Motivation is a main driver for learning, especially at the younger levels, as a tutor, I have learned that my job isn’t just to teach students the information they need to know, but to do so while maintaining an engaging, enjoyable comfortable environment that hopefully encourages or keeps their motivation for the topic. If a student isn’t motivated, even the most basic information might feel difficult to process or understand. Thats why I value motivation to such a high extent.

Before getting straight into the content of the topic, I always make sure to revise the topic itself, explain specific concepts that might come up, allow for the student to familiarise themselves with the topic to the best extent they can without actually starting to learn it yet. This helps keep the content as digestible as possible, which helps with minimising frustration and confusion, all emotions that hinder motivation.

One of the quickest ways I’ve seen a student lose their motivation is when they look at their assessment notification, all those expectations and content to learn had the student stressing out, feeling upset and lacking motivation. To counter this, I simply broke down the requirements into smaller, more manageable loads for the student to start working on, which made them feel a little better, I threw in some comments like, “See, you couldn’t do a question like this even just 10 minutes ago” to mark their progression on the topic. This method seems to help students maintain motivation, feel comfortable with their ability and overall, succeed!

Now I understand motivation is very conditional, it varies based on many factors, but the important thing to think about is to work with what you have, if they have a bad day, that doesn’t mean if they can’t focus to get frustrated with them, it means lighten the workload, help get their motivation back, don’t pile onto what was likely causing it in the first place.

Motivated students show up, prepared (often with work in hand), they ask questions and they celebrate little wins. When you do that, the results come flooding in.

Lishai Rubinstein