How can you balance pushing students to improve with maintaining their confidence and motivation?

Motivating students can be tricky, especially if you lose sight of their individuality. Some students might feel less motivated and sensitive about feedback, while others might feel demotivated because they expected harsher feedback. Some ways that have yielded some positive outcomes in my experience: - It's not (just) about you: It helps a lot to check in with the students to see if they're all right. A lot of times, other life issues trickle into their focus and productivity, and it helps to hear that their teacher is concerned with more than their grade. - Weekly reviews Reviewing the class's goals before the beginning of the class can help remind students of the grading standards and keep track of progress.

Before setting a goal, students must know the purpose of the task asked of them. This clarity can guide their goal in aligning with the teacher's expectations. Goal setting is much more useful when the goal is measurable and the student has time to reflect on how they have progressed towards the goal in a given amount of time. Students can make their goals more measurable when the teacher offers clear quality criteria, so students can easily assess their progress at a given skill. Metacognitive reflection at check-points, after a given amount of time, allows students to recognize the progress that they have made and make a plan going forward on how to achieve their goal. This structure for goal setting also increases intrinsic motivation.

Encourage incremental progress, offer constructive feedback, and celebrate achievements. Tailor challenges to their skill level, fostering growth without overwhelming. Recognize effort, reinforcing a positive mindset to sustain motivation.

It is best to offer 1-3 Glows (skills or efforts done well) and 1-2 highest leverage or most relevant Grows (skills to work on improving). The reason we focus on just a few skills in feedback is so that students can do targeted practice to improve certain skills and maintain certain skills. If there are too many skills to remember, students will struggle to focus on every skill in a targeted way. Be specific, so students can understand what they must do. For example, "Work on your grammar" is a piece of constructive feedback that would be hard to follow, since grammar is a broad skill requiring many different sub-skills. Instead, try offering a specific focus point, such as "Practice consistently ending sentences with end punctuation."

We should jettison the idea of 'pushing' students and employ encouragement and persuasion because these strategies are able to infiltrate the minds of young ones. Students love to be appreciated and prodded. These strategies will stimulate students' desire to learn and improve on their current performances.