Students are more successful when families help support and promote education both at home and in the classroom. During our time with COVID, the support of families is more important than ever. Here are two strategies you can use to help your child become more engaged with their learning.
Help them find their own motivation
Children range drastically in their levels of motivation and their sources of motivation. Although teachers work hard to help motivate students, the dynamic of parent-to-child is different from the dynamic of teacher-to-child. Ideally, motivating a child is one area where parents are better than any teacher could be. As a parent, we should want to help our kids ‘want to’ learn without punishing them psychologically or making all motivation external and independent from the actual value of the knowledge being gleaned.
Keep in mind the maturity levels between a sixth grader and an eighth grader are huge. So, what serves as motivation for a sixth grader may not work as well toward the end of the year as it did at the start of the year. Outside of infancy, middle schoolers are growing and their brains are wiring faster than any other point in their lives. So, if you think your child is always acting differently as a middle schooler, you are probably right. This means that rewards or incentives that have worked well for motivating your child in the past, may not always continue to work as they grow. Helping them find their own motivation for learning becomes more and more important as a child grows.
Gamify the learning
Kids today are used to playing video games…and most of them love them. Why? Video games are interactive, fast paced, and provide rewards for their performance. Gamification can be used to:
- encourage a specific response or behavior
- increase the visibility and perceived importance of otherwise ‘minor’ and less visible actions
- promote competition; to engage students, and
- help students track their own progress.
Gamification gives students a “carrot” to work toward. It provides a way to encourage students to achieve a goal. Examples of gamification would be leaderboards, badges, or points.
