Motivational Strategies for Engaging Students in Real and Virtual Classrooms
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Introduction
Good afternoon, everyone! Today’s session is about motivational strategies that will help keep students engaged in both real and virtual classrooms. Our insightful speaker, Joanna Dossiter, a seasoned educator with over 20 years of experience at the British Council in Barcelona, is here to share practical ideas and motivational theories to enhance teaching practices.
In a world that has seen unprecedented challenges, especially in 2020, motivation has proven to be the fuel that supports resilience and optimism in learners. This presentation will provide ten actionable teaching ideas designed to foster student engagement, both online and offline.
Part 1: Setting Off the Journey
Importance of Motivation
Motivation can be described as the driving force that compels students to want to engage with the subject matter. In this segment, Joanna emphasizes the significance of creating a positive learning environment and understanding what motivates students.
What Words Come to Mind?
Participants were encouraged to jot down words associated with motivation:
- Achievement
- Enjoyment
- Goal
- Journey
Characteristics of Motivating Teachers
- Building Trust and Relationships: A positive relationship with students fosters an environment where they feel safe to express themselves.
- Empowering Students: Motivate them to feel confident and capable through effective feedback and encouragement.
- Fostering Autonomy: Allow students choices in their learning process.
Theoretical Frameworks on Motivation
Joanna discusses various frameworks, including:
- Self-Determination Theory: Highlights three basic needs - relatedness, autonomy, and competence.
- Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation: Understanding the difference between motivation driven by internal desires versus external rewards is crucial for teachers.
Part 2: The Journey
Generating Initial Motivation
One of the primary goals of this phase is to create enthusiasm at the course's beginning. Below are some practical ideas:
- Setting Goals: Encourage students to set personal learning goals.
- Breaking Down Learning: Present information in manageable chunks.
- Using Engaging Content: Tailor content to fit students' interests.
Maintaining Motivation
Teachers should consistently work to maintain student motivation through varied approaches:
- Collaborative Group Work: Engages students through teamwork, encouraging peers to learn from each other.
- Using Technology Variably: Tools like Kahoot or Google Forms can introduce excitement into the learning process.
Protecting Motivation Against Distractions
Joanna suggests that teachers be proactive in protecting student motivation from distractions:
- Routine and Structure in Lessons: Providing a predictable framework while integrating varied activities can reduce anxiety.
Part 3: Holding the Vision
The Power of Visualization
Utilizing techniques such as vision boards helps learners visualize their future selves and where they want to go with their language learning.
Celebrating Success
Recognizing accomplishments, no matter how small, is vital for sustaining motivation:
- Positive Feedback: Sharing students' strengths boosts their confidence.
- Collaborative Projects: Completing group tasks fosters a sense of achievement.
Growth Mindset
Joanna highlights the importance of fostering a growth mindset, rooted in the belief that effort leads to improvement. Encourage students to:
- View failures as learning experiences.
- Set realistic expectations for progress.
Conclusion
In summary, effectively motivating students requires a blend of active engagement, supportive environments, and varied instructional methods. As Joanna elegantly stated, “The key to change is having faith that something even more magnificent will take its place.” As we navigate education in real and virtual settings, these motivational strategies will enhance the learning experience for both teachers and students.
Thank you for your participation, and let’s continue to inspire our students towards their educational journeys!
