Motivate Students With Long Term Goals

Welcome back to my series on student motivation. The first post shared thoughts on motivating students by creating structure, and the second discussed motivating students by achieving short term & daily goals. This time we're looking at a few of the long term motivation factors. The two I'd like to touch on are programming and high profile performances. Programming strategically helps the students grow musically on a daily and long term basis (helping to create intrinsic motivation) while preparing for high profile performances can motivate them to achieve new heights of musical excellence.

Journal Entry - "The First Year" 05/25/12

I've officially survived my first year! I feel like I saw an "Achievement Unlocked" pop up earlier, or at least felt one. I know I was in the middle of a series about student motivation, and I do want to finish that, but I also want to take a post to reflect on this past semester. Combined with some of my other entries this year and we'll have a pretty decent record of my experience this year: I Found a Job!, Thing Are Getting Better, Three Tips to Make Your Next Concert a Hit and Journal Entry 3-24-12.

In the last journal entry I talked about how I believed the band was hitting a major turning point. At UIL we made a 2 in Sight Reading and a 1 in Concert. The concert rating was significant because it was the first 1st Division in Concert Contest since 2009 for this group, also because we got a 3 at Marching Contest, and also because that meant they would get to perform at the UIL State Wind Ensemble Festival. It generated a lot of excitement, not just for the kids, but for the community as well.

Motivate Students by Achieving Short Term & Daily Goals

Program preparation feels
a lot like this, but every day
counts. What do students feel
they've accomplished when
they leave each day?

Welcome back to my series about Student Motivation! My last gave some tips to Motivate Students by Creating Structure. This, I think, is a prerequisite. Without structure, nothing else you do will matter. But simply providing enough structure may not get you all the way there. I doesn't necessarily garuantee that students will start believing they can achieve, or care to achieve. In fact, putting all of that structure in place without enough results may make students feel bitter that they followed your rules, did what you asked, and didn't get much for their effort. I ran into this during marching season, which was riddled with rookie mistakes. I started working out a system to increase our daily achievement that showed some results by the Christmas concert, and was more refined and led to much greater success for UIL and other contests. With that in mind, here are some tips to setting and achieving short term and daily goals.