Motivation to begin a lesson or task. Tileston, D.

Tileston, D.  (2004).  Motivation to begin a lesson or task.  In What Every teacher should know about motivation (pp. 19-33) Corwin Press.

An Annotation

This chapter included a lot of information about motivation, learning, attention, the brain and emotional intelligence, learned helplessness, stress and importance.  It explained many examples about how to use emotion to motivate (or at least not de-motivate) students, listing emotional states such as suspense, curiosity, anticipation, hope, fun, acceptance, surprise, self-confidence, intrigue, and importance.  It spoke to the importance of locus of control in a student’s perception about their own success, listing either ability, effort, task difficulty, or luck as reasons they believe contribute to success or failure.

One quote within a section describing threats, specifically “threats based on what we do or do not know” was related to giving students specific direction, instructions and expectations:

“There was a time when I would say to my students, ‘I want you to do this at quality level.’  What I soon found was that what I consider to be a quality level and what they consider to be a quality level were very different.  By giving them a matrix that showed specifically what I wanted, I was able to raise the quality level of their work considerably.  I believe that students would do work at a quality level more often if they know what we meant by that phrase.”