Sparking Motivation

For twenty plus years I have tried to figure out what makes people tick. Why? Well because being a good teacher is nothing more than being a professional motivator. You have to know your audience and what motivates them in order to propose a path to them that will spark their interest and foster learning. Which brings me to my main topic, online learning. Many of today’s good teachers have difficulty translating these skills to the online world. You see motivation forces determining behaviors that require four main categories, inspiration, incentive, drive, and enthusiasm.

Ask any good teacher who has never taught online how you accomplish this online and many of them will tell you “you can’t”.

            Now let me try to help you understand how to change that attitude. Next time you have to do develop a class online divide each section to a process and answer yourself the following four questions.

1. What is the inspiration behind the lesson?
2. What incentive to learn does the lesson provided?
3. What’s the drive?
4. How do I keep the learner enthusiastic?

The Process

Further Explanations

            Inspiration requires the stimulation of the mind, a story, a movie, or other people’s work. Teachers need to go back to the fundamentals of story telling and find the digital representation of what they want their students to see and be inspired by. Incentive requires something that encourages your student to do something. Hopefully you have inspired them by stimulating their mind and now can propose a situational problem they can relate with. This need to be part of the story telling foundation a good teacher would normally act out in class. Again, spark motivation by using technology story telling and provide an incentive that provides a need for a resolution. The resolution now becomes part of the drive that requires the act of finding something via investigation or research. I propose to you the problem and how we solve it. Last but not least is enthusiasm, requiring your students to get motivated and consume interest in the subject.