keeping students engaged in real and virtual classrooms with our speaker joanna dossiter and
thank you very much for joining us and please remember that during the talk there's a question and answer
function available so feel free to post your questions and comments there caroline and i are also in the studio
towards the end of the session um when they will have time to answer them so feel free to like any question that
time permitting okay so now i'd like to introduce our speaker joanna dossiter she's a senior teacher at the british
and her particular interests are best practice in young learner teaching and in teachers continuing professional
development okay so i'll pass over to you now joanna that's great thank you very much
um and if you uh were listening to graham stanley's plenary you might well have a fork that you're waving at the
um what's in it for me what will you get out of this well uh hopefully ten practical teaching
session at this qr code you might want to take a screenshot but you can also get it at the padlet
support resilience and optimism so i think it's a good moment for motivation so part one
setting off so i'd like to start with introduction as lisa just said i work at the british
my colleague gemma has put up this lovely display and nothing is impossible the word itself says i'm possible
so something briefly about me i'm originally from king's lynn in norfolk and some of the things that
all of these so first of all i would suggest that um as we go through the talk you maybe have
a little notebook or you just scribble down a few things because i think being active helps helps
i'm just going to wait a few seconds while you find a notebook and a pen scribble down a few words or just make a
thought of extrinsic intrinsic achievement goal enjoyment journey something like that so another
um just quick activity i'd like you to think of a teacher who motivated you maybe in the past or maybe even a
teacher that's motivating you now so what is or was it about this teacher that was motivating
and here i'd like you to type something in the chat i can't see the chat at the moment
but when we stop a third of the way through the journey um i'll ask lisa and caroline if they can
um myself and my colleague gemma did a version of this talk a little bit earlier in the year with british council
curious and made the subject relevant so we're going to look a little bit of the theoretical framework
to motivation so one of these frameworks is self-determination theory which suggests that humans have three
basic needs and one of those is relatedness the need to have a close affectionate relationships with others
the other one is autonomy they need to control the course of our lives and the third one is
competence the need to be effective in dealing with the environment and competence i think we can also hear a
quake with confidence so there are many motivational theories we won't go deeply into any of them but
and rises within the individual but extrinsic motivation is referring to behaviour that's more driven by external
and these link to other concepts so the intrinsic motivation may be linked to integrative motivation learners wanting
perhaps pass past an exam or at a job or maybe move abroad and in a way we probably typically
investing in their learning they have chosen to pay for it um teens their parents will be the ones
and both of them need to be engaged and engagement is a really critical concept that we'll come back to in the talk
both groups can easily be distracted and they need to be kept interested and on task i would argue
to have some freedom and choice and here i think it's interesting if you uh were watching
leslie keith's i wonder talk earlier this morning she was mentioning just the importance for young learners
to have control over their environment and competence the need to feel effective and confident
about your ability to do something you know and it's kind of like this idea of this powerful message of yes i can is
this idea of self-efficacy so i would argue that the characteristics of motivating teachers
are that they build trust and relationships they empower students by helping them to feel confident and
it's uh john keller's arcs model um and those uh acronym the acronym stands for attention
relevance confidence and satisfaction so finally the last theoretical sort of framework for this
so um one of the things that zoltan points out is that um language learning needs motivation because it's
an idea of a process approach to motivation that it that covers distinct phases um first of all creating
the basic motivational conditions then generating the initial motivation then maintaining and protecting it
that is the title of this talk um so in this session we will look at 10 practical activities so first of all
we need to create a pleasant and supportive atmosphere in class we need to demonstrate and model
appropriate teacher behaviors and we need to create a cohesive learner group with appropriate group norms
have this information and you can refer back to it and i would say that it's it's nice to refer
back to this information and recycle it so you can recycle it into the class and as a kind of find someone who now in
some adaptation there's no question um but i think to some extent uh the teacher can highlight these or
put these up on the board and say um who is the person who and read out the things and encourage the other
students to recognize these features or these characteristics of each other and therefore that
and invite them all to participate actively and this helps to develop a cohesive learner group
which is which is really important and i think i would also say here that we do have quieter students in our
that is our role to make sure that all students are contributing um and i think there's an interesting
you type in the names of your students and you keep getting a random student to participate
and another very nice website is this one app.classroom screen which has a random name generator included in
it as well as a whole other whole load of other features and this is very nice to use online when
classroom so motivational teaching idea number three is to establish clear group norms at the start of the year
everybody needs to speak in english in the english classroom um but also it's very good to factor in
choice and autonomy and ask the students for their own ideas about the class and even possibly to
