What Happens when Positive Motivation Strategies are Used with Fidelity

What Happens when Positive Motivation Strategies are Used with Fidelity

Effective teaching requires teachers to use positive motivation strategies that encourage students to persist longer, learn more deeply, produce higher quality work, and perform better in class and on tests. In effective classrooms, teachers use techniques to motivate students to achieve mastery goals and empower students to manage their own learning outcomes.

Teachers motivate students by:  

• Promoting a mastery-goal orientation rather than a comparative performance orientation. As a student works towards a meaningful goal, they attach value to the learning task, develop a belief in their own competence to master the goal, and experience the satisfaction of finally achieving the goal. 
• Setting up and maintaining wall displays of lesson progress goals, exemplar work and whole-class rewards. 

What It Achieves  

When teachers involve students in the learning process and focus on mastery goals, the classroom is a predictable environment in which students explicitly understand what they need to do to succeed. When students perceive that there is a mastery goal structure in place, there are fewer behaviour disruptions and they are more focused on learning.  

When students are involved in planning how to approach learning tasks and setting targets for learning, their motivation is enhanced as they take ownership over the process and outcomes. 

Using positive motivation strategies also helps teachers see how their classroom success is contributing to the school’s success.  

Finally, when students experience motivation strategies, they achieve success daily, are more confident, attend school regularly, and are motivated to set higher goals and continue working towards them.