Avoid Labels

experience people they can relate to doing things in their lives that are related to what students are studying. Invite successful people to visit your classroom to help connect content to their work or simply share their inspirational stories and perhaps provide mentoring at school or in the workplace.

Find the Right Level of Challenge

Let’s try a little experiment. Before you read on, get a timer and set it for one minute. After you read this sentence, start the timer and count every and and the in the following paragraph without trying to understand the content. When the minute ends, stop counting and read on. Ready, go!

Finding the right level of challenge is one of the most important ways to motivate students. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) and other researchers state that when the level of challenge matches one’s capabilities, motivation is optimal (Qingguo, Guanxiong, & Liang, 2017). Tasks that are too easy are not beneficial. And if a student fails at an easy task, the results are significantly more harmful because the student concludes, “I’m stupid.” When tasks are too difficult, students give up. View each classroom and subject as a mountain chain with peaks of different heights, and try to match the peak with the aptitude of the climber. When challenge matches ability and effort leads to mastery, the conditions are right for students to gain confidence and participate with enthusiasm, even if the task isn’t particularly interesting. The three-five strategy from chapter 1 (see page 9) can help you identify a suitable challenge for each student.

Did you complete the task of counting each and and the? How motivated were you on a scale of 1 to 10 (least to most)? How many did you find? How interested are you to know the right answer? Is knowing relevant or beneficial in any way to your life? If you are like most readers, you did the task and are interested in knowing if your answer is correct even though knowing the answer has no relevance to your life and will not add any meaningful knowledge to benefit you beyond satisfying your immediate curiosity. Consider that I probably got you sufficiently motivated to do a meaningless task.