Motivation: Using Student's Interests to Guide Instruction

Abstract

Motivation is a key ingredient to students' success in school and as a preservice teacher I have focused and reflected on this broad topic. Through my coursework I have learned to take an ethnographic approach to learning about my students’ daily life outside of school and this has led me to conduct case study home visits. I observed and analyzed home life interactions and environments in the hopes of making school content more meaningful. Throughout one student teaching semester I worked with my mentor teacher and our class to implement a long-term project that bridged students’ home life with school. My mentor teacher and I collaborated on bodies of knowledge or themes that were of interest to the majority of the class. We chose a pop-culture topic, Angry Birds, which looked to be of interest to most of our students. I implemented the long-term project and through two transcribed interviews and an analysis of theories relevant to motivation concluded that teachers can help students’ motivation by implementing curriculum that follows their interests.