This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 37 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode I'm going to talk about how you can motivate your students by asking yourself five important questions.

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis, student motivation.

You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable.

No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you're out of ideas.

So in this episode we're going to tackle this issue head on.

In the blog post associated with this episode you'll find links to all the resources I mentioned here.

Just go to Cult of Pedagogy.com, click podcast, and go to episode 37.

Also, if you're enjoying the podcast please take a moment to leave me a review on iTunes.

This will help let more people know about the show. Thank you.

So for a long time I had no solutions to this problem of student motivation.

It was just too complex of a problem.

I have had my own unmotivated students and I never had any magic bullets for them.

Still the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research to find out what the most current studies say about what motivate students.

And this is what I found, five basic principles.

Number one, students are more motivated academically when they have a positive relationship with their teacher.

Number two, choice is a powerful motivator in most educational contexts.

Three, for complex tasks that require creativity and persistence,

extrinsic rewards and consequences actually hamper motivation.

Four, to stay motivated to persist at any task, students must believe they can improve in that task.

And five, students are motivated to learn things that have relevance to their lives.

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