Motivating Your Students: Before you can teach them, you have to reach them

McCarty, H., & Siccone, F. (2001). Motivating Your Students: Before you can teach them, you have to reach them. Massachusetts: Pearson Education Company

This is a handbook for teachers of K-12 and beyond. The authors describe key methods of both maximizing your powers of persuasion and engaging your students in spirited discussion. This is through various motivational tactics.

Summary/Analysis:
This summary pertains to a chapter titled “Motivating You Student”. This chapter discusses challenges of motivating students, how all humans are motivated in some sense, a teacher’s understanding of student motivation, and accepting the fact that students may not always be motivated at one time. McCarty and Siccone describes motivational teaching is not a paint job. Motivating students do not mean to give them something they don’t have or paint the motivation on the surface. Rather, reaching students require finding their major motivation or those most appropriate to his or her educational objectives. McCarty and Siccone states not every student is on the “same page”, as far as being motivated in school. Some will be “the good students,” motivated to do well in class and to please their teacher. Others may see academics as “boring” or may have a history of failure in the school. In conclusion, “speak to the heart” ends this chapter and discusses the importance of finding out student’s concerns, important feelings, issues, or values and will need to be spoken to directly. In other terms, this is the “art” of motivational teaching.

This resource truly goes in depth with the ideas of motivating students. This chapter emphasizes on the importance of understanding students as an individual and analyzing their own motivation. This has allowed me to start thinking about my action research question and how I can implement motivation through student goal setting. How will students achieve through their own motivation? What motivates them to succeed in school? What short term goals will encourage motivation in the classroom? I found out that Hanoch McCarty has actually written several stories for Chicken Soup for the Soul, this only shows how compassionate and heart-warming this author truly is. Even though McCarty and Siccone do not offer more concrete educational resources, I feel that this text is something I can refer to when looking deeper into motivating students.

Relevant Quotes/Concepts:
~ ”We don’t mean that the task of delivering a motivational lesson is impossible, we just believe that one cannot “give” motivation to someone else unless one can tap into the motivations already present in that person!” (2)

~ “If you can determine what the major motivations are in this class, you can become a motivational teacher” (5).

~”The paradox is to teach with the clear intention of inspiring each and every student to discover his or her love of learning and then to accept that some were moved and others were not. Then return to school tomorrow prepared for this to be the day when the awakening happens” (6)
~”The trick is going to be whether or not you learn to connect yourself, your words, and your ideas to their need, their background and experiences, their ways of seeing the world (7).
~”Speak to the heart. Find what is at the core of your student’s concerns. Keep your eyes and ears tuned to finding out those central, more important feels, concerns, issues, or values, and speak to them directly. That is the key, the foundation, the secret to the art of motivational speaking” (9)

Text Sources:
Hidi, S., & Harackiewics, J.M. (2000). Motivating the academically unmotivated: a critical issue for the 21st century. Review of Educational Research, 70, 151-180