ASSIGNMENT 7: MOTIVATION GRAPH

MOTIVATION GRAPH

One of the most difficult and important aspects of becoming a teacher is learning how to motivate your students. Students who are not motivated will not learn effectively. They won’t retain information, they won’t participate and some of them may even become disruptive.

As teachers, we should try to motivate students during all the lesson, however, we should know the BEM principle, if we want that our students retain the most important information.

This simply means that our students will remember best the information they learned first, followed by the information they learned last.

They remember the least the information in the middle.

This principle highlights the importance of using creative teaching methods and hooking them right at the beginning. But we should take advantage of the ending part of our class sesión, making it powerful and remarkable because students remember information best at the end.

This principle can be shown by means of this graph:

Here are some good ideas for starting a lesson (warm-up)

•      Use open-ended activities such as brainstorming and prediction which are perfect for mixed ability classes.
•      Start the first stage of vocabulary teaching by having students notice the words. Flashcards are ideal for introducing word families.
•      Use a large number of photos or tangible and concrete objects like images, pictures and hand movements, and gestures to pre-teach images. Visual methods are important for supporting meaning and generating interest.
•      Elicit what students know about a topic before presenting them new information.
•      Personalize parts of a lesson. The best time to personalize an activity is during the first five minutes of a lesson. Students are more motivated and engaged that way.

Here are some ideas for the end (cool down):

• Use a mind map to review the information tackled for that session
• Use of an exit ticket, wherein students write on a piece of paper 2-3 things they have learned in that session and things that were unclear for them
• Pop quizzes can be used as a tool for review immediately after a learning session and not as a threat to make students study at home
• Have students draw out what they have learned, or anything else that proves they have understood the topic