Dear Sina Mahdavi , it is an interesting question. It is very true that teachers have the most power to know how to motivate students more than any district or school wide programs because they’re on the front lines. I have gone through different reports and tried to share some points that I found important to help for motivating students.

Following are some research-based strategies for motivating students to learn.

• Become a role model for student interest. Deliver your presentations with energy and enthusiasm.  As a display of your motivation, your passion motivates your students. Make the course personal, showing why you are interested in the material.
• Get to know your students. You will be able to better tailor your instruction to the students’ concerns and backgrounds, and your personal interest in them will inspire their personal loyalty to you. Display a strong interest in students’ learning and a faith in their abilities.
• Use examples freely. Many students want to be shown why a concept or technique is useful before they want to study it further. Inform students about how your course prepares students for future opportunities.
• Use a variety of student-active teaching activities. These activities directly engage students in the material and give them opportunities to achieve a level of mastery.
  • Teach by discovery.  Students find as satisfying as reasoning through a problem and discovering the underlying principle on their own.
  • Cooperative learning activities are particularly effective as they also provide positive social pressure.
• Set realistic performance goals and help students achieve them by encouraging them to set their own reasonable goals. Design assignments that are appropriately challenging in view of the experience and aptitude of the class.
• Place appropriate emphasis on testing and grading. Tests should be a means of showing what students have mastered, not what they have not. Avoid grading on the curve and give everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades.
• Be free with praise and constructive in criticism. Negative comments should pertain to particular performances, not the performer. Offer nonjudgmental feedback on students’ work, stress opportunities to improve, look for ways to stimulate advancement, and avoid dividing students into sheep and goats.
• Give students as much control over their own education as possible. Let students choose paper and project topics that interest them. Assess them in a variety of ways (tests, papers, projects, presentations, etc.) to give students more control over how they show their understanding to you. Give students options for how these assignments are weighted.
• Praise Students in Ways Big and Small

Recognize work in class, display good work in the classroom and send positive notes home to parents, hold weekly awards in your classroom, organize academic pep rallies to honor the honor roll, and even sponsor a Teacher Shout out section in the student newspaper to acknowledge student’s hard work. 

• Expect Excellence
• Set high, yet realistic expectations. Make sure to voice those expectations. Set short terms goals and celebrate when they are achieved.
• Spread Excitement Like a Virus

Show your enthusiasm in the subject and use appropriate, concrete and understandable examples to help students grasp it. For example, I love alliteration. Before I explain the concept to students, we “improv” subjects they’re interested in. After learning about alliteration, they brainstorm alliterative titles for their chosen subjects. 

• Assign Classroom Jobs

With students, create a list of jobs for the week. Using the criteria of your choosing, let students earn the opportunity to pick their classroom jobs for the next week. These jobs can cater to their interests and skills.

Classroom Job Examples

• Post to the Class blog
• Update Calendar
• Moderate review games
• Pick start of class music
• Watch class pet
• Public relations officer (address people who visit class)
• Standard class jobs like Attendance, Cleaning the boards, putting up chairs, etc.
• Hand Over Some Control

If students take ownership of what you do in class, then they have less room to complain (though we all know, it’ll never stop completely). Take an audit of your class, asking what they enjoy doing, what helps them learn, what they’re excited about after class. Multiple choice might be the best way to start if you predict a lot of “nothing” or “watch movies” answers.

After reviewing the answers, integrate their ideas into your lessons or guide a brainstorm session on how these ideas could translate into class. 

On a systematic level, let students choose from elective classes in a collegiate format. Again, they can tap into their passion and relate to their subject matter if they have a choice. 

• Open-format Fridays

You can also translate this student empowerment into an incentive program. Students who attended class all week, completed all assignments and obeyed all classroom rules can vote on Friday’s activities (lecture, discussion, watching a video, class jeopardy, acting out a scene from a play or history).

• Relating Lessons to Students’ Lives

Whether it is budgeting for family Christmas gifts, choosing short stories about your town, tying in the war of 1812 with Iraq, rapping about ions, or using Pop Culture Printables, students will care more if they identify themselves or their everyday lives in what they’re learning. 

• Track Improvement

In those difficult classes, it can feel like a never-ending uphill battle, so try to remind students that they’ve come a long way. Set achievable, short-term goals, emphasis improvement, keep self-evaluation forms to fill out and compare throughout the year, or revisit mastered concepts that they once struggled with to refresh their confidence.

