Questions for Reflection

implementation. Strategies without a suggestion can be implemented fairly easily without further support. Although the book is meant to be a comprehensive and practical guide, unanticipated events, such as the global pandemic that began in 2020, can turn everyone’s world upside down and require us to modify or invent new strategies as needed. Remember, you are in charge!

Use the following questions to reflect on the information you learned in this introduction. You can reflect on these questions individually or with colleagues.

1. What factors are associated with challenging behaviors, including lack of motivation? Have you or someone you know who has been affected by these factors been successful?

What or who helped them get there? 2. Why do you think a high percentage of students begin school enthusiastically but gradually become more and more disengaged as they get older? If you could, what would you change about school to make this less likely to happen? 3. Has the growth of technology tools helped or hindered student motivation in your class? How?

CREATE Confidence AND Hope

Remember that guy that gave up? Neither does anyone else.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Motivating students is about helping them accumulate and internalize a reservoir of success to the challenges we provide. Those successes build hope and confidence. If you believe you have the tools to be successful and are sufficiently interested, investing time and effort in a task is rarely a problem. By contrast, if confidence is lacking, you must first come to believe that you can succeed. Many unmotivated students lack that belief. Like a child who begins to ride a bike with training wheels to prevent falls, helping students develop belief in their success begins by making it virtually impossible for them to fail. As confidence grows stronger, tasks can be made more and more challenging.

This chapter helps you understand why creating confidence and hope are important to boosting student motivation in the classroom. It also provides a series of strategies you can use to instill confidence and hope in students to form a foundation on which they can build their efforts.