The single most important thing that you can do to improve the motivation of your students is to help them understand that intelligence and talent can both be improved by effort.
Without this ‘growth mindset’, they’ll lack the incentive to put in the effort required to excel in their exams.
There are a number of things that you can do to help them:
- Make them aware of where they currently are along the growth vs fixed mindset continuum – click on the following link to launch a questionnaire which can help with this
- Explain the importance of having a growth mindset – Matthew Syed has done a brilliant podcast on this. Launch it by clicking on the following link and running the video from 15.10 until 27.45.
- Explain up-front that you will be presenting scatter graphs throughout the year and that you expect these to show a positive correlation between time spent and performance – click here for an example
- Follow through with this at regular intervals – until the message hits home. Click the links below to see how:
