Hi! My name is Laura Hyatt. I am currently a sophmore in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. I am studying to be a Early Childhood teacher, and I hope to recieve a masters in Special Needs. Part of being an Education Majore means that I spend a lot of my time at different classrooms in different schools. My freshman year I was a tutor at Oak Grove Elementary. The girl I was tutoring was wonderful! I could not have asked for a better student. However, one day I was asked to also tutor another girl. Up until this point, I had never met someone so unmotivated. No matter what I tried she simply didn't want to learn or do the work that was assigned to her. She was smart, and I could tell she knew the answers if she tried. Getting her to try was the hard part. This is the reason why I chose to do my project on motivation. My video and the Youtube video both talk about motivation in the classroom. So take a look!

My video states that we as teachers need to find better ways of motivating our students. As teachers we will face the problem of motivation countless times. As the example I gave earlier, there are some students that seem almost impossible to motivate, but as teachers it its our job to find whatever it is that will. Motivation can be done through many different areas. You can relate the material to something personal, use projects to get the students to learn about the material, plan field trips the involve the material being learned, and countless other ideas. Motivating students means to get the students attention, and get to be curious in the material you are discussing. I recently was in an 8th grade boys South Carolina History class for my EDPY 401 practicum. The teacher's name was Mrs. Helfer, and she knew exactly how to motivate her boys to get involved in the class and learn the material. The boys were involved in several projects through out this semester, and they also went on some field trips around the state. Mrs. Helfer would even get the boys involved in class discussions by relating the material to things the boys knew about. In one class she was discussing the reasons for the War of 1812. One of the reasons was becuase the colonies felt that England was picking on them, as Mrs. Helfer put it. So as she was discussing this she would walk around the classroom and start picking on the boys by moving their books across the classroom, and telling them they looked funny. The boys really got into the discussion, and later on in a review session they were able to recall the information becuase it had been relayed to them personally through Mrs. Helfer's picking. Mrs. Helfer's way of motivation appeals to the extrinsic side of motivation. This is motivation outside of an idividual. Another type of motivation is intrinsic. This is where a child is motivated to do well because he or she wants to accomplish something personally, such as making straight A's in a class. Either way motivation is key to being a teacher. If we truly want our students to learn the material we discuss in class, they have to enjoy actually being in the class. So how will you motivate your students? There are so many ways, we just have to be creative, and not give up just because a student may seem like a hopeless cause. Everyone deserves a chance to succeed in school and in life.

Sources: Ormrod, Jeanne E. "Educational Psychology: Developing Learners." Pearson Educations, Inc., New Jersey 2006. ( Chapter 11, Fifth Edition)

Observations done at: Oak Grove Elementary and Dent Middle School.