Ideas for Motivating Students

1. Explain. Some recent research shows that many students do poorly on assignments or in participation because they do not understand what to do or why they should do it. Teachers should spend more time explaining why we teach what we do, and why the topic or approach or activity is important and interesting and worthwhile. In the process, some of the teacher's enthusiasm will be transmitted to the students, who will be more likely to become interested. Similarly, teachers should spend more time explaining exactly what is expected on assignments or activities. Students who are uncertain about what to do will seldom perform well.
(In a study conducted on one college campus, a faculty member gave a student assignment to a group of colleagues for analysis. Few of them could understand what the faculty member wanted. If experienced profs are confused, how can we expect students to understand?)
2. Reward. Students who do not yet have powerful intrinsic motivation to learn can be helped by extrinsic motivators in the form of rewards. Rather than criticizing unwanted behavior or answers, reward correct behavior and answers. Remember that adults and children alike continue or repeat behavior that is rewarded. The rewards can (and should) be small and configured to the level of the students. Small children can be given a balloon, a piece of gum, or a set of crayons. Even at the college level, many professors at various colleges have given books, lunches, certificates, exemptions from final exams, verbal praise, and so on for good performance. Even something as apparently "childish" as a "Good Job!" stamp or sticker can encourage students to perform at higher levels. And the important point is that extrinsic motivators can, over a brief period of time, produce intrinsic motivation. Everyone likes the feeling of accomplishment and recognition; rewards for good work produce those good feelings.
3. Care. Students respond with interest and motivation to teachers who appear to be human and caring. Teachers can help produce these feelings by sharing parts of themselves with students, especially little stories of problems and mistakes they made, either as children or even recently. Such personalizing of the student/teacher relationship helps students see teachers as approachable human beings and not as aloof authority figures. Young people are also quite insecure, and they secretly welcome the admission by adults that insecurity and error are common to everyone. Students will attend to an adult who appears to be a "real person," who had problems as a youth (or more recently) and survived them.
It is also a good idea to be approachable personally. Show that you care about your students by asking about their concerns and goals. What do they plan to do in the future? What things do they like? Such a teacher will be trusted and respected more than one who is all business.
4. Have students participate. One of the major keys to motivation is the active involvement of students in their own learning. Standing in front of them and lecturing to them (at them?) is thus a relatively poor method of teaching. It is better to get students involved in activities, group problem solving exercises, helping to decide what to do and the best way to do it, helping the teacher, working with each other, or in some other way getting physically involved in the lesson. A lesson about nature, for example, would be more effective walking outdoors than looking at pictures.
Students love to be needed (just like adults!). By choosing several students to help the teacher (take roll, grade objective exams, research bibliographies or biographies of important persons, chair discussion groups, rearrange chairs, change the overhead transparencies, hold up pictures, pass out papers or exams) students' self esteem is boosted and consequently their motivation is increased. Older students will also see themselves as necessary, integral, and contributing parts of the learning process through participation like this. Use every opportunity to have students help you. Assign them homework that involves helping you ("I need some magazine illustrations of the emphasis on materialism for next week; would someone like to find one for me?").
5. Teach Inductively. It has been said that presenting conclusions first and then providing examples robs students of the joy of discovery. Why not present some examples first and ask students to make sense of them, to generalize about them, to draw the conclusions themselves? By beginning with the examples, evidence, stories, and so forth and arriving at conclusions later, you can maintain interest and increase motivation, as well as teach the skills of analysis and synthesis. Remember that the parable method of making a point has some significant historical precedent.
6. Satisfy students' needs. Attending to need satisfaction is a primary method of keeping students interested and happy. Students' basic needs have been identified as survival, love, power, fun, and freedom. Attending to the need for power could be as simple as allowing students to choose from among two or three things to do--two or three paper topics, two or three activities, choosing between writing an extra paper and taking the final exam, etc. Many students have a need to have fun in active ways--in other words, they need to be noisy and excited. Rather than always avoiding or suppressing these needs, design an educational activity that fulfills them.
Students will be much more committed to a learning activity that has value for them, that they can see as meeting their needs, either long term or short term. They will, in fact, put up with substantial immediate unpleasantness and do an amazing amount of hard work if they are convinced that what they are learning ultimately meets their needs.
7. Make learning visual. Even before young people were reared in a video environment, it was recognized that memory is often connected to visual images. In the middle ages people who memorized the Bible or Homer would sometimes walk around inside a cathedral and mentally attach certain passages to objects inside, so that remembering the image of a column or statue would provide the needed stimulus to remember the next hundred lines of text. Similarly, we can provide better learning by attaching images to the ideas we want to convey. Use drawings, diagrams, pictures, charts, graphs, bulleted lists, even three-dimensional objects you can bring to class to help students anchor the idea to an image.
It is very helpful to begin a class session or a series of classes with a conceptual diagram of the relationship of all the components in the class so that at a glance students can apprehend a context for all the learning they will be doing. This will enable them to develop a mental framework or filing system that will help them to learn better and remember more.
8. Use positive emotions to enhance learning and motivation. Strong and lasting memory is connected with the emotional state and experience of the learner. That is, people remember better when the learning is accompanied by strong emotions. If you can make something fun, exciting, happy, loving, or perhaps even a bit frightening, students will learn more readily and the learning will last much longer. Emotions can be created by classroom attitudes, by doing something unexpected or outrageous, by praise, and by many other means.
The day you come to class with a bowl on your head and speak as an alien observer about humans will be a day and a lesson your students will remember. Don't be afraid to embarrass yourself to make a memorable point.
9. Remember that energy sells. Think about these problems for a minute: Why would so many students rather see Rambo, Robocop, Friday the 13th, or another movie like that than one on the life of Christ? Why is rock music more popular with youth than classical music or Christian elevator music? Why is evil often seen as more interesting than good? The answer is connected with the way good and evil are portrayed. Unfortunately, evil usually has high energy on its side while good is seen as passive and boring. We've been trapped by the idea that "bad people do; good people don't." Good is passive, resistant, reactionary, while evil is proactive, energetic, creative.
In a typical cartoon where Sylvester the cat is trying to catch and eat Tweety bird, the cat is highly creative, inventing several ways to get at Tweety. Meanwhile, the guard dog is passive and waits until the cat comes within range before spoiling his plans by beating him up. Here is the unfortunate problem: in the theological scheme of things, the cat is the devil and the dog is God. The cat is admired because of his creative energy; the dog is just a boring policeman. This problem is not new--in the seventeenth century, Milton's Paradise Lost was criticized because Satan was a more interesting character than God, because Satan was the one with the energy.
The lesson here is that we must begin to associate our heroes and our truths with energy. Don't portray Jesus as a wimpy good guy--the "gentle Jesus, meek and mild"; show him as dynamic, exciting, and energetic. Present his turning over the money changers' tables, his power and energy in multiplying the loaves and fishes, and so on. Likewise, make a point to show that evil is often lazy, uncreative, predatory, tired, recycling the same old boring temptations, etc. etc.
Why does heaven sound boring to a lot of kids, while they think that all the really interesting people will be in hell?

