Saving instinctive optimism and intrinsic motivation

How can a teacher help a student to be intrinsically motivated and optimistic?

There are many ways the teacher can help create the conditions in which a student begins to get motivated or regain those feelings again. It all starts with teaching them to be as optimistic as possible.

Failure is temporary

Something that many students encounter early in the learning process is a sense of failure. It may be simply answering a question poorly, misbehaving in the classroom, or it may even be the result of some kind of learning disability, but a student should never be allowed to view a single failure or difficulty as a permanent state.

Understand optimism

True optimism will allow the child to see any failure as temporary, totally non-personal, and very specific. This is why it should be a primary focus of a child’s teachers and parents, especially if the student is struggling. To do this, mentors and teachers must reshape the student’s perceptions of failure into something more reinforcing and beneficial. They must shape their own verbal responses and responses to such events, scenarios, feelings, or situations in a completely non-judgmental way. They should aim to express to the child that their difficulties are temporary, that success comes from hard work, and that they have strengths that will help them get the answers they need.

Specifically, the teacher must rethink the student’s perception of a frustrating event; the first step is to discuss the issue with them using non-judgmental terms or comments. For example, a teacher should never evaluate failure by jumping to the “where did he go wrong” approach.