Saturday, June 11, 2011

Closing Post

Motivation is defined as the process by which a person is moved into action.
These actions are either influenced by internal motives (push) such as hunger and belonging or by external motives (pull) such as incentives and goals. As a result when the internal and external motives increase so does the motivated behavior.
Some of the behaviors we express as humans are a result of evolution, a means for survival (nature), while others are a result of personal history, (nurture).
The interaction between both nature and nurture contribute to what motivates behavior.

The source of motivation delineates whether the behavior is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated. Intrinsic motives include curiosity, self-determination, and building competency in a certain area. Extrinsic motives may be obtained from money, good grades, and/or the approval of others. This course explains a lot about human motivation, and what drives our behaviors.

My favorite part of the class was blogging. Online classes are very impersonal and you really don't interact with other students and the professor as you would in a regular meeting class. Through the blogs, we gained insights to other student's personality and background. For example, Lauren's son is an extrovert and enjoys socialization, Briana on the other hand, likes having goals and as a waitress she makes sub goals each night to make more money to achieve her ultimate goal of paying her rent. Chris is a procrastinator but motivates himself when he needs to study, and Nicole is not a procrastinator but her best friend is, and it drives her crazy. I even let the other students in on my fear of snakes.



As a future teacher of elementary school and special education, I will use the information I learned in class to motivate my students to develop their own individual goal commitments. My role as a teacher will be to give them the feedback for continued progress towards that goal. Once their goal is achieved the student hopefully will experience both extrinsic (better grades) and intrinsic (sense of accomplishment) satisfaction and continue making and working towards appropriate goals in the future.


3 comments:

  1. Nice post! I am also in the teacher program and this class was helpful to me as well. I've heard that ticket systems in the classroom (extrinsic motivation) does not work to motivate students as well as intrinsic motivation does. The question is, how do we get students to be intrinsically motivated, especially the difficult ones? That's something I'm still trying to figure out! Good luck to you and your future teaching plans!

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  2. I think all teachers are trying to figure out the same thing. The ticket system works but only if it is used properly. A lot of teachers make it either too easy or not easy enough so the value of the ticket decreases. I worked with a teacher one time that would invite the kids over her house for dinner if they accumulated 100 tickets during the school year. There were minor incentives for less tickets but EVERYONE wanted to go to that teacher's house. It was a great motivator and she awarded tickets based on the individual's accomplishments. If a child that usually did poorly on math tests but got a B they received a ticket. If a child in her class screamed out answers without raising his hand did it without be reminded, that child got a ticket. It was a powerful behavior tool and motivated all children in the class.

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  3. This was a really good post and this is very true. As I stted in one of my pot my nephew actually does well with getting incentives that has imprved his behavior fairly well. Since you are going to be a teacher in the future I would highly suggest giving good feedback to your students that also will also improve their behaviors because they are being acknowledged of their work or behavior in the classroom. e teachers at my nephews school and I have heard from friends with children that plenty of other schol systems use a form of token economy with their students. My sister has taken this particular system that is used throughout the schools and carried it into her home it has been working out great with he kids. Children often will look forward to those form of rewards and acknowledgement.

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