Being energetic in your teaching is a motivating factor in itself; adding energy to the ideas you want to convey will further enhance learning and commitment to the ideas.

How to Measure Your & Your People's Strengths & Capabilities?

The First Steps you must take is to get yourself scientifically measured so as to know for yourself your hidden strengths. Your strengths are your opportunities for growth and progress. Your strengths open the doors for your bright future. You must know your weaknesses too, as they are likely to be your threats. Your weaknesses rob you of your success.

You will be happy to know that Psychologists have uncovered that the vast majority of people in this world are working on their weaknesses and hence end up struggling, most of the time. Since weakness is a weakness and takes a longer time for course correction. The successful minority always focus on strengths, true strengths and hence they are on fast track.

Our true strengths are actually hidden inside each one of us in the form heredity and environmental influences. We are born with gifts that we rarely use, due to our ignorance. The good news is that you can measure it now. Our upbringing has too bestows certain strengths to us in terms of conditioned emotional responses to different situations. Our personality is a combination of both, the heredity and environment. So it is good to measure both in order to gain a holistic view and better understanding of the self.

But as we grow, based on the demands of life or work or school one develops certain competency or is required to develop some more to be on the fast lane. Do a Psychometric competency mapping to know as to where you stand today, so that you can take right decisions as to where you wish to be in the near future.

You have an advantage to find out and actually measure as to how good you are, in your communication. Don`t forget the fact that communication is the life blood of your progress no matter your subject matter expertise, technical competence or years of experience. Based on the theory of transactional analysis, now you can get your specific solution to all your communication problems or challenges.

