Motivation for You and Your Students

“Artists work from big ideas, but to motivate and sustain their interest and to make their ideas worth pursuing, they find personal connections to them. Student artists also need personal connections to big ideas.”

Sidney Walker, Teaching Meaning in Artmaking, Davis Publications, 2001.

Motivation. It’s been a heading on just about every lesson plan I’ve ever written. In the schools where I first taught in Louisiana, our lessons were driven by Madeline Hunter’s precepts from Motivation Theory for Teachers. In the last district in which I taught, motivation was called “warm up” on our lesson plans, but my preferred term is one that Davis Publications (SchoolArts’ parent company) uses in its art education textbooks – engage.

Whatever it is called, motivation written into a lesson provides prompts to help engage students and focus their attention. Including good questions at this stage serves to activate students’ prior knowledge and to introduce lesson themes and concepts. Meaningful questions make lesson concepts relevant to students and inspire and encourage curiosity.

How do you, as an art teacher, go about developing lessons and units that motivate students’ engagement and curiosity? One approach is to use big ideas, enduring understandings, and key questions to design lessons that are relevant to students’ interests and concerns. Personalizing big ideas for artmaking can lead to student discoveries both on their own and with their classmates.

Start by linking big ideas and art making to individual student interests and experiences and then think about how the idea is expressed in art from various times and cultures to choose works to share with your students.

This month’s SchoolArts (which you can read for free online) includes articles that detail a variety of approaches to motivation that teachers can use when planning lessons:  big, enduring ideas such as Identity (My Shadow and Me) and Symbols (The Door); the inclusion of historic artists (John James Audubon), contemporary artists (Kara Walker), and diverse cultures (Mali and Cameroon, Egypt); interdisciplinary connections (Days of the Dead) and a TV show (Chopped).

There is another important aspect of motivation to consider. It isn’t written into the lesson plan, but it, too, is required for a lesson to be successful. The teacher must also be motivated and engaged in presenting and teaching a lesson. If you are not motivated, your students will not be motivated. If you are not curious, your students are not likely to be. So share your enthusiasm and passion; your students will be enthusiastic and passionate, too.

Photo: In a tea shop in China. Travel to new places can motivate and feed your own curiosity, leading you to share your passions with your students.