Motivational tools for high school students

Search form Search. The New Teacher Advisor Motivational Tools Motivating students to listen and learn and remain on task is not an easy thing to do. The three programs below are designed to address individual student behavior. Trending Report Card Comments It's report card time and you face the prospect of writing constructive, insightful, and original comments on a couple dozen report cards or more. Here are positive report card comments for you to use and adapt! Struggling Students? You've reached the end of another grading period, and what could be more daunting than the task of composing insightful, original, and unique comments about every child in your class?

The following positive statements will help you tailor your comments to specific children and highlight their strengths.

You can also use our statements to indicate a need for improvement. Turn the words around a bit, and you will transform each into a goal for a child to work toward. Sam cooperates consistently with others becomes Sam needs to cooperate more consistently with others, and Sally uses vivid language in writing may instead read With practice, Sally will learn to use vivid language in her writing. Make Jan seeks new challenges into a request for parental support by changing it to read Please encourage Jan to seek new challenges.

Whether you are tweaking statements from this page or creating original ones, check out our Report Card Thesaurus [see bottom of the page] that contains a list of appropriate adjectives and adverbs. There you will find the right words to keep your comments fresh and accurate. We have organized our report card comments by category. Read the entire list or click one of the category links below to jump to that list. Behavior The student: cooperates consistently with the teacher and other students.

Character The student: shows respect for teachers and peers. Group Work The student: offers constructive suggestions to peers to enhance their work. Interests and Talents The student: has a well-developed sense of humor. Participation The student: listens attentively to the responses of others.

Social Skills The student: makes friends quickly in the classroom. Time Management The student: tackles classroom assignments, tasks, and group work in an organized manner. Work Habits The student: is a conscientious, hard-working student. Student Certificates! Recognize positive attitudes and achievements with personalized student award certificates! Report Card Thesaurus Looking for some great adverbs and adjectives to bring to life the comments that you put on report cards?

Go beyond the stale and repetitive With this list, your notes will always be creative and unique. Adjectives attentive, capable, careful, cheerful, confident, cooperative, courteous, creative, dynamic, eager, energetic, generous, hard-working, helpful, honest, imaginative, independent, industrious, motivated, organized, outgoing, pleasant, polite, resourceful, sincere, unique Adverbs always, commonly, consistently, daily, frequently, monthly, never, occasionally, often, rarely, regularly, typically, usually, weekly.

Objectives Students will learn about changes that occurred in the New World and Old World as a result of early exploration. Older students only. Besides strange people and animals, they were exposed to many foods that were unknown in the Old World. In this lesson, you might post an outline map of the continents on a bulletin board.

On the bulletin board, draw an arrow from the New World the Americas to the Old World Europe, Asia, Africa and post around it drawings or images from magazines or clip art of products discovered in the New World and taken back to the Old World. You might draw a second arrow on the board -- from the Old World to the New World -- and post appropriate drawings or images around it. Adapt the Lesson for Younger Students Younger students will not have the ability to research foods that originated in the New and Old World.

You might adapt the lesson by sharing some of the food items in the Food Lists section below. Have students collect or draw pictures of those items for the bulletin board display. Students might find many of those and add them to the bulletin board display. Notice that some items appear on both lists -- beans, for example. There are many varieties of beans, some with New World origins and others with their origins in the Old World.

In our research, we found sources that indicate onions originated in the New and sources that indicate onions originated in the Old World. Students might create a special question mark symbol to post next to any item for which contradictory sources can be found Note: The Food Timeline is a resource that documents many Old World products.

This resource sets up a number of contradictions. Help students strike a balance between effort and results by giving the opportunity to achieve success through varied and challenging experiences that build upon one another. Try this : Challenge students to find success while thinking outside the box with a digital escape room.

Explore the many great ones including some that are free from Breakout EDU or create your own. Personal responsibility: Provide students with personal control over their success.

When people feel their success is based on their own efforts and abilities, rather than on external factors like luck or the decisions of others, their confidence improves. Present choices when possible so that students can select the path for which they feel most prepared. Try this : Create a digital choice board to engage students with different interests, strengths, and ability levels. To sustain optimal motivation, learners need to have positive feelings about their learning experiences and accomplishments.

Satisfaction can come from a sense of achievement, value, or inherent joy in the act of learning; from external reward systems or praise; or from the belief in a sense of fairness. Intrinsic satisfaction: Provide opportunities to apply new learning in personally meaningful ways and foster personal recognition.

Allow students to showcase their efforts to increase a sense of accomplishment and share the positive benefits of their learning. Try this : Teach students how to set up a paper or digital portfolio , and encourage them to add their work to it over time. Portfolios are fun to share with others and work as archives for projects and personal reflection.

Rewarding outcomes: Positive reinforcement and motivational feedback can lead to extrinsic motivation that many students desire.

Grades, privileges, certificates, and other tokens of achievement can provide motivating recognition for efforts. Likewise, feedback from peers, teachers, parents, and members of the community at large can be highly satisfying for students who have put forth effort and want others to know.

Try this : Publishing to an online site with permissions, of course allows students to see themselves as content creators with ideas worth sharing. Is there a way to reduce the fear and anxiety students feel when you mention tests? Set up your curriculum so that they take quizzes more regularly, but make the questions amusing. While you can use pre-made quizzes, like this English Literature Quiz , you can also make your own with QuizWorks.

This allows you to text their knowledge on subjects from class, while adding your spin to the questions to make them more fun. The stop light concept serves as a great tool for assessing daily behavior. All students start the day on green. When they make poor choices and act improperly, they move towards yellow and red. Good choices can move them back to yellow and green.

At the end of the day, evaluate the choices and write them on a behavioral calendar. You can also use the tool LiveSchool to track and reward this behavior digitally. Students earn or lose points based on raising their hands, arriving to class on time and more. For example, if a student has points, they get to pick a pencil out of the prize box. All methods and tools are already out there; you just need to rely on the right ones.

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