Seminar 1: Motivation

Recently, I attended my first teaching assistant seminar for ATDP Berkeley. ATDP Berkeley is a summer camp where middle school to high school students attend classes for credit or to make their summer productive. The weekly seminars are designed to train teaching assistants so they can be good role models for the students. In other words, the seminars target on life skills that include peer to peer relationships. The topic for the first seminar was on motivation. We watched a 5 minute clip from Cambridge University about motivation. What made it a very insightful video was when the person said, "It is wrong for adults to ask 'How can I motivate students?' Instead, the question should be 'How do I set the conditions that can help motivate my students?'" Looking back, this totally made sense. In the end, motivation is internal and cannot be forced upon. No matter how much you tell someone to stop doing something because it is bad, nothing will happen until they have some intrinsic motivation. Sure, you can use extrinsic motivation by using threats and external rewards, but that won't help in the long run. Another interesting point that the person made was that everyone has motivation and this includes lazy people. For lazy people, their motivation is to relax. I have associated motivation with hard work and goals that I forgot that it could be the opposite.

In general, the first seminar was quite interesting as I learned about psychology that was related to education and child development. The challenge for me and other TAs is how to apply what we learned from those seminars in the classroom setting. The first seminar was also a wake up call for me to be more connected with the students and to be more helpful as a peer. I should take more initiative to communicate more with the students. Currently, I kind of isolate myself in the classroom because I prepare the labs in the corner of the classroom and at most walk around the lab tables to check their homework and labs.