Teaching Strategies and Practices to Support Positive Motivation

Jacquelynne S. Eccles, Jennifer Appleton Gootman, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development. National Academy Press, 2002. 

Research shows that having an intentional learning environment is one of the key characteristics of the successful positive youth development programs. It is very important to set up the most effective educational setting on how to best teach new skills, new knowledge, new understandings, and new habits of mind. The following teaching strategies and techniques are critical:

1. Students need to be encourage to produce or construct knowledge, rather than reproducing or repeating facts and views expressed by teachers;
2. The materials studies need to be related to the student and his or her community culture.
3. Regular feedback on progress so that students know where they are and what they still need to learn.
4. Individual approach to students that recognizes the individual differences in the level of knowledge, interests, and learning styles.
5. Cooperative and highly interactive learning activities so that the students can tutor each other and learn from each other.

Which practices support positive motivation?

1. Grading practices that stress improvement rather than social comparison;
2. Teaching practices that stress improvement rather than current levels of knowledge;
3. Practices that make sure all students are expected to participate fully in the learning activities;
4. Learning practices that involve hands-on activities (lab exercises, field-based data collection, etc)

In other words, teachers need to make sure they involve every student in the learning activities, which may be challenging because kids have different interests and different learning styles. To overcome that, teachers need to practice individual approach to every student, which is much easier when the class is small. Finally, it is important to grade the students' effort trying to stress their improvement rather than social comparison. Unfortunately, this practice is not widely spread.