• Reward Positive Behavior Outside the Classroom

Tie service opportunities, cultural experiences, extracurricular activities into the curriculum for extra credit or as alternative options on assignments. Have students doing Habitat for Humanity calculate the angle of the freshly cut board, count the nails in each stair and multiply the number of stairs to find the total number of nails; write an essay about their experience volunteering or their how they felt during basketball tryouts; or any other creative option they can come up with.

• Motivate Students Beyond the Classroom

The idea of cash incentives is a timely yet controversial topic, so I’d like to look at this attempt to “buy achievement” through a different lens. It seems people are willing to dump some money into schools, so let’s come up with better ways to spend it.

• Plan Dream Field Trips

With your students, brainstorm potential field trips tiered by budget. Cash incentive money can then be earned toward the field trips for good behavior, performance, etc. The can see their success in the classroom as they move up from the decent zoo field trip to the good state capitol day trip to the unbelievable week-long trip to New York City. Even though the reward is delayed, tracking progress will give students that immediate reward.

• College Fund Accounts

College dreams motivate athletes; why not adapt the academic track to be just as tangible for hard-working student? One way is to keep a tally of both the cash value and the potential school choice each student has earned. As freshman, they see they’ve earned one semester at the local junior college. By second semester of junior year, they’re going to four-years at State for half the price. By graduation, watch out free ride to their dream school.

Sources:

• http://www.teachhub.com/top-12-ways-motivate-students
• https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/motivating-students/
• Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, Harvard University Press, 2004, pages 32-42.
• Linda Nilson, Teaching At Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 2nd edition, Anker Publishing, 2003, pages 41-44.
• Matt DeLong and Dale Winter, Learning to Teaching and Teaching to Learn Mathematics: Resources for Professional Development, Mathematical Association of America, 2002, pages 159-168.

Dear Sina Mahdavi , it is an interesting question. It is very true that teachers have the most power to know how to motivate students more than any district or school wide programs because they’re on the front lines. I have gone through different reports and tried to share some points that I found important to help for motivating students.

Following are some research-based strategies for motivating students to learn.

• Become a role model for student interest. Deliver your presentations with energy and enthusiasm.  As a display of your motivation, your passion motivates your students. Make the course personal, showing why you are interested in the material.
• Get to know your students. You will be able to better tailor your instruction to the students’ concerns and backgrounds, and your personal interest in them will inspire their personal loyalty to you. Display a strong interest in students’ learning and a faith in their abilities.
• Use examples freely. Many students want to be shown why a concept or technique is useful before they want to study it further. Inform students about how your course prepares students for future opportunities.
• Use a variety of student-active teaching activities. These activities directly engage students in the material and give them opportunities to achieve a level of mastery.
  • Teach by discovery.  Students find as satisfying as reasoning through a problem and discovering the underlying principle on their own.
  • Cooperative learning activities are particularly effective as they also provide positive social pressure.
• Set realistic performance goals and help students achieve them by encouraging them to set their own reasonable goals. Design assignments that are appropriately challenging in view of the experience and aptitude of the class.
• Place appropriate emphasis on testing and grading. Tests should be a means of showing what students have mastered, not what they have not. Avoid grading on the curve and give everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades.
• Be free with praise and constructive in criticism. Negative comments should pertain to particular performances, not the performer. Offer nonjudgmental feedback on students’ work, stress opportunities to improve, look for ways to stimulate advancement, and avoid dividing students into sheep and goats.
• Give students as much control over their own education as possible. Let students choose paper and project topics that interest them. Assess them in a variety of ways (tests, papers, projects, presentations, etc.) to give students more control over how they show their understanding to you. Give students options for how these assignments are weighted.
• Praise Students in Ways Big and Small

Recognize work in class, display good work in the classroom and send positive notes home to parents, hold weekly awards in your classroom, organize academic pep rallies to honor the honor roll, and even sponsor a Teacher Shout out section in the student newspaper to acknowledge student’s hard work. 

• Expect Excellence
• Set high, yet realistic expectations. Make sure to voice those expectations. Set short terms goals and celebrate when they are achieved.
• Spread Excitement Like a Virus

Show your enthusiasm in the subject and use appropriate, concrete and understandable examples to help students grasp it. For example, I love alliteration. Before I explain the concept to students, we “improv” subjects they’re interested in. After learning about alliteration, they brainstorm alliterative titles for their chosen subjects. 

• Assign Classroom Jobs

With students, create a list of jobs for the week. Using the criteria of your choosing, let students earn the opportunity to pick their classroom jobs for the next week. These jobs can cater to their interests and skills.