so what about motivation in the virtual world how is this similar and or different and graeme was speaking
and some of those things are very similar to the face-to-face classroom but some of them are perhaps a little
a number of different videos about motivating and engaging students um online and one thing they stress is
the importance of teacher presence and they say how important it is for the teacher to make your presence felt
people asking if you would mind just slowing down a little bit so they can take in the information
so um just because i'm probably have put too much in this talk but i will slow down i i will also say
so um to come back to what we were saying about norms um it's a ground rule or a norm in a
virtual learning environment is perhaps established how much participation that you're expecting from the students
and online in particular the teacher has perhaps a new role which is that of the community manager
so more than ever the role of the facilitator the teacher teacher's facilitator is really really important
to create the sense of community which really does tie students together and and and heightens their motivation and
learning community that is um perhaps another but different is to well not necessarily different but an
online learning community can be even more democratic in that it does seem to involve and give a voice to
may actually find it easier to participate more actively and contribute more so that's the end of
then this would be a good moment just to to look at them well joe in in response to your your
question about what motivates uh what teachers motivate them what are the qualities in a teacher a word that
comes up a lot is passion uh it's repeated several times through the chat passion about the subject
love of what they're teaching um kindness friendliness and something that you referred to very
makes you feel that you can can achieve yeah that's great um absolutely i think you know the enthusiasm of a teacher is
kindness and caring is very important from a teacher and also this you know that the teacher
has a belief that you can do something will really help to convince the students and then they'll have this
sense of self-efficacy that um that without it they may well give up okay um we'll carry on into part two but
so what's in it for me this journey um i would say that if you can successfully generate enthusiasm and motivation at
the start of a course then you're a long way towards guaranteeing the success of the students
on that language learning journey with you possibly for the next year or longer and what you might see i was trying to
do there was to basically sell it sell it to you yeah sell it to you why you might be listening to this what's in
um make it engaging and uninteresting so that the students really want to to to pay attention um an engagement has
been called by different writers as the holy grail of learning um which suggests it is not the easiest thing to
or encourage students to set their own goals so one thing you can do as a group is to negotiate class goals
um the other thing is to find out what your students goals are and they may all have different goals
which again if you can individualize and personalize the learning that will be that will be
their own goals because i think the problem sometimes is that learners don't really know
what the teacher what the teacher has in mind with these like with the activities that they're planning
so share class objectives frequently at the beginning of the class you can have a class menu up on the board
and also share the criteria for success which will help learners to identify when they've done
they might do this in a learning journal and i think one thing to say this year we've been
talking about how we're going to be teaching in a socially distant classroom this is uh we're starting our
classes uh the british council very soon and um i think perhaps this year we will find that there will be
um i think there's there's work going on students are thinking and reflecting and that although you can't see it
motivational teaching idea number five is to break the learning down into achievable chunks um and again just
talking about the kind of structured frameworks that that really help um to sort of break the
learning down and make it achievable and we can look at this as a kind of a problem-solving approach and i think
it's also worth mentioning that students with additional educational needs particularly benefit from this so
they're doing and what their what those steps are breaking it down into the steps um it makes it a lot more
similar areas of the brain activate for both learning and pleasure and this is to do with the sort of
then we get a hit of dopamine which um can make us uh as another talk i was listening to earlier about habits
makes us maybe crave this but can be a positive thing obviously um but the point is being able to solve
the problem and uh this i'm sure you are familiar already with the cheek sent me high flow
boredom and anxiety if something is too easy we get very bored easily but if it's too difficult we get
and game design works very much on this theory that we we have a little problem we solve it we get the
so i think this is exploited in many times a day of games so the motivational teaching idea
so i think the relationship here with food is that you know we we we need the food that's good for us
and that will um give us nutrition but if it's always the same it's incredibly dull
for the students well one way is to do needs analysis regularly and this can be just simple feedback and
in the online world we can use google forms we can use microsoft forms we can use surveymonkey and we can
back to this slide um so how about variety how can you introduce variety in your teaching so
i'm just going to pause i'm sorry if i'm going fast again but i'm just going to pause at this point
and ask you to jot down perhaps in the chat how you can introduce variety in in the classroom
either the face-to-face classroom or the virtual classroom i have a few suggestions here so i think
in general also very the the person who provides the content and you can ask students to bring in content with
student presentations and actually about three months ago one of my students online uh did a really
excellent presentation all about um the coronavirus because his parents and relatives were working in
incredibly interested and actually learnt a lot about coronavirus from it so online games that you can play to