You would have noticed at times that your behaviour is not same everywhere and it actually varies depending on the situation. Now you can be in the driver`s seat by even helping yourself with that knowledge too. Your behaviour is driven by your attitude made up of the conditioning over the years. You can change all of that by changing your thought process and to change that you need to measure your inner mind with not just one but a chosen battery of assessments to suit the specific situation or job role.

Look forward to be of professional help in understanding People's BAT - Behaviour, Attitude & Thinking.

Stress is a Choice

A magnet serves its purpose very well. It doesn't care exactly what it attracts. It's on auto pilot and simply does its job. When we recognize that we too are magnets who attract people and things into our lives, we unleash the power to choose who and what we truly want to draw into our lives.

Look around you. Who and what is in your life? Whoever and whatever you find, you've attracted. That's right. You brought them all to you. You're a magnet and quite a powerful one at that.

Your thoughts, conversations and actions have drawn everything and everyone to you just like a magnet attracts metal. Do you like what you see around you in your business, your job or personal life? Well, it's all because of you.

You didn't realize you had such a strong gravitational force, did you? Like it or not, you've pulled all these people and things into your pathway to the future. Do you want to keep them along for the ride?

If you're like me, while growing up you may have often heard your parents telling you something like, "You are who you have around you. Choose your friends and associates carefully." As a child growing up, those words did not have as much meaning and significance as they do to me today. Looking back on my life, I have been fortunate to have a number of people who positively influenced my life.

Discover your magnetism and choose carefully what you say, what you think and what you do. Attract those people and things that will carry you forward to a desired state, one you truly deserve and choose to achieve - no matter what.

Some questions to ask yourself:

Who or what are you attracting in your life?

As new people enter your life, how are they the same or different than others?

Are your thoughts and conversations drawing powerful, positive influencers to you?

Bibliography- Newsletter simpletruth.com

HAVE A SIMPLE STRESS FREE LIFE!!!!!!

10 common body language traps for women in the workplace

A female executive was having problems dealing with her male colleagues. "They like me, but they never take me seriously," she complained. "It's as if they think I'm flirting with them. Which I definitely am not!"

After watching her interact with various men on the senior management team, I saw the problem. She was trying to discuss work-related issues while using a "social gaze."

Here's what I mean . . .

If you create an imaginary triangle on someone’s face, with their eyes as the base and mid-forehead as the apex, you will have mapped out the "look of business." When you keep your gaze in that area, you nonverbally signal a no-nonsense, business-like approach. But when you invert the triangle and move your focus to the area between the eyes and mouth, you turn your gaze into one more appropriate for social encounters. And a social gaze can be misinterpreted as flirtatious—even in a corporate setting.

It’s a small thing, really. But as this woman found out, one small nonverbal signal can change the dynamics of an entire business interaction.
There are two sets of nonverbal signals that are especially important to all professionals. When first introduced to a leader, followers immediately and unconsciously assess him or her for warmth (empathy, likeability, caring) and authority (power, credibility, status). “Warm” leaders connect with staff in a way that makes them want to do a really good job because of that personal connection, affection and respect. But employees also look for leaders who project stability and authority, who make them feel secure, and whom they believe can follow through and achieve results.

Obviously the most appealing leaders are seen to have both qualities, and the least effective leaders are those regarded as uncaring and insecure. Perhaps not so obviously, many of the nonverbal signals for warmth and authority are divided along gender lines. Although I know several leaders of both sexes who do not fit the stereotypes, I’ve also observed that gender differences in body language most often do align with these two groupings. Women are the champions in the warmth and empathy arena, but lose out with power and authority cues—mostly because they fall prey to ten common body language traps.

TRAP #1: Using too many head tilts. Head tilting is a signal that someone is listening and involved—and a particularly feminine gesture. As such, head tilts can be very positive cues, but they are also subconsciously processed as submission signals. (Dogs tilt their heads to expose their necks, as a way to show deference to the dominant animal.) TIP: Use head tilts when you want to demonstrate your concern for and interest in members of your team, or when you want to encourage people to expand on what they are saying. But when you need to project power and authority, you should keep your head straight up in a more neutral position.

TRAP #2: Physically condensing. Women tend to condense their bodies, keeping their elbows to their sides, tightly crossing their legs, stacking their materials in small, neat piles and contracting their bodies to take up as little space as possible. High status males do the opposite: They expand into available space and take up room. TIP:Remember that status and authority are nonverbally demonstrated through height and space. So stand tall, pull your shoulders back, widen your stance and hold your head high. And at the next meeting, instead of keeping your belongings in a neat little stack, spread them out and claim your turf!

