Approach to classroom management – Internal Motivation

During the last two weeks, I have been hearing of teachers having issues to strive to organize meaningful lessons for their students, trying to get them to learn. Unfortunately their hopes are not fully realized. I would like to share one of the practices that I have been using which has helped to bring out good in my students – the use of internal motivation.

I put this internal motivation to good use by helping students see how it can bring about satisfaction or pleasure in their learning. I see myself more as a stimulator instead of just motivator, who activates students’ motivation from within in positive ways. Traditionally, teachers had tried to motivate students by urging, directing, cajoling, criticizing and using rewards and punishments. But these are external factors and so they do not often result in real change, instead just to avoid discomfort and possibly gain the approval of their favorite teacher. Unfortunately, these external factors are also responsible for the “stress” and poor relations seen in many situations. What I am saying can be summarized in two words – Trust students. This can be simple – or rather more difficult. Difficult, because to trust students we must trust ourselves – that we ourselves need to be trusted by the students. And so teachers go on to treat students as teachers themselves were trusted by the students. Call this “reality” or say bitterly, “If I could up with it, they can too”.

One important way to get results from this approach is to inspire students to achieve and ensure that they find pleasure in our classroom – a classroom which promotes positive attitude and good relationships. And how to do this? My emphasis is on positivity, choice and reflection.

Positivity is about influence. Apart from peer influence, another major factor is the teacher in the classroom. Being around optimistic people makes us feel better, so likewise, students will probably be pleased to be in your class if they see the teacher as positive in his/her outlook and how well the teacher deal with others, rather than negative.

Choice is what I empower my students by offering them options. I would try to elicit from students what choices they had when learning and how they could make better choices. Then, the teacher and students come to a final decision.

Reflection is about the student himself/herself, regarding thinking of the student’s behavior shown in learning in classroom and getting him/her to judge the merit of such behavior. Teachers must first understand that we cannot control students by only demanding obedience or imposing consequences. Teachers cannot force change in how students think, want to learn or how they behave, want to behave. Students must do these things for themselves. What I do is to get the students to be notice things they never knew they could do before, and in these find the learning interesting and worth learning. I try to whet their curiosity and add their understanding and so they learn more than they started at the beginning of the lesson.

What we can do as teachers is to establish expectations and empower them to attain them. The process I use has helped me gain the students’ trust and prompt my students to jumpstart thinking about how they behave in learning and sets in motion a positive learning environment for my students.