break up the monotony of the learning kahoot i think we all know kahoot very well by now also bamboozle
get more difficult but at the very least we can do simon says in our chairs we can stand up we
fair work group work and individual work um protecting motivation so one writer has talked about guarding against
everyday dragons and everyday dragons are things like distractions they are things like um you know other
activities that get in the way and certainly in today's world with so many um digital devices that are constantly
pulling us in all directions and i think teenagers we know are incredibly pulled in all directions
to group together students contributions i know a lot of teachers in the state system are using google classroom
well uh i've got some examples here so for example um this role a timekeeper role is is a
also we can have um an ideas generator so somebody who maybe not just one person more than one
or idea generator or i'd sorry idea evaluator or somebody who's the devil's advocate
or somebody uh who's the noise monitor that can be helpful in in busy classes and busy schools
a summarizer or a graphic designer and i would suggest having the roles on a lanyard i think is is
is good because you've got a physical reminder of what your role is and then it's very easy just to swap the roles
around the next time and have variety just to come back to the idea of communities and online environments this
is an example of flipgrid and i asked a friend of mine to to to record uh her opinion about a
motivating teacher um and i'm going to build on this as well with with other friends so
suggestions and comments again um with suggestions for introducing variety through different media
which which you have touched on but it's obviously a key a key question about the difficulties
on the fun element and and so on so that came up uh somebody who somebody sorry i can't
remember who now mentioned the difficulty even you just using masks um and that might provoke some shyness
yeah i think that's a very good question and i'd have to say i don't have the answer
yesterday about this and most of us were voicing our apprehension one nice idea that one teacher had was
to ask the students to bring in a photo of themselves and put it on their desk folder over put their name
and that way um all the learners can see each other's faces because obviously they'll be covered up
with the mask but then they've got the photo there and then again the importance for the
and just although we we may feel anonymous because of the masks to try and personalize that as much as
okay so we're going to move on to to part three and hopefully at the end of this there'll also be time
in this book motivation language identity and the l2 self um and this is a very nice youtube talk
and is currently being used in and widely used in coaching high performing athletes and sports men and women so
this is being used because it does work um and the idea is if the learners can visualize themselves as succeeding in
their ltu language journey then they're going to be energized in the present to continue and in that
sense that this seeing in the mind's eye is believing and i think this incredible example of this
is from my favorite documentary man on wire and here we see philip petit walking between the twin towers and he
many years before and he tore out the drawing because it inspired him so much and he knew he was going to do this
um this this incredible um feat that he that he achieved to walk between the twin towers i think that just
i believe this anyway i'm not a neuroscientist but uh the dopamine reward circuit is that
we're transported into the future and we experience pleasure in the in the present as we contemplate the vision
and in a way if we think in english we look forward to something and in spanish this idea of illusion now we've got it
in the mind um but what could this look like in the classroom itself so here i would like to
um explored this with a community of practice and a group of teachers and um so his ideas he shared with us
are vision boards visualization and future self letters so what is a vision board a vision board
of themselves in the future so for example this learner here is imagining themselves in 10 years time
running their own business and all of these things that they can achieve once they've got really good english
more touchy feely and it's not perhaps everybody's cup of tea um but i think the idea is that the
teacher would have some kind of script and would ask learners to imagine perhaps with their
writing a letter to their current cells once they've succeeded what uh letter of advice would they
would they write to themselves so i think that's also a very nice idea so we move on to the next part group
group lee so glee or happiness celebration it's it's important to to celebrate success
um and important to find and make the most of opportunities to celebrate progress and success so this is
um just to come back again to the dopamine reward circuit pleasure and enjoyment this is why we
get addicted to facebook likes these positive reinforcements they keep us hooked on the experience
so for example receiving positive feedback is is really important and i think one of the most motivational
teach one of the most motivational things that a teacher can do is to give positive feedback to students
said how good she was at certain aspects of teaching and she said she felt this was like a pat on the back that she
um very simple level is we have our class goals and a menu and we we tick them off and we show
finishing it and getting praise and feedback even if something as simple as doing well in a class kahoot
um this is the last part of dernier's uh process of motivation and it's this idea of encouraging positive retrospective
self-evaluation and a very influential idea here which i'm sure you are probably familiar with
already is carol dweck's growth mindset coming from her book from 2006 the new psychology of success and a
with effort we will all get better and even if we're not there yet um we can get there it's just a question of uh
and this relates to attribution theories of motivation so with a growth mindset um we attribute our success to effort um
so the motivational teaching idea number 10 is to help students to develop this growth mindset
you know the only mistake you can make is the one that you don't learn from perhaps you could use yourself as a