TRAP #3: Using girlish gestures. Everyone uses pacifying gestures when under stress. They rub their hands together, grab their upper arms and touch their necks. But women are viewed as much less powerful when they pacify with girlish behaviors (twirling hair, playing with jewelry, etc.). TIP: Keep your hands on your lap or on the conference table where they can be seen—and where you will be reminded to keep them still. And when you do use gestures, notice if they are reinforcing your statements. If so, you are probably showing your palms when indicating openness and inclusiveness, “steepling” (finger tips touching, palms separated) when being precise, and turning your hands palms-down when you are absolutely sure of your position.

TRAP #4: Speaking “up.” Women's voices often rise at the ends of sentences as if they're asking a question or asking for approval. TIP: When making a declarative statement, be sure to use the authoritative arc, in which your voice starts on one note, rises in pitch through the sentence and drops back down at the end.

TRAP #5: Smiling excessively. Excessive or inappropriate smiling can be confusing and a credibility robber. This is especially noticeable if you over-smile while discussing a sensitive subject, expressing anger or giving negative feedback. TIP: Employed at the right times (for example, during an initial meeting with a potential business client), smiling can be one of the most powerful and positive nonverbal cues, and especially potent for signaling likeability and friendliness. But when the subject turns serious, you need to look serious.

TRAP #6: Nodding too much. When a man nods, it means he agrees. When a woman nods, it means she agrees—or is listening to, empathizing with or encouraging the speaker to continue. In fact, women tend to nod so much that we’ve been accused of looking like bobble-head dolls. TIP: Constant head nodding can express encouragement and engagement, but not authority and power. To project authority, especially when stating your opinion, keep your head still.

TRAP #7: Waiting your turn. In business negotiations, men take control by talking more than women and interrupting more frequently. TIP: One perspective on the value of speaking up comes from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who—when asked what advice she had for up-and-coming professional women—replied, “Learn to interrupt.”

TRAP #8: Flirtatious behavior. Women gain likeability but lose the competitive advantage in a negotiation when they flirt. That was the consensus of a University of California Berkeley study in which female actors played the roles of sellers of a biotech business. Half were told to project a no-nonsense, business approach. Half were instructed to flirt subtly(using the nonverbal behaviors of smiling, leaning forward suggestively, tossing their hair, etc.). The outcome of the Berkeley study was that the “buyers” offered the flirts, dubbed “likeable losers”, 20 percent less on average than what they offered the more straitlaced sellers. TIP: In business, it’s better to come across as competent and professional.

TRAP #9: Being emotionally over-expressive. While a certain amount of movement and animation adds passion and meaning to a message, women who visibly express their emotions with hand gestures that rise above their shoulders can quickly overwhelm an audience (especially if that audience is composed primarily of males). TIP: To engage and motivate people, an emotional presentation can be very effective. But in situations where you want to maximize your authority, you’ll need to minimize your movements and keep your gestures about waist high. When you appear calm and contained, you look more powerful.

TRAP #10: Having a delicate handshake. Even more than their male counterparts, women with a weak handshake are judged to be passive and less confident.TIP: Take the time to cultivate your "professional shake.” Keep your body squared off to the other person, facing him or her fully. Make sure you have palm-to-palm contact and that the web of your hand (the skin between your thumb and first finger) touches the web of the other person's. Look your partner in the eyes, smile—this is one place where a smile is a business asset—and start to speak: “So good to meet you . . .” or whatever. Most of all, remember to shake hands firmly.

Of course, increased awareness of how you stand, gesture, shake hands and employ other nonverbal signals is only half of the equation. The other half is the ability to accurately read the body language of others. And it is here where women leaders really have the advantage. Women are more attuned to relationship dynamics and more skilled at picking up nonverbal cues. It’s a skill that gives them insights that men sometimes miss about what is really going on in a meeting or during a negotiation.

This piece is based on research from Carol Kinsey Goman’s latest book, The Silent Language of Leaders: How Body Language Can Help—or Hurt—How You Lead, published in April 2011 by Jossey-Bass. Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., is an executive coach, consultant and international keynote speaker, as well as an expert contributor to The Washington Post’s On Leadership panel.