Both Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education and eLearn Magazine discussed engaging reluctant learners and the best approaches to engage students. Chapter 9, all about motivation and performance suggests that only recently (1979) is motivation moving to the forefront of education.
In the past having direct instruction wasn’t a horrible thing since students usually talked with everyone face-to-face. With the advent of television, movies, and video games, teachers are having to compete (unfairly) with these new technological breakthroughs. The chapter on motivation and the journals I read both feel that students can be engaged, but we have to actively motivate them.
We can do this many ways, but it feels like personalization is becoming the key to motivation. Personalized instruction is one way to accomplish this, by considering students not as mindless automatons, but as thinking, breathing individuals. Another thing we can do is to encourage constructivism in the classroom, something that video games are already doing- World of Warcraft is very much based in a constructivist philosophy which assigns each member of your group a role and then asks that you work together to complete certain objectives.
My greatest concern is whether motivating students in the classroom can ever truly keep up with the accessibility of entertainment- students with cell phones are distracting enough. What will teachers do when students have the ability to access databases of films, television shows and video games all from their own brain? Technology truly is a double-edged sword.
One of the ideas I do plan to implement concerns intrinsic motivation. As an English teacher this will be easy for me- my plan is to start each new unit with consequences for not understanding the material. For example, if going over subject-verb agreement, I may bring in two college entrance essays- one that poor use of subject-verb agreement and another where it is lacking. I can have the students discuss who they would accept and why. Then I can have them point to their own papers, thereby improving motivation to learn the correct rules of that grammar lesson.
