• What challenges might arise that could affect students’ motivation and engagement during the project?

• What strategies can you use to help students stay motivated, take ownership of their learning, and bring out their best work?

• How can you ensure that all students feel valued and contribute meaningfully to the team’s success?

Please appoint a scribe and a presenter. Key in the key ideas of your group's discussion in a new post. Remember to write down the room number of your group.

• Identify the Motivational Issues – What challenges are the students facing in this scenario?

• Analyse Possible Causes – Why do you think these issues are occurring? Consider both internal factors (e.g., self-efficacy, interest) and external factors (e.g., teaching strategies, classroom environment).

• Evaluate the Teacher’s Strategies – What strategies is the teacher using, and to what extent do these address the students’ needs? What actions can the teacher take to help students move toward a higher level of motivation and engagement?

Please appoint a scribe and a presenter. Key in the key ideas of your group's discussion in a new post. Remember to write down the room number of your group.

1. Talent development can occur without motivation if the right conditions for skill-building (appropriate resources and opportunities) are in place.

2. Extrinsic motivation should be avoided because it undermines long-term effort and commitment.

3. A person with innate talent and a fixed mindset will outperform someone with a growth mindset in the long term.

   
   

   Please appoint a scribe and a presenter. Key in the key ideas of your group's discussion in a new post. Remember to write down the room number of your group.

Q2: Provide checkpoints along the way, assign specific roles to the students within the group so that these checkpoints willbe clearer.

Q3: Assign purposeful roles, post reflection on how they have contributed meaningfully in the project, peer feedback to help know each other better

- conflict between Freya and Tim as Tim may think Freya is a freeloader. Freya may feel hurt by this perception.

- students may request to change groups as they feel they cannot work for the people in the group

Strategies:

- teacher could guide the group to come up with some differentiated roles to take on so that everyone can contribute, ensure fair allocation of work

- Speak to Tim to step up as a leader. Allow him to delegate the task and guide him to be more nurturing

- for Freya, allow her to choose her role that she feels comfortable with so that she doesn't feel inadequate

- possible extrinsic motivation could be a peer feedback form at the end of the project for students to rate their team mates

• Students may be very individualistic that may hamper the group dynamics

• May have free-loaders or students like Tim who dominate the group

Strategies

• Teacher should get the group to discuss and decide on the group norms as well as delineate their responsibilities.

• There are merits in assigning any of the 3 profiles as the group (willingness, breaking out certain stereotypes)

• But regardless of the appointment, the teacher should check in with the students regularly. Good to have some progress chart. (Also answering Q3).

• Beyond their individual assigned portions, the students need to view as a collective effort or responsibility.

Motivational Issues:

Task Avoidance: Martha sees poetry as irrelevant to her future in science and questions the value of engaging in it.

Low Task Value: She doesn’t perceive the poetry assignment as meaningful or useful.

Possible causes: lack of interest, poor task management skills; She’s overwhelmed with school workload and struggling to prioritize what feels important.

Evaluate teacher's strategies: She explained that poetry builds creative thinking—connecting it to skills useful in science. Mentioning the enrichment programmes aligns with Martha’s desire to stay competitive and top-tier.

But It May Fall Short Because: She didn’t fully address Martha’s overload or explore her interests or voice in the assignment. Could ask Martha why she doesnt want to do poetry: dont want to disappoint others as well as not good at producing good work in the subject

What teacher could have done: explore students belief in the subject and probably help her in finding the reason why she is weak in the subject.

• negative motivation: anxiety, failure avoidance

• comparing himself to others, wanting to avoid failure, not sure how to obtain success

Causes:

• lack of self belief

• tendency to compare himself with others

Evaluation of teacher's strategies:

• the teacher is aware that anxiety is a common emotion that students will face because the task is difficult

• "we expect only a few students to solve it" - may cause more anxiety because Peter now realises that he is not the top few in the class

• What is the intention of the task? is it diagnostic?

• Suggestion: give students a few problems, perhaps starting with a few simpler tasks to give students some confidence, then more difficult questions at the end (give students some small wins)

• Suggestion: can the teacher give some clues / a bit of scaffolding to get him started (to reduce his anxiety when his peers have started)

1. Challenges: Anxiety - student compare with peers and feel discouraged

2. External: Student looking at peers who seem to be moving faster and not struggling. Internal: how student perceives failure

3. Teacher strategies: Good that teacher encouraged him to focus on the process rather than outcome. But perhaps don't just tell student that only high-ability students will get it. Instead, the teacher can give some guidance on how to get started. Can encourage them to go at their own pace - not everyone will have the same strengths. Teacher can set positive classroom climate that encourages students that its ok to fail/make mistakes

• some form of