Workshop on Motivating Students

Workshop Summary:

As teachers, we feel that often we go to a lot of work to teach and assist our students, yet the students do not always seem to put in as much effort as we are. They often do not study as much and as early as they should, and sometimes they don’t even come to class. What can we do to change this? Is it even our responsibility to motivate the students, anyway? In this workshop we will discuss these questions as well as the theory, from cognitive science, as well as the practice of student motivation. When students are motivated, they learn more– and teaching is a lot more enjoyable, too.

Workshop Length:

I usually do this as a 50-minute workshop with time for 10 minutes of questions in a 1-hour slot, but there is more than “one hour’s worth” of methods of motivating students– and the evidence to support those methods– out there, so the length is flexible. Other alternatives include: combining a discussion of motivating students in general with metacognitive techniques specifically; extending the workshop to include more time for faculty to design or plan how they will use these techniques in their specific classes; or combining this discussion of student motivation with one about evidence-based teaching in general, especially for participant groups with minimal baseline understanding of the current state of evidence about university pedagogy.

Workshop Link: 

Here is a recording made of this workshop at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, March 2017.