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Motivation

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This 3-minute video for parents features Mental Health Therapist Stephanie Dann talking about motivation. Consider these questions: 1) How can I help my student believe they will be successful? 2) How can I increase the value of the activity for my student? - Goal-setting conversations - elementary: short-term/daily and specific choices, middle school: longer-term weekly goals and break into smaller parts, high school: long-term self-directed goals. - Track progress and make a plan for when your student gets stuck. Talk about how the goal relates to things your student values. - With rewards, focus on effort and not results as well as be specific about what you are rewarding. Challenge: Have a goal setting conversation this week with your student!

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Hi my name is Stephanie Dann. I'm a mental health therapist that works with the White River School District. Today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about motivating your students. I know this is something that's been a struggle in distance learning. A good approach to thinking about motivating kids of all ages to do school work is to consider two questions. One, how can I help my student believe that they're going to be successful. And two, how can I increase the value of the activity that my student is doing. To increase success in school work with our students, goal setting and looking at progress can really be helpful. So what does this look like? We can have goal-setting conversations with our students. Students are still learning how to organize information and time manage. So having conversations with them can really help them in this area. For elementary age students, this would look like having conversations about short-term goals and having very specific choices. So it might look like, "This morning we have to do some things. Would you like to write these three sentences to describe these pictures or finish your math assignments?" For middle school-age students we want to create longer-term goals and help them to break things apart into smaller pieces. So it might look like at the beginning of the week taking a math class, and saying, "What do you need to have done by the end of the week, and how do you want to break that up over these five days?" With high school students we want to focus more on ultimately what they need to learn, and then how do we shift that to what they need to do, with giving them more choice and power. So, maybe taking a bigger broad view of, "What are you learning about in this class? How long are you working on it? And how will you break that apart over time?" Making them come up with the solutions. We want to help them to track their progress, so things like having a planner, or using an app to see how things are going can be very helpful. And then also, in advance having a plan for, "What are you going to do when you get stuck?" We also want to help students to understand how their school work is related to something that they value. What are they doing in class that is related to something they might want to do in the future, like a job? Can we relate what they're doing in class in any way to a hobby that they like? Is this related to something else that they want to learn about? Again, linking what they're learning about to something that they value makes it more likely they will do it. Lastly, if you are going to use rewards for doing school work, focus on rewarding your student's effort and not their results. Be really specific when they're rewarding them. Not just a blanket 'good job'. You want them to understand that you're rewarding them for doing this, with this kind of reward. You want them to be able to link that in their mind. And use your words to encourage students to do things that they wouldn't likely normally do. We don't need to reward everything. Just things that are particularly hard, or things that they don't like to do. Thanks for listening.

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