What Teachers Can Do to Boost Student Motivation

What teacher doesn’t want an environment where students are working on lessons and learning because they want to do it instead of because they have to do it? Researchers have identified four specific ways to nurture a sense of intrinsic motivation in students.

In this video series, educators and authors Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski discuss these elements: autonomy, which is helping learners feel that they have a choice in what they do and how they do it; competence, or creating situations in which students feel that they are capable of doing what they are being asked to do; relatedness, or doing activities that help students connect to others; and relevance, or making work seem interesting, valuable, and useful to students’ everyday lives.