Motivating students to engage actively in a lesson

To me, one way to motivate students to engage actively and participate in a lesson is when they see the purpose of the class session, and how it contributes to their future endeavours. However, sometimes this is easier said than done. If a course, or a class session, is closely related to what students HAVE TO complete soon, then this actual need will easily spice up the students, even if this is only extrinsic motivation. One example is the class session on Lesson Planning, which is usually conducted towards the end of my 17-session Subject Curriculum and Teaching (English) course on the Postgraduate Diploma in Education programme. The students, who are either preservice or inservice ESL teachers, will be supervised for teaching practicum soon after the Subject Curriculum and Teaching course. During the lesson observations, they will be assessed on, inter alia,  their lesson planning skills. In this scenario, it is not difficult to motivate students to engage activity, as they will have a chance to, and in fact need to, apply the lesson planning ideas soon in their own teaching.

It is less easy, however, when the course, or the class session, has no immediate application value to the students, especially if the course is more theoretical in nature. For a four-year undergraduate programme, students may not ‘feel’ the future importance of a course if it is offered in the first or second year of study. Sometimes, even the whole programme may not be one that is ‘practical’ or career-oriented.

It is under such circumstances that the task for course instructions to motivate students to engage them actively becomes even more challenging. The course instructor may then have to strive to (a) show the intrinsic value of,  and stimulate intrinsic interest in, the course content itself, and (b) make the class sessions themselves more interesting and rewarding, utilising a variety of teaching techniques (e.g., ‘small teaching’ strategies (Lang, 2016)) .

 

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching : everyday lessons from the science of learning. Jossey-Bass & Pfeiffer.