Universidad Dominico Americano (UNICDA)

Teaching Practice I (EDU-132)

Why Reflect and Motivate the Students

Group:
Annette Cabrera
Rosalía Feliz
Daniela Álvarez
Kisaidy Peña

Teacher:
Claudio Polonia

Santo Domingo, D.N

February 22nd, 2023
Why Reflect and Motivate the Students

The world has been changing and we have changed a lot with it, this includes the way that we
educate. With the advances of technology, we’ve had many improvements, however, some
disadvantages as well because students are more distracted by it. But a huge method to keep the
students engaged is reflection and motivation. So, in this paper, we will see the importance of
reflection and motivation of the students along with strategies to implement it in our classrooms.

Why Reflect
Reflection is a process where students describe their learning, how it changed, and how it might
relate to future learning experiences. It is an important practice for students to make sense of and
grow from a learning experience, and it allows them to develop their critical thinking skills.
We need to implement reflecting strategies to our classrooms because it encourages students not
only to think in terms of getting a job, but in terms of their personal development, acquisition of
soft skills and civic engagement.
In this 21st century, one of the predominant competencies is creativity. When the students reflect,
they can create and express their own ideas. Another virtue is that they also create their own
opinion and decide what’s best for them according to their ethical values.

Reflect strategies.
Depending on the grade and developmental stage of your students, you can use different strategies
but the following can be implemented to any group:
1. Pair Share: students are paired, and then share something that will help them learn new
content, deepen understanding, or review what they already know.
2. 3-2-1: is a way to frame anything from a lesson (e.g., ask students to write 3 things they
think they know, 2 things they know they don’t know, and one thing they’re certain of
about a topic) to a reflection.
3. Brainstorming is an effective reflection strategy because it disarms issues with other
approaches, the student would take an allotted time to write down everything they
remember about a topic.
4. Personal Journal: students will write freely about their experience. This is usually done
weekly. These personal journals may be submitted periodically to the instructor or kept as
a reference to use at the end of the experience when putting together an academic essay
reflecting their experience.
5. Preparing questions: it is an old fashioned but effective way to develop critical thinking
after a lesson and also allows students to express their opinion and will help them relate
their experiences with the learning.
Why Motivate
Motivation is giving our students reasons to learn, making them enthusiastic about our lessons.
Motivated students are much more likely to achieve their goals and find success. This is why
motivation is an essential ingredient in effective teaching and learning, it yields the positive
behavior of our students. Understanding how to motivate people in education is crucial.
You can notice students are motivated when they focus their attention on a certain goal, show
resilience and curiosity, and care respect their work. They see the value in what they are learning.
It is very hard to help a student to learn and apply the learning when they are unmotivated, so as
teachers, we need to know strategies that foster intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in our students
to keep them engaged and willing to learn.

Motivation strategies
Developing strategies to address the student’s lack of motivation is vital to the class success, here
are some suggested strategies to achieve motivation:
1. Build relationships with your students: You will be able to better understand their learning
needs and showing a personal interest in your students will also inspire their trust in you.
2. Use examples as often as possible: This will help them to be more confident as they learn
new concepts thus increasing their motivation to learn.
3. When possible, hand over control to the student: If students have control, they are much
more likely to be committed to the lesson.
4. Use all types of technology available to you: Lessons presented to students via computers,
Smartboards, iPad etc. will help even the most distractible student attend because they view
these devices as something fun.
5. Provide specific praise to students for little things and big things: Tell the students how
proud you are of them when they learn a new concept that you know they had difficulty
understanding.
6. Show your creativity: The use of games as a reinforcer for learned material is fun for the
students, especially if there is a prize at the end for the winners.
7. Establish Routines: Many students need to know what to expect when they walk into a
classroom. This provides them with comfort and a sense of control.
8. Be Expressive and Smile. Greet the students with a smile every day and tell them that you
are glad to see them. When you appear happy and motivated then your students will
respond kindly.

While it is not always possible to develop the intrinsic reflection and motivation of all our
students, with these strategies we can definitely guide them to succeed in our classroom and
achieve our objectives.