How to Enhance Student Engagement and motivation in the Classroom

BLOGGER INDONESIA

Some strategies to enhance student engagement and motivation:

• Recognize and enhance one’s mental and physical stability. 

Teachers have to take care of their mental and physical selves. Teachers should engage in activities that are relaxing and physically challenging. Having an outlet to alleviate stress will radiate within the classroom and positively enhance student-teacher relationships. When teachers feel good about themselves, they have more patience for and better interaction with students.

• Ensure the classroom environment is welcoming to students from all cultures. 

To be engaged, students need to feel that they are in an environment where they are accepted and affirmed. Ensure the classroom is warm and inviting to all.

• Enhance students’ self-belief. 

Research shows that students engage when they act as their own learning agents working to achieve goals important to them. They must believe they can learn and know how to deal with failures and learn from those experiences.

• Survey students to obtain information about their likes and dislikes. 

Understanding what students like and dislike will provide suggested areas in which teachers can connect with the student.

• Allow students to work autonomously, enjoy learning relationships with peers, and feel they are competent to reach their goals. 

Allowing students to work autonomously and with others, developing their sense of competence, results in increased student motivation. This focuses on the cultivation of intrinsic motivation, which fosters self-determination that leads to engagement.

• Create learning opportunities that are active, collaborative, and promote learning relationships.

Those skills are key components to engagement and motivation.

• Create educational experiences for students that are challenging and enriching and that extend their academic abilities. 

Easy learning activities and assignments are not as effective at engaging students as activities and assignments that challenge them. When students are reflecting, questioning, conjecturing, evaluating, and making connections between ideas, they are engaged. Teachers must create rich educational experiences that challenge students’ ideas and stretch them as far as they can go

• Recognize that teaching and teachers are central to student engagement. 

Keeping up with the educational research through involvement in professional development activities, for example like reading journals, attending workshops, etc.

The last increased student engagement and motivation is key to academic and behavioral success.