Four Ways to Motivate Your Students
As a music educator, your job description includes a lot more than just teaching. You are required to perform several other roles to provide your students with the complete package that they need. For instance, if you are in a classroom full of students who are bored out of their minds and unwilling to learn, what can you do?
Motivate them! Yes, it is your job to motivate your students to learn. Especially if you are a music teacher, the progress of your students is at stake. To make sure they are always improving, you need to take the appropriate measures to bring their motivation levels up. If the motivation levels are high, you can rest assured that the progress will be high too.
The real question now is, ‘How exactly can you motivate your students?’ This is a difficult task because even if you are able to motivate them for a short while, the levels can plummet at any time. So what needs to be done not only to raise motivation levels, but also to sustain them? Here are 4 ways you can try to motivate your students:
4 Ways To Motivate Your Students
1. Student Of The Month
Student of the month is a motivation technique as old as time. Being appreciated and acknowledged for hard work in front of the entire class is great. Other than the reassuring validation from a public display of admiration, this technique also instills a sense of competition amongst students. This friendly competition can lead to high magnitudes of progress.
Since this is a monthly occurrence, more and more students will want to be considered for the achievement, which will result in high levels of motivation. That's what you call a mission, accomplished.
2. Arrange A Recital
A music recital is when your students finally get the time to showcase their talent to their family and friends as an audience. With a recital in mind, the students will be motivated to perfect their craft since they will be performing in front of an audience.
During your recital preparation, your students will feel motivated and you will see immense progress from each of them. This is the best time to point out any of your students’ shortcomings since they will be motivated to fix each and every one of them before the performance.
Make sure that the music pieces your student plays are their favorites. This will help them keep a keen interest and thus, the music will be driven by passion.
3. Record Their Music
Recording music is probably the most ‘grown-up’ thing you can do. It is a very serious endeavor and probably the biggest way you can motivate your students. Tell them that if they perform well enough in the first term, you will make efforts to get their music recorded. Since this gives a serious end goal for all the hard work that they put in, your students will be highly motivated to work on all of their pieces thoroughly.
Teach them about all of the technicalities of recording music and they will be wanting to get in the recording studio as soon as possible. Each year you can record all of your students’ pieces, make an album, and hand it out to them at the end of the term. This will be very memorable for your students and they will treasure the album for life.
4. Incorporate Their Favorite Music
What is the use of teaching your students music that they have no interest in or simply do not like? It is best if you try to listen to them and take their suggestions as to what kind of music they are interested in learning. Once you teach them something they like, their interest in lessons will increase 10 fold. You can set out some time to have a discussion with your class and get to know what they are actually interested in learning.
These four ways are plenty to keep your students going. It is best if the class is as fun for your students as it is fun for you. Have a great time teaching and learning from your students!