and that brings us to motivational teaching id at number 11. but i said there were only 10 so yes
there are actually 11 i wanted just to surprise you so the motivational teaching idea number
and i think that curiosity really drives innovation and new thinking and certainly this year
has um i think been provoking many of us to think in ways that we we hadn't thought before
and coming back to this idea of engagement um so why why is this engagement idea so important
that it's the holy grail of learning um coming back to zoltan derniae again um he writes that um motivation is great
certainly important but it it's not the be-all and end-all because unless we actually do something with our
and he says to be sure motivation is undoubtedly necessary for preparing the deal but engagement is
so i would encourage you to explore your own teaching uh one really great way of doing that is
to work with peers which i think is inherently motivating um try out new things and in the handout
and i've just taken a number of those and put that in the handout uh and and he encourages you to just to try one
because sometimes as teachers we are actually hard on ourselves so finally just to conclude here uh
motivational quote number two and this comes from an interesting book the organized mind which finishes with
something or someone even more magnificent will take its place i think this can motivate us to to move
hopefully we have a couple of minutes for questions and i'm just going to put this feedback form
also up on the screen here so that you could give me some brief feedback when this finishes
so caroline and lisa are there first of all have we run out of time and do we have time for maybe one or two
do it from leslie saying how do we know if we're overwhelming students with too much variety
as asking the question what do you think we've been using this platform that this platform this other
um have you you know how are you finding the course so far are we going are we going too fast or
are there other activities that you haven't liked so getting feedback regularly in many different ways is is
really important just by talking to the students or by giving them something a little bit more structured like
some kind of um google form or something like that um i mean it's it's i think variety
is really really important that the brain has a novelty bias so we we're looking for the new and it gives us a
buzz and we do want it but at the same time um and uh that's one of the talks earlier today
perhaps up to many ages this idea of routine as reassurance is also very powerful so it's kind of
like we do need routines and we do like routines but within that routine we also need this variety factor or we
we're actually not taking stuff in and we're not learning um so it's it's a balance i think
definitely it's a balance um i think probably going back to the learners and asking them
um asking saying somebody asking about effective ways tips for preventing states of anxiety
or boredom amongst students it's it's a big question joe but i mean you've obviously touched on a
lot of that but if there any any other thoughts you had on that yeah it is a very big question it's a big
question anyway i think right now this um this point in this pandemic and and with the um the you know the
socially distance classroom it's it's it's even more important um i mean i think anxiety in general
can be you know massively destructive in terms of learning because it's this whole thing about the
effective filter and it means that we don't we don't take stuff in when we're in an anxious state
so it is really important that you know that we're creating this pleasant environment where people are happy
and i think in a way what i was demonstrated badly at the beginning i went too quickly um and that kind of
makes people go oh you know you need to slow down so i think we need to have the right pace
when we're teaching and um again you know students with additional educational needs um
this is a particular factor that's important so this whole idea of structuring the learning breaking it
down making it into smaller steps and not moving on to the next step until really we're happy that
people have mastered the step that they were at and it's a good delicate balance because
if we if we go too slowly there are also learners who will just not be engaged so we need to strike the balance but i
think reducing anxiety is incredibly important and i think right now probably it's going to be a
classroom environment and and i think something graeme was saying earlier you know making sure that there's fun
and there's time to socialize at the beginning it's time to chat um and that there's plenty of moments
a quiz a game that kind of thing a song okay indeed no more questions but a nice comment here
inspiring she's got she says definitely to be watched again the talk and to grasp take more from it
as you said variety and yet routine because we often find that um the idea of having a routine
uh reduces anxiety especially in younger learners so perhaps it's a it's a case of us also
as teachers finding a balance between maybe perhaps introducing our lessons with a set routine
which might be very valuable for these learners in this time where everything's quite uncertain
um and one example there where you can sort of have a routine but have variety is this idea of a sort of student
presentations so you have this routine every week one of the students is going to give a presentation and they know
that that's maybe the last 10 minutes of class and but every time it's a new student um
so i found that that works really well with with sort of higher level learners but you can work
we've got just a couple of instructions for you the virtual hall um we'll paste the
link into the question and answers now perhaps caroline can help me with that um some of you are asking about where
on the virtual hall padlet we should have all of these speakers information and handouts available by
presentation again remember you just need to click on the teams link the same link that you
clicked on to attend this session and you'll be able to find a recording of the session
where you can watch again or you can send it to anybody who wasn't able to attend today
so keep sending us your texts about inspirational teacher colleagues to teaching conference spain at
britishcouncil.eso.org and we'll have some prizes for that okay and so thank you very much