on How to Declutter Your Computer Desktop, I described how teachers might help students with organization by applying the Eisenhower matrix. It’s a strategy that students create a matrix to prioritize tasks according to their importance and urgency. Another method of prioritization is the MoSCow technique. Students sort tasks into ‘Must haves ‘, ‘Should haves ‘, ‘Could haves ‘and ‘Won’t haves ‘or ‘Would haves ‘categories. This allows students to see what they need to accomplish versus what they want to accomplish. Additional strategies for helping students manage their time can be found on my ATL Skills page: ATL Smörgåsbord – Self-management – Organization.

Teaching strategies to cope with stress and anxiety

Every individual experiences stress. Some stress is good as it encourages us to get the jump on an adversary. Too much stress, however, can make our bodies and minds suffer. Many students don’t have coping strategies for difficult feelings like stress, frustration, or disappointment. The simple coping strategies that teenagers often resort to are playing sports with friends, playing video games, watching TV, or hanging out with friends. Unfortunately, the Covid restrictions make it challenging or impossible for them to even be able to go out to see their friends. Sadness builds up and it can easily lead to depression and a sense of hopelessness. Here are some ways we can help students cope with stress:

• Start journaling
• Keep a gratitude journal
• Practice breathing techniques
• Use I statement to practice self-affirmation
• Practice grounding techniques
• Practice mindfulness exercises
• Engage in physical activity do something creative

Provide choices of learning tasks to develop a sense of autonomy

Giving students choices in their learning tasks gives them a sense of autonomy. Autonomy can increase motivation and performance, especially among groups that don’t always feel empowered. My teaching involves giving a lot of support and direction to my students to make them meet their learning goals. At the same time, I have to teach them self-regulation skills, which requires less intervention from me and help them develop self-efficacy. Through conversations with students, I have learned the importance of gradually releasing control and allowing students to explore what helps and what hinders their learning. If a process is too limiting and structured, it may be too rigid, and the end results may be more than expected, but too narrow. The best way to facilitate effective learning is to make sure students know what the expectations are and to allow them to choose the way they’d like to reach those learning outcomes. For instance, depending on what was read, students may come to an understanding by drawing comics or writing paragraphs. If a student has choices in their tasks, they are more self-disciplined, responsible, engaged, confident, and committed than those who do not have such choices. Making it clear at every step what they can control helps empower students in their own learning experience.

Design meaningful learning tasks

Create questions that promote critical thinking and give students the space to formulate their own conclusions rather than expecting them to have it in the material we provide them. This will require teachers do more intentional planning about how the curriculum can be more meaningful and relevant for students. For instance, rather than having students watch a video and take notes, utilize the Take Note visible thinking routine to foster more profound and personally meaningful responses. If we would. like students practice vocabulary, they can construct a semantic map rather than simply filling in blanks on vocabulary worksheets.

Additionally, taking a different approach to assessment and adding project-based learning as an option will keep learning relevant and meaningful for students. This approach allows students to connect what they’re learning in class with real-world experiences outside of school. Authentic projects can be constructed around any curriculum content area. It is up to teachers to think creatively about how their content areas could be presented through projects. Students might research local community issues or problems, work on a documentary film, or develop an advocacy campaign. It is important that teachers design tasks that encourage student autonomy so that students feel empowered rather than overwhelmed by classroom expectations.

Implement multimodal teaching

A multimodal approach means giving students more than one way to learn. When we give them alternative ways to learn, not only will they be engaged, but their understanding of key concepts will also improve. Using a multimodal approach, teachers can go beyond their students’ one-dimensional exposure to written texts, adding other sources such as multimedia that includes images, sound, and video. To illustrate, the teacher incorporates pictures into their lessons to get the point across. They show a video with subtitles, speech, music, and gestures that deepen understanding of a topic. The more senses a student uses while being taught, the better they’ll remember what they’ve learned and how to apply it in real life. Providing a variety of ways for students to more deeply understand a concept fosters higher achievement and increases motivation. For more information about teaching in various modalities, please refer to my previous post on Multimodal Teaching.

