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The bottom line about motivation: sustaining focus on learning

12 February, 2015 - 11:00
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/ce6c5eb6-84d3-4265-9554-84059b75221e@2.1

Sooner or later when you teach, there will be situations appropriate for each perspective about motivation described in this chapter. There will be times when focusing exclusively on students' appropriate behavior (or lack thereof) will be both necessary and sufficient evidence of motivation. But there will be other times when it is important to encourage students' beliefs that they can accomplish specific tasks, and still other times when providing for students' underlying needs for competence or social connection is important. Think of these perspectives as alternatives to be used either singly or in combination when the time is right.

Because of your own values, attitudes, or beliefs, you may find one perspective more personally compatible than another. Even if you settle on favorite ways of motivating students, though, we encourage you to keep the other, less favored approaches in reserve anyway, and to experiment with them. We believe that an eclectic approach to motivation will enrich your teaching the most, and enrich your students' motivation and learning as well. If there is a single lesson from the concepts about motivation outlined in this chapter, it is this: academic motivation has no single source, and teachers motivate students the best when they assume motivation is complex. The next two chapters look at ways of realizing such “broad-mindedness” in practice, first when you prepare activities and classes and later when you actually teach them.