It is a sad fact that so many children have a wasted year due to the fact of poor teaching. A lack of enthusiasm, interest and passion lets these students down. Yes, it is difficult to cater to such a range of learning styles, abilities, goals, and backgrounds. But as the classroom teacher, it’s your job!

The classroom environment should be positive, encouraging and motivating. Ideally, you want your students to want to learn, more so then having to convince them to want to learn. It might not be a case of motivation; it just may be the way you are teaching.

You say easy said, not easily done. Read on if you are ready to make a difference in your teaching and make a difference in your student's lives.

• Be clear of the purpose of each lesson. Make a point to share why you are teaching what you are teaching, why the students are learning what they are learning. We call this the WALT ‘We are learning to…’ Identifying the purpose helps draw connections in your students learning. Convince them they can learn and what you have to teach them is important. 

•  Listen to your student’s needs, how can you accommodate and respond to these needs in order to be a more efficient teacher. Does someone need to be in the front row to hear you better, do certain students need to be separated, does someone need the instructions repeated again, does someone need you to set them up before they get started.

• Your students must value their learning. They must feel involved in their learning. Encourage them to contribute, to ask questions, to seek answers, to extend on their knowledge and share back with the class. After quiet reading time, I select a few students to share their favourite page, what they learnt or what the problem is in their story.

• You must build your students up. It’s okay to tell them they are the best. After my students have a great learning session, we often clap ourselves on the back and say ‘1, 2, 3, 4, I’m the best and that’s for sure!’.

•  Get them involved in their learning. Let them make choices about their learning paths. Make them feel valued and valuable. Choose your own adventure style of learning is great fun for the students. You will feel more fulfilled and worthwhile if students retain things rather than just learn material for a test, where it's easily forgotten the next day. 

• Make learning as enjoyable as possible for your students. Hold trivia’s, quizzes, use clipboards, write on the windows, invite guest speakers, organise excursions, learn outside, learn inside, have hands-on materials, have a buddy class to learn with. Allow flexibility and choice, depending upon their style of learning. Encourage your students to be creative thinkers, collaborate, and develop 21st-century thinking skills. 

• Ensure your students feel safe in the classroom. Make them believe they can, they can be successful. Let them know it is okay to make mistakes and they can learn from them. That way there is no fear of embarrassing themselves or being bullied. Work on building a classroom environment where everyone belongs, everyone is social and there is a true sense of working together as a team. Build the team spirit.  

• Provide constructive feedback throughout their learning. This way your students will reach their goals successfully. Get their peers to give feedback to. What do they need to work on? How can we make this better? Is this your best work? Send students work to other teachers for their comments.  

• Celebrate your student’s success. Identify what went well and encourage others to do the same. Do a happy dance, have a disco party. Display your students work on the classroom window, on the school noticeboard, in the office foyer. Post students work on your class blog or app for parents to see. Make them feel proud of their achievements.

• Consider your use of extrinsic motivation vs intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is the rewards, stickers, lollies, extra recess, class party, table points, awards. Whereas real motivation to learning in the classroom is intrinsic. Motivation needs to be intrinsic, so the students engage in their learning a lot more. Rely less on extrinsic and work more on the intrinsic.

• You want your students to choose the correct behaviours for their learning and future. Encourage independence. Don’t baby them. They are young and probably don't understand or have a long-term outlook of education, but you need to make it purposefully for their short term, their now. Show them how it gives them a sense of power and independence. Before a reading lesson, give examples of what you can do because you learnt to read at school… follow a recipe, read a manual to fix something, choose a movie from the TV guide, read street signs…

• If it's not relevant, your students will not care. Put yourselves in their shoes. This is when they will act out, tune out, or cause issues in the classroom due to frustration, anger, and irrelevance. Ensure everything you do has a purpose. Don’t just use fillers to make the day go by. Your students will sniff you out.  

• Your people pleaser students will learn because they like you, then you have the students who can make connections and see relevance but you lose many others on the way. Be aware of who fits where. If learning solves a problem for your students, they will be engaged.

In high school, students choose what they are interested in but in primary school, they often have no choice. It is our jobs as teachers to make the curriculum interesting and have our students engaged in learning.

Do you have other suggestions for ways you encourage your students to be motivated to learn? We would love it if you joined the conversation and left a comment below.