Motivation

Any teacher who has been through a teacher ed program, knows how important motivation is in a lesson plan. During my student teaching experience, all of my supervisors alway emphasized it's importance to me, and I really struggled to constantly slip a motivational piece into my lesson. I felt that it had to be some type of game that had to be incorporated to make the students interested and motivated in the lesson. With that type of mentality, I felt that it was impossible to constantly motivated students in this way, and that at some point, they needed to take responsibility for their own learning. This directly relates back to the intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation debate. Throughout my educational career, i haven't really seen intrinsic motivation at work. The best I've seen is college students, because they all in class by choice. In an elementary setting, even as a sub, I still have only seen extrinsic motivation used with table points, marble jars, tickets, or class money. Perhaps intrinsic motivation only develops with age.

In the reading, I really liked the ARCS model categories and subcategories, as they really helped to show me the other ways that motivation can be tied into a lesson other than turning everything into a game. In addition to that, I found the steps of the ARCS design process to be interesting because it really forces the instructor or designer to really think about what motivational element will be included, and take into account the types of learners that will taught. I think if this was used often, that it would really lead to improvements in instruction and design.