Meggin’s Current Articles

Creating Engaging Units of Study For Your Students – Motivating Learners

25th October, 2009 - Posted by Meggin - No Comments

When you are creating units for students, these questions run through your mind (along with many others, I know):

• What will I do to get my students excited about what I am getting ready to teach them?
• How will I motivate, incite, energize, stimulate, encourage, inspire, provoke, challenge, rouse, rally, invite, titillate, engage, entice, and/or lure my students into this unit of study?
• What will I do that will activate their background knowledge?

The sky is the limit for all of these because your creativity is boundless.  So, there is not a particular ‘number” of activities or strategies that you need to use, because so much depends on the depth and breadth of your unit and what you ultimately create that will be the energizer(s), the enticer(s), the engager(s) for your unit.

With that being said, however, just thinking that you will have a guest speaker on plate tectonics or that you’ll show a movie related to your unit theme is not enough.  Let’s think about what you can consider as you’re putting your unit together. 

1. Go back to the unit’s “Content Outline” and the unit “Objectives.”  No matter what you decide to include into your unit plans, it is essential that the motivation and activation activities support the learning objectives. There is so much you can do that enhances students’ learning that there is certainly no need for ‘filler’ activities that are ‘fun’ but don’t add to the learning. 

2. Begin to consider what will motivate your students as they are learning.  To motivate is to “furnish with a motive or motives; to give impetus to; to incite; to impel.” The learning activities that you want to include in your unit are ones meant to encourage students to learn, to inspire them to learn, to engage them in learning, to challenge them to learn, to rally them to the teacher’s side in the fight for learning, etc.  Start brainstorming what would do that (again, review your content outline and objectives to help keep your brainstorming on track). 

3.  Next, go back and rethink your brainstorming and begin to flesh out those ideas that seem to have promise for ‘inciting learning’ in your students.  This includes helping them make connections between what they know and what you are teaching them as well as extending their learning of the information. 

4.  Consider all the different types of learners you have in your classroom, too.  Certain learning activities will connect better with some students than others – so be sure to differentiate where possible and where reasonable. 

5.  As you are working through this, you will also need to evaluate whether you have ”enough” – or if you have gone overboard!  As stated above, one movie is not enough. (Two movies are not enough).  You want to look for quantity (5 – 10 activities/ occurrences/ happenings) and/or for quality 1-3 exceptionally “in-depth” activities/occurrences /happenings. This does not mean that there won’t be quality in the quantity. I hope there will be–but you want to assure yourself that you have created motivational experiences that demonstrate quality of reasoning, planning, and potential learning.

6.  It’s always wise to conceptualize a clear justification for each motivation learning experience.  You never know when someone might question you and how you are getting your students too excited about learning!  Sad, but true. 

Have fun planning and then have a fabulous time teaching and learning with your students! That’s the best part of all!!

And if you’d like to access multiple free resources to support your teaching, you’ll find them at both of the following websites, which you are welcome to access:

** http://www.PumpernickelPublishing.com

** http://www.OwningWordsforLiteracy.com

(c) Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D. – AKA ‘The Ph.D. of Productivity’(tm).