Break large tasks into a series of manageable chunks

If we are training for a marathon, we don’t practice for a marathon every day. Instead, we chunk the task into pieces and arrange beforehand to do practices. Accordingly, we can find simple, achievable actions for our students to make on a daily basis, in order to help them build up their motivation levels. Breaking tasks down into more manageable chunks allows students to focus on individual milestones, reducing the workload and more easily visualizing their progress. We can take advantage of classroom bulletin boards or use digital tools to display student ideas and accomplishments. As students progress towards their learning goals, their confidence will grow. They will see that they have achieved something worthwhile, which may encourage them to continue. Students could find themselves confused if large assignments are not broken down into more manageable and specific tasks. In order to reach the desired outcomes, I highly recommend that a learning roadmap be set up. The roadmap would divide larger tasks into smaller steps to help students reach the learning desired outcomes.

“Motivation comes and goes. If you want to do something consistently, then don’t pick a level of difficulty that requires great motivation. Make it easy enough and simple enough that you’ll do it even when you don’t feel very motivated.”

James Clear

Provide targeted and timely feedback

Motivation is about having a goal and knowing how well we are doing toward reaching that goal. The same goes for student motivation. They need goals and feedback to know whether they’re achieving them. If teachers ask students to complete homework regularly, we should provide feedback to show them where they did well and what they can improve on. Feedback can come in many forms such as audio recordings, critique assignments, and student conferences where suggestions are given for how to improve. Written feedback is not the only option. Refer my sanity-saving feedback strategies post to get more ideas. Providing constructive and actionable feedback in a timely manner also helps us form relationships with students. It shows that we care about them. We are willing to invest time in reviewing their work and offering strategies and suggestions to help them improve. When giving feedback, it’s important to be specific, so students have clear action steps to follow. Students sometimes get upset and frustrated that feedback from a teacher is sometimes slow in coming after they complete their assignment. One important consideration is whether or not homework is even necessary at all. If that’s the case, we must ask, what are the intended purposes of this assignment, and how will we use this data to improve student learning?

Conclusion

In addition, teachers have also found it difficult to stay motivated due to the persistent covid situation. They have felt exhausted in delivering online instructions, trying their best to engage apathetic learners, worrying about their families, finding a new job, etc. Additionally, many of us living abroad have not been able to visit our families and friends for a long time now, which causes additional frustration and disappointment. Most of us are experiencing different levels of stress and frustration. That is also true for headmasters, principals, and parents. The school community must work together and look after each other to create a more motivating environment. It is challenging to keep everyone motivated, particularly in this extraneous circumstance. We must be caring and support each other to build our resilience muscles.

Increase Learner Motivation Poster

Three aspects which influence motivation are stress, self-efficacy, and emotion. (Gieras) I address the three elements and discuss strategies to support the affective and cognitive processes in the poster. There are more strategies for leader motivation. However, for this article, I want to focus on strategies for supporting the cognitive and affective processes.

English poster

Chinese poster

References

• Brewster, Cori, and Jennifer Fager. INCREASING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT and MOTIVATION: FROM TIME-ON-TASK to HOMEWORK. Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, Oct. 2020.
• Gieras, Jenny. “A Powerful Strategy for Fostering Student Motivation.” Edutopia, 18 Dec. 2020, www.edutopia.org/article/powerful-strategy-fostering-student-motivation. Accessed 20 Mar. 2022.
• Girmus, Ronald L. How to Motivate Your Students. 2022. ERIC, ERIC, 1 May 2012, eric.ed.gov/?id=ED534566.
• Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Take Note | Project Zero.” Www.pz.harvard.edu, www.pz.harvard.edu/resources/take-note. Accessed 24 Mar. 2022.