Classroom Job Examples

• Post to the Class blog
• Update Calendar
• Moderate review games
• Pick start of class music
• Watch class pet
• Public relations officer (address people who visit class)
• Standard class jobs like Attendance, Cleaning the boards, putting up chairs, etc.
• Hand Over Some Control

If students take ownership of what you do in class, then they have less room to complain (though we all know, it’ll never stop completely). Take an audit of your class, asking what they enjoy doing, what helps them learn, what they’re excited about after class. Multiple choice might be the best way to start if you predict a lot of “nothing” or “watch movies” answers.

After reviewing the answers, integrate their ideas into your lessons or guide a brainstorm session on how these ideas could translate into class. 

On a systematic level, let students choose from elective classes in a collegiate format. Again, they can tap into their passion and relate to their subject matter if they have a choice. 

• Open-format Fridays

You can also translate this student empowerment into an incentive program. Students who attended class all week, completed all assignments and obeyed all classroom rules can vote on Friday’s activities (lecture, discussion, watching a video, class jeopardy, acting out a scene from a play or history).

• Relating Lessons to Students’ Lives

Whether it is budgeting for family Christmas gifts, choosing short stories about your town, tying in the war of 1812 with Iraq, rapping about ions, or using Pop Culture Printables, students will care more if they identify themselves or their everyday lives in what they’re learning. 

• Track Improvement

In those difficult classes, it can feel like a never-ending uphill battle, so try to remind students that they’ve come a long way. Set achievable, short-term goals, emphasis improvement, keep self-evaluation forms to fill out and compare throughout the year, or revisit mastered concepts that they once struggled with to refresh their confidence.

• Reward Positive Behavior Outside the Classroom

Tie service opportunities, cultural experiences, extracurricular activities into the curriculum for extra credit or as alternative options on assignments. Have students doing Habitat for Humanity calculate the angle of the freshly cut board, count the nails in each stair and multiply the number of stairs to find the total number of nails; write an essay about their experience volunteering or their how they felt during basketball tryouts; or any other creative option they can come up with.

• Motivate Students Beyond the Classroom

The idea of cash incentives is a timely yet controversial topic, so I’d like to look at this attempt to “buy achievement” through a different lens. It seems people are willing to dump some money into schools, so let’s come up with better ways to spend it.

• Plan Dream Field Trips

With your students, brainstorm potential field trips tiered by budget. Cash incentive money can then be earned toward the field trips for good behavior, performance, etc. The can see their success in the classroom as they move up from the decent zoo field trip to the good state capitol day trip to the unbelievable week-long trip to New York City. Even though the reward is delayed, tracking progress will give students that immediate reward.

• College Fund Accounts

College dreams motivate athletes; why not adapt the academic track to be just as tangible for hard-working student? One way is to keep a tally of both the cash value and the potential school choice each student has earned. As freshman, they see they’ve earned one semester at the local junior college. By second semester of junior year, they’re going to four-years at State for half the price. By graduation, watch out free ride to their dream school.

Sources:

• http://www.teachhub.com/top-12-ways-motivate-students
• https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/motivating-students/
• Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, Harvard University Press, 2004, pages 32-42.
• Linda Nilson, Teaching At Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 2nd edition, Anker Publishing, 2003, pages 41-44.
• Matt DeLong and Dale Winter, Learning to Teaching and Teaching to Learn Mathematics: Resources for Professional Development, Mathematical Association of America, 2002, pages 159-168.

I have only one suggestion- restrict android mobile phone to students.

I have been observed many students are addicted to the mobile phone, they using different social media, such as whatsup, imo, viber, facebood, instagram, twitter etc. The addiction is alarming and can be compare with lethal drugs.

Check this link

http://www.humanutopia.com/motivation/motivation-in-schools/

regards

Interesting

Motivation is really an important thing to achieve once goals and get success. Every student needs to be treated differently (positively) as all have different abilities. so it is very crucial to know interests of every student for motivation and for this teacher plays an essential role by building an interest or at least showing that, according to students' needs to motivate him/her. Try to be friend of students upto certain limits and share your different experiences with them. Admire them on good things in front of all but for any thing wrong, pass your soft comments to teach a student right way. Whatever is advised to students for improving their studies give examples and also focus on their lifestyle/habits to alter according, providing evidence for good results after modification in their behaviors or lifestyle (eating patterns, sleeping timings, personal hygiene, and others.)

Hello,

Thank you very much for all of your good and valuable answers.

Thanks,

teachers are drawing their attention to student´s interest, to evaluating his success in connection with subsequent motivation. They are presenting teacher´s possible approaches and aiming their attention at the influence of a seminar group of its members.

