Strategies for Motivating Students
Dan Pink says that motivation comes from three distinct facets of human need: mastery, autonomy, and purpose. In thinking about how to motivate students in a middle school classroom, there is also the interplay of social and cognitive development that can severely hamper student desire to expend effort or to pursue mastery in a content area. Carol Dweck and Dan Pink are the eminent scholars who have studied the constructs of motivation. Below is an overview of the theory around motivation and how to implement in a classroom. For more detailed information, this is a PPT (with audio narration on each slide) about student motivation and a paper with detailed research and pragmatic solutions.
Check out this page for a download of a PPT (with audio) and a straight-forward paper highlighting research about student motivation and easy to implement solutions in your classroom.
Middle School Writer 