Supporting Students' Motivation

Book excerpt: This is a book about teachers’ classroom motivating styles. Motivating style is the interpersonal tone and face-to-face behavior the teacher relies on when trying to motivate students to engage in classroom activities and procedures. The over-arching goal of the book is to help teachers work through the professional developmental process to learn how to provide instruction in ways that students will find to be motivationally-enriching, satisfying, and engagement-generating. To realize this goal, the book features six parts: Part 1: Introduction, introduces what teachers are to support—namely, student motivation; Part 2: Motivating Style, explains what a supportive motivating style is; Part 3: “How to,” overviews the recommended motivationally-supportive instructional strategies one-by-one and step-by-step; Part 4: Workshop, walks the reader through the skill-building workshop experience; Part 5: Benefits, details all the student, teacher, and classroom benefits that come from an improved motivating style; and Part 6: Getting Started, discusses ways to begin using these skills in the classroom. Based on a successful workshop program run by the authors, teachers successfully improve their classroom motivating style. In doing so, they experience gains in their teaching skill and efficacy, job satisfaction, a renewed passion for teaching, and a more satisfying relationship with their students. This multiauthored book provides teachers with the practical, concrete, step-by-step, skill-based "how to" they need to develop a highly supportive motivating style.