Motivating Students

One of the most difficult aspects of becoming a teacher is learning how to motivate your students. It is also one of the most important. Students who are not motivated will not learn effectively. They won’t retain information, they won’t participate and some of them may even become disruptive. A student may be unmotivated for a variety of reasons: They may feel that they have no interest in the subject, find the teacher’s methods un-engaging or be distracted by external forces. It may even come to light that a student who appeared unmotivated actually has difficulty learning and is need of special attention.

While motivating students can be a difficult task, the rewards are more than worth it. Motivated students are more excited to learn and participate. Simply put: Teaching a class full of motivated students is enjoyable for teacher and student alike. Some students are self-motivated, with a natural love of learning. But even with the students who do not have this natural drive, a great teacher can make learning fun and inspire them to reach their full potential.

Here are five effective ways to get your students excited about learning:

1. Encourage Students

Students look to teachers for approval and positive reinforcement, and are more likely to be enthusiastic about learning if they feel their work is recognized and valued. You should encourage open communication and free thinking with your students to make them feel important. Be enthusiastic. Praise your students often. Recognize them for their contributions. If your classroom is a friendly place where students feel heard and respected, they will be more eager to learn. A “good job” or “nice work” can go a long way.

2. Get Them Involved

One way to encourage students and teach them responsibility is to get them involved in the classroom. Make participating fun by giving each student a job to do. Give students the responsibility of tidying up or decorating the classroom. Assign a student to erase the blackboard or pass out materials. If you are going over a reading in class, ask students to take turns reading sections out loud. Make students work in groups and assign each a task or role. Giving students a sense of ownership allows them to feel accomplished and encourages active participation in class.

3. Offer Incentives

Setting expectations and making reasonable demands encourages students to participate, but sometimes students need an extra push in the right direction. Offering students small incentives makes learning fun and motivates students to push themselves. Incentives can range from small to large giving a special privilege to an exemplary student, to a class pizza party if the average test score rises. Rewards give students a sense of accomplishment and encourage them to work with a goal in mind.

4. Get Creative

Avoid monotony by changing around the structure of your class. Teach through games and discussions instead of lectures, encourage students to debate and enrich the subject matter with visual aids, like colorful charts, diagrams and videos. You can even show a movie that effectively illustrates a topic or theme. Your physical classroom should never be boring: use posters, models, student projects and seasonal themes to decorate your classroom, and create a warm, stimulating environment.

5. Draw Connections to Real Life

“When will I ever need this?” This question, too often heard in the classroom, indicates that a student is not engaged. If a student does not believe that what they’re learning is important, they won’t want to learn, so it’s important to demonstrate how the subject relates to them. If you’re teaching algebra, take some time to research how it is utilized practically for example, in engineering and share your findings with your students. Really amaze them by telling them that they may use it in their career. Showing them that a subject is used everyday by “real” people gives it new importance. They may never be excited about algebra but if they see how it applies to them, they may be motivated to learn attentively.

This is a very interesting question, which is a problem for both the parents and the school.

Following ...

Reflect their future work in class. When my students graduate from college, they have to take a competitive regional exam to get a position as a teacher. They have to study for the test up to three years. In my class, I address the most difficult studies so when they get good information specifically for the test, this helps them a lot for the test preparation, and thus facilitates their transition to a real job almost immediately.

Splendid solutions from colleagues, however, due to nowadays technology flood, I do not think the student is more attractive to science in general, they are attracted to money, which is vice versa of science.

Thank you for this interesting question. 1. First we need to differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. 2. Intrinsic motivation should be the target of each teacher because is about motivating students to love learning and learn for learning. 3. Extrinsic motivation is related to rewards or punishments after the test. 4.Intrinsic motivation stores the knowledge in the "long term" memory to become knowledge for life. 5. With extrinsic motivation, information is stored in the "short term" memory and usually lost after the test or exam. 6. For the pedagogy ; active learning strategies help students to feel responsible for the learning and can easily love the subject and get involved in learning.7 In the art of teaching; if students realize that their success make you happy; they will do their best to make you happier ☺

My Dear colleagues,

Thank you very very much for your contribution. Really, you have kindly provided your nice opinion to my question .

Thanks again,

Sina

There are so many good hints and valuable answers added, especially by @ Khulood Obaid and @ Beemnet Mengesha Kassahun !

I think that the key issue will be to create situations in which the student can use their strengths, show off the best possible way in front of the teacher and colleagues. And praise for achievements. Praise can do a lot and is a much more effective motivator than punishment.

don,t overload them with so much of tasks, make them free, utilize their mind and give attention to every individual

Useful discussion.