Teach English in Caihe Zhen - Huanggang Shi

Motivating students is a skill that every teacher should desire to incorporate into their teaching and create an environment in their classroom to do this. Motivating does not come easy though. Depending on the age group, a teacher will have different obstacles to jump over to motivate the students. Young children have short attention spans, teenagers aren’t always excited about learning and might need reasons to enjoy the lessons, and with all groups one should be a pillar of knowledge to come to. Teaching young children, teachers must be creating lessons that will keep their attention long enough and encourage them to enjoy learning. That initial act of keeping their attention is difficult when you know what lessons you want to get through each day and children can often get off track. Adjust the lessons to be more interactive, add games, and have a positive attitude so the children are excited and focused in the classroom. It is a different situation with teenagers or young adults because they start doing things just because they must. They might just be in an English class because they were told to and it was a part of their curriculum. Teenagers only become fully interested if it relates back to them. Use this as a tool for lessons going forward, do research. Find what excites your students, their interests, hobbies, and what they want from learning English. Use these things to make lessons more enjoyable for the class and keep their attention. Making the lessons more enjoyable in turn motivates the students to put more into learning and sticking with English. This is a great start, but it will only be the start of getting students motivated. Develop rapport and being a source of knowledge for students will in turn motivate them as well. One does not have to know everything to know about teaching English but exercise the knowledge you do know and shape the students. Showing you have knowledge on the subject helps to motivate because they will see you as reliable and someone they can come to with questions. When you don’t know something follow up on it. Go find out the answer and bring back up in the next class or next week. Show you are putting in the effort to find the answer for the student. It goes hand and hand with creating rapport with the class, putting in effort goes a long way with students. Remember students’ names, helping them if they need help but letting them try on their own first. Showing care with your teachings is noticeable by the students. Slacking and not planning the lesson for the day is noticed by students. This won’t always be the case at first with students who inherently don’t enjoy school or learning however, creating this kind of environment shows them someone is taking an interest in their learning and helps them to want to learn. Every teacher has their own style and methods of doing all of this in the classroom. Some work better than others but it will always come down to the attitude of the individual. How a teacher approaches everything and their energy in front of the class will determine how certain things are received by the students as well. Often a positive and bright outlook in front of the students instead of one who doesn’t show much emotion or is stand offish will have a greater impact on a class. Much with any aspect of teaching there should be thought, and immense effort put into it and the same goes with motivating students. Throughout my own schooling the lessons and efforts that left the most impact on me motivated me into later stages of my schooling and life. These things were personal connections with lessons, shaping lessons around the students needs, holding the students to a standard and knowing they could achieve that, and of course pushing students. While caring for students is good, pushing students and flexing lessons around them will help just as well in many cases. Again, motivation is not always easy but is worthwhile in the end.