Motivating Students

One of the most difficult aspects of becoming a teacher is learning how to motivate our students but it is also one of the most important. Students who are not motivated will not learn effectively. While motivating students can be difficult, the rewards worth it. Motivated students are more excited to learn and participate. Teaching in a class full of motivated students is something super enjoyable for teacher and the student too.

If there is one thing we know about our students, it’s that they have short attention spans and prefer now to later. This is especially true at the beginning of the year. We, teachers, have the most power to know how to motivate our students (we need to know them well). We cannot expect the student to be motivated if we are not motivated ourselves. If we want to stay in front of a motivated class we have to be motivated on our own.

Teachers must be creative and be able to make connections between the topic and the student's real lives. If the student doesn't believe that what they’re learning is important, they won’t want to learn, so it’s important to demonstrate how the topic is of importance. Show them and demonstrate how they may use it in their future careers or in their real lives today. Showing them that something is used everyday by people gives it a new importance.

Designing Materials

I agree that students learn to speak in the second language by interacting with others. Communicative Language Teaching is based on real life situations that require communication and by using this method in our classes, students have the opportunity of communicate among them using their second language. I think that we as teachers (or me as a future one) should create a classroom environment where students have real life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language.

In my personal experience, I have created and designed materials for the classes, and I found it very useful. You don’t need to be a genius to produce highly successful, dynamic lessons using authentic materials. You just have to think in your students, what they can do, what they like, how they think and what are their motivations for learning English. While it is true that creating or adapting materials consume lot of time and money it is also true that once you have done the work, you can reuse the materials over and over again with other groups, private students or again the following year, etc.

As an example I created a storytelling activity with a cartoon I found, and after adapting it for my students I conclude that working with attractive material improves and boosts the creative thinking in them. It also helps students express their ideas and to create the typical format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and the setting a story has to have. Working with attractive materials make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their learning more meaningful and fun for them. So, we as teachers must find our students motivations in real life and to translate those motivations in creative materials, and students will love it.

Using Rubrics for Assessment

There are plenty of ways of evaluating students’ work. Sometimes it is difficult for a teacher to be consistent and fair for all of his or her students, they have the right to be equally assessed. The benefits of using a rubric in your teaching are that it gives you as a teacher a more objective method of scoring each student with specific criteria and it also provides students a clear vision of what we are expecting from them.

A rubric is an assessment tool that clearly indicates marking criteria. Assessment rubrics can be used for assessing learning at all levels but teachers have to ensure that the rubrics they are going to use, are prepared for the group of students, according to their level, the criteria used, and the tasks given. Teachers must consider it well before they start to assess students' works. 

The creation of a rubric is really simple. It can be made with a word software or if you prefer a more traditional option, it can be made with your own handwriting in paper. In every case, teachers need to consider: the criteria used, the highest and the lowest levels they are going to consider, and how they are going to get the final mark. 

Because of their easy-to-follow format, assessment rubrics gives students a clear feedback that can be easily understood and it also help students improve their performance on previous or subsequent work.