Motivation. It is something everyone struggles with both in life and teaching; motivation to learn, motivation to forge ahead and motivation to keep pushing on even when you are starting to feel a bit hopeless.
Motivation in the classroom, both from the teachers and the students, is essential for learning but it is a tricky balance to strike since the two are so interconnected; if the teacher loses motivation, so do the students and if the students lose motivation, so does the teacher.
Recently, I have been trying to strike this balance with my current students; the ones who are older than 5 and have realized that school is no longer about singing songs and coloring pictures.
I'll be honest, it hasn't been easy and I've been wary about how many "motivational tools" I use like stickers because I don't want to fall into the trap of having them expecting rewards for every single thing they do in every single class.
Eventually, they need to understand that learning doesn't always have physical rewards like a sticker. I remember being just as unmotivated and bored by the material as my current students, but it doesn't mean as a teacher, I don't get frustrated when the students aren't listening to me or not taking the lesson seriously.
There have certainly been a few cases where I wanted to rip my hair out, or just walk out, or scream at the top of my lungs. But, we all know that those reactions are not useful, and instead I put on my game face and tried to get as creative as possible.
I have been incorporating some movement in the classroom, i.e. having them float around the classroom and asking questions of each other or playing charades, and I have seen some improvement from that. I remember being annoyed in class by the rigidity of sitting in one place for a long period of time, and so I think getting the students to move around and bit and interact with each other keeps them better engaged with the material.
I've also had some success with team-building exercises and some healthy competition; they seem more motivated to learn the material if they are competing against someone else. These implementations have kept the class a bit more lively, and I've seen a bit more interest in the "boring" subjects like spelling and writing.
My other suggestion is: discover what makes your students tick. For example, my students LOVE Hangman, so much so that they beg me every class to play. Instead of letting their incessant begging annoy me, I made a deal with them that they get three stars and if they misbehave, don't listen or don't take focus on the material I will erase a star and if all three stars are erased, then we won't play a game of Hangman at the end of class.
So far, it has worked and now I have other students monitoring their friends behavior because they know if one misbehaves, all of them don't get to play a game.
I also have a student I give one-on-one lessons to who struggles with motivation and he even told me flat-out he doesn't want to learn. The same day he told me that, I had brought in a brand-new lesson plan that was part of a series based on a detective story and I was really excited about it, so that was a huge blow to my motivation.
Well, I remember that the student likes to draw, so I asked him to draw me pictures depicting the vocabulary words and the story and voila! The student's interest in the lesson returned, he retained the vocabulary words and the lesson was saved and we are both looking forward to the next one!
What can the teacher do?
Find something that interests your students, use material that intrigues then and get their attention by using a bit of movement in the classroom.
It won't be easy at first, I know, but persevere and and when you get really frustrated, just remember what it was like when you were a student and laugh at the irony of now being a teacher and being frustrated with the same antics you and your friends pulled many, many, many years ago!