The difficult educational situation has deprived many students of the desire to study well. Every day, teachers’ forums, blogs, and social networks are filled with complaints: students do not want to learn, do homework assignments without enthusiasm, and are distracted by phones and tablets all the time. However, educators do not see the root cause of this behavior.
While students are not interested in subjects, educational institution staff formalize an already mentoring approach to lectures and seminars, turning essential knowledge into incomprehensible information, filled with feelings of frustration and disappointment. Thus, you must understand that a dictatorial approach to students will not increase their desire to learn about the subject.
According to statistics, the most effective is an integrated approach to motivating students. The best results are shown by students who strive to achieve high academic performance and are passionate about the disciplines studied. If you are a teacher and do not know how to draw the student’s attention to your studies, take advantage of expert tips.
Realize Your Role
The first step on the road to change for the better is the correct awareness of your role and purpose. Remember that the teacher, as a catalyst in chemical processes, must expedite the reactions of an educational action in accessible ways, which is an aggregate goal, a sum of many dissimilar elements. Teachers do not have the opportunity to make all students Nobel laureates. Nevertheless, they have access to tools for managing the forms of knowledge distribution and the content of the disciplines taught.
Use Personal Examples
Thousands of articles on the Internet have written that monotonous lectures have become obsolete. Supplement them with examples understandable to students, stories from your scientific practice, close to the topics of the class. Share your current research papers if you think this story will help students master the subject. Do not forget about additional materials for lectures or seminars, and promptly send them to students’ email addresses. Finally, do not be afraid to communicate with students during and after pairs on social networks. It is possible that some of the students will be able to understand your subject by reading a message on Snapchat, by looking at an illustration on Instagram, and will receive an additional incentive to work on their own by seeing a recommendation on Goodreads or Worldcat book services.
Use Technical Tools
Use all the power of modern technical means: interactive whiteboards and projectors, gadgets, and other computer equipment. Instead of standard seminars, conduct interactive colloquial presentations and invite specialists in their field who will tell more than the minimum laid down by the methodologists in teaching materials and programs. Interactive technologies will significantly revitalize the environment in the classroom, allowing students to accumulate new experiences.
Use Peer-to-peer Learning or Network Learning
If you are not afraid of changes, feel free to choose an alternative educational paradigm within your course. For example, try peer-to-peer learning, or network learning, the main principle of self-preparation and distribution of “student-teacher” academic roles by the students themselves. It is possible that once in the teacher’s shoes, many students will evaluate your everyday work differently, which will allow them to gain additional competencies. For example, teach how to work with an audience, organize working hours, prepare reports and lecture plans independently.
Learn to Understand Students
A successful student today is a young scientist. This metamorphosis is facilitated by the architecture of the three-stage system of higher education (bachelor’s, master’s, and postgraduate studies) and its substantive requirements and attitudes.
In the senior undergraduate courses, a student is a priori unable to conduct independent research, write an article for a peer-reviewed journal. The teacher should help with the design of the study and its results. Do not deny your students, because perhaps you are in front of the future luminaries of science who lack very little attention and support for a successful start. If there are no such proposals, initiate the activity yourself. Offer to write a work for intermediate certification in the form of a mini-dissertation, an article for an academic journal, a case study.
Learn New
Each generation of teachers and scientists feels comfortable in the material of their time. However, time does not stand still, and knowledge requires constant updating. Electronic library systems and peer-reviewed journal aggregators can be good sources of up-to-date knowledge. Actualization of knowledge will allow you to look at common truths from other angles and demonstrate the mind’s mobility and openness to new knowledge. But this is not enough.
Learning today means mastering related areas of knowledge and developing advanced research approaches. This enhances academic mobility. Sociologists and linguists often become good programmers and actively use IT tools, and professional journalists acquire knowledge in copyright and management, historians and archaeologists quickly master editorial work. Interdisciplinarity will help each teacher take a fresh look at their knowledge and strengthen their image.
Education is structurally flexible and changeable, so it will not fit all the relevant methods and advice on motivating students into one material. Even briefly, they barely fit into the standard volume of the textbook. Some practices continue to produce results, while others quickly become obsolete. The variety you see should not mislead you. Any experience is better than no experience.
