How To Motivate Your Kids To Learn

You can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink.
By Alain Jehlen
That dilemma has had teachers tearing their hair out since time immemorial. How can you get
students to want to learn? Some students arrive at your door already eager, but what about the
others?
Hundreds of strategies have been tried and theres no
consensus on the right path. But here are seven approaches
recommended by accomplished teachers that you can try.
Build strong relationships.
Let kids know you genuinely care about them, that its
not just a job that finishes at 3 p.m., says third-grade
inclusion teacher Charlene Christopher of Norfolk,
Virginia.
If kids like you, theyll perform for you, says Jim McNeil in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Kids
know you cant become too familiar with them, but let them see you as a human being.
Theres no simple formula for getting your relationship with students right. Im respectful to my
students, says McNeil, and in turn, they know that if theyre disrespectful, Ill call them on it.
Also, I use a lot of humorthat works for me.
Tell them why it matters.
Tell your kids why youre doing what youre doing, especially if youre assigning something
repetitious and tedious. says Michelle Wise Capen, an elementary teacher whos now a
curriculum coach in Lenoir, North Carolina. Even in kindergartena child will work harder at
his handwriting if you sit down and tell him hes building up his finger muscle strength. Make
sure they understand youre not just bossing them around.
Give them a voice and a choice.
Many schools suffer from curricula that prescribe in great detail what must be covered, but you
usually can let students make some decisions about what and how they learn. Theyll work
harder if they have a say. Oklahoma English teacher Kevin McDonald was teaching Othello to

his AP students and his lower level class insisted on reading it. So he scrapped his plans for
them. The language was tough, but its about jealousy, revenge, cultural bias. These White kids
from rural Oklahoma could identify with a Black Muslim from Italy who gets tricked.
Make it fun.
Thats not just for elementary school. In Pennsylvania, Jim McNeil had his seventh-grade
students write their own obituaries. They could marry anyone they chosemany picked
celebritiesbut the exercise also got them thinking about where they had been and where they
planned to go.
Make it relevant.
Los Angeles fifth-grade teacher Sharon Harrison takes her students to the grocery store to see
decimals in action.
The better you know each student, the better you can apply this strategy. Every September,
Harrison surveys her students about their interests. Whenever possible, she writes those interests
into her lesson plans, which can be as simple as using them in arithmetic word problems.
Make it real.
Plan lessons so that students accomplish something that matters to them. The National Writing
Project, through which thousands of English teachers have improved their practice, recommends
writing for real audiences, such as newspaper editors, parents, or public officials. History classes
can build an exhibit on their neighborhoods history at a local community center. Elementary
school children can publish their own stories, complete with artwork, and read them to
kindergarten students. In Phoenix, Arizona, Allan Cameron has led mostly low-income,
immigrant high school students in national robot competitions. Many kids have gone on to
college and good careers. [The robot competition] is a real task, not a worksheet, says
Cameron. Were counting on them. If someone puts the wheels on wrong, we all lose.
Use technology.
Renee Moore, who taught high school English in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest places
in the country, says many students didnt want their friends to know they were interested in
school. But online, they were free of the peer pressure.
In 1994, she hooked up her class with a school in Soweto,
Read how Renee Moore got her
South Africa. They discussed two novels, one South African
students to involve other adults
and one American. I had boys who wouldnt let you know
in their education.
they had read a novel unless you pulled a shotgun on them and
demanded an answer, says Moore, but they were excited about their correspondence with the
Soweto kids. They would show it to me privately.

These days, its easier to use the Internet to get your students creative juices flowing. Moore
recommends the free K-12 Online Conference.

Problem Solver
I teach writing to low-income, minority students. Many of them
come to me not liking school and convinced they cant do the work.
What can I do?
An answer:
First step: Show that you respect these students and their work by
getting them to write about subjects that matter to them.
Encourage them to develop what they say. Dont pick up your red
pencil!
Second step: Once theyre involved in telling their stories and
ideas, get them to correct their own English mechanics, one rule at
a time. You explain the rules, but they find and fix the mistakes.
Linda Christensen, Portland, Oregon
Six Ways To Motivate Students To Learn
By Annie Murphy Paul September 2, 2013

Scientific research has provided us with a number of ways to get the learning juices
flowing, none of which involve paying money for good grades. And most smart
teachers know this, even without scientific proof.
1. Fine-tune the challenge. Were most motivated to learn when the task before
us is matched to our level of skill: not so easy as to be boring, and not so hard as to
be frustrating. Deliberately fashion the learning exercise so that students are
working at the very edge of your abilities, and keep upping the difficulty as they
improve.
2. Start with the question, not the answer. Memorizing information is boring.
Discovering the solution to a puzzle is invigorating. Present material to be learned
not as a fait accompli, but as a live question begging to be explored.
3. Encourage students to beat their personal best. Some learning tasks, like
memorizing the multiplication table or a list of names or facts, are simply not
interesting in themselves. Generate motivation by encouraging students to compete
against themselves: run through the material once to establish a baseline, then
keep track of how much they improve (in speed, in accuracy) each time.
4. Connect abstract learning to concrete situations. Adopt the case-study
method that has proven so effective for business, medical and law school students:
apply abstract theories and concepts to a real-world scenario, using these

formulations to analyze and make sense of situations involving real people and real
stakes.
5. Make it social. Put together a learning group, or have students find learning
partners with whom they can share their moments of discovery and points of
confusion. Divide the learning task into parts, and take turns being teacher and
pupil. The simple act of explaining what theyre learning out loud will help them
understand and remember it better.
6. Go deep. Almost any subject is interesting once you get inside it. Assign the
task of becoming the worlds expert on one small aspect of the material they have
to learnthen extend their new expertise outward by exploring how the piece they
know so well connects to all the other pieces they need to know about.
For more about the science of learning, go to AnnieMurphyPaul.com