Figuring out the perfect strategies for increasing student motivation in your classroom can be one of the most challenging parts of being a high school math teacher. By the time your students get to your class they’ve already had years of hating math and truly believing that they are not math people.
This makes it even more important to meet your students where they are at and figure out the best way to motivate them. In this blog post I will be sharing a few ways to connect with your students and help them reach their goals.
The first way to support your unmotivated students is by just listening to them. Let them know that you care, that you really are here to help them, and you don’t want to see them fail.
This may seem obvious to some but I’ve worked with a lot of students that truly think their other teachers don’t care about them.
In reality, this is not the case at all. No student is going to want to complete work in a classroom where they feel that their opinion is not valued. Making sure that you have this relationship with your students from the start is one of the most important strategies for increasing student motivation.
Also, positive reinforcement always goes a long way. The more that you are praising these students for their small wins the more that they will want to continue doing work and seeing those successes.
When they get to the point where they are so overwhelmed and feel like they are so far behind it is much more challenging to motivate students to want to continue working.
Make it meaningful
Another reason that your students are unmotivated is because they don’t care and they don’t think that the skills they are learning in your math class are going to matter once they leave your class.
Especially with social media and technology, students are seeing lots of professions and different ways of living where they don’t necessarily need math.
I’m not saying that every single student in your class is going to use math. I’m not saying that at all.
What I am saying is that the skills they are learning in your class are important. They’re learning problem solving skills, collaboration, how to justify their solutions, and how to defend their answers.
You need to make sure that your students know that what they are doing is meaningful and will help them once they leave your class. This takes a lot of trust building with your students.
One of my favorite strategies for increasing student motivation is to make math seem more meaningful through projects and real world applications.
When your students are able to see how math can be used in real life situations or that the skills they are using to complete projects can be used in the future, then they are much more likely to be motivated. I will say that this strategy alone does not work for every student but it definitely increases buy-in for some of those students that are really just reluctant to do any work.
You can also have conversations with these students to ask them what they are interested in and what their plans are for the future. Many of these students aren’t having conversations about their future at home, so they need an awesome teacher like you to talk to.
Once they realize that everything they are doing in school now is building on the skills they need in real life, they are going to see the meaning behind your efforts.
Of course getting this out of your students is not a one-man show. With your super unmotivated students you will usually have a team of other teachers, counselors, and special education teachers to work together with the goal of motivating your student.
Intrinsic motivation
The goal for student motivation is always to have students intrinsically motivated but if we’re being realistic, at the high school level, most of your students will not be intrinsically motivated. They’re not doing math work because it’s something that they actually want to do.
Most of the time they are completing assignments because it’s something that they think they have to do based on extrinsic motivators. Some really good examples of extrinsic motivators are pressure from their parents, not wanting to disappoint their teacher, getting good grades, and being accepted into college.
All of these motivators are more of a means to an end because they know that they won’t actually use the math concepts in real life.
Since these extrinsic factors usually play a very large role in a student’s motivation, having a relationship with your struggling students’ parents is essential. If you’re able to work together as a team to support your students and help them throughout the semester it will be much easier to reach your students.
Engaging unmotivated students
One strategy that I think is really important that I got from CollaboratEd with Julianna is cold calling in math class. This strategy for increasing student motivation is usually very taboo and frowned upon especially for students with anxiety but if it is implemented correctly can be very beneficial.
The idea of cold calling in this case is to ensure that everyone participates and puts forth their best effort. The expectation in the classroom is that mistakes are okay and part of the learning process.
This is going to take a lot of unlearning negative automatic thoughts and getting past those anxieties for some of your students. However, if you’re able to create an environment in your classroom where students feel safe to express their thoughts and share their ideas then this will no longer be an issue.
With cold calling students also know that they’ll be held accountable for their actions. If they know that there’s a chance they’re going to get called on they will need to be paying attention and be prepared to have thoughts about the work.
My final thoughts about these strategies for increasing student motivation
You will never be able to motivate your apathetic students if you don’t first figure out what motivates them. Build that relationship with your students so that you know exactly what they care about and can support them in reaching those goals.
This could look like meeting with them to discuss their future plans and just letting them know that you are there to support them and you want them to be successful. You could also find out what types of math problems interest them such as projects, hands-on, videos, or games.
The ultimate goal of this is to ensure that none of your students just fall through the cracks of the public education system. It can be really challenging at times and you’re not going to be able to get every student but know that you are making an impact by building these relationships with your students.
