Inquiry Project Cont. (Motivating the Un-motivated)

My Inquiry project is all about motivating unmotivated students. I am very curious of the different strategies you can implement to get those students who just seem to not want to do anything, to doing something! I think this inquiry will be forever on going to be totally honest, but I did learn some strategies within my last practicum that seemed to work pretty effectively on some very challenging students. One experience included a student that was very argumentative, he had an EA in the classroom dedicated to helping him out, but he refused help. I observed that he did not like feeling almost singled out by always having EA support by his desk so instead he simply refused it. By then refusing the help he struggled a lot with completing and staying on track with the work being done, and the defense mechanism for this was to argue with the teacher on why this work even needed to be done. What was cool about this student is that he was 1 of 4 grade 6 students in a grade 7 class and I got the chance to work with the grade 6 students in a small group in a different room. This student found a lot more success in this type of working environment, he was not being singled out and made to look like he needed extra help in front of the whole class, we were in a different room which seemed to make him more open to getting help, and he was a lot more pleasant to be working with. The help was easier to accept and especially because the other three students in the group were also getting help for me and did not care that they were, him seeing his peers accept my help, seemed to help him also accept my help. So, for this unmotivated kid, in the sense of not accepting help and then going downhill quickly from there, all it really took was less feeling of being singled out, possibly being in a less overwhelming space could have helped as well. I think universally though students don’t want to be singled out or feel like they are being singled out especially as they get older. Finding more creative and maybe “indirect” ways to help students like this, while still getting them the necessary assistance they need to get the work done is the overall tip I took away from this situation of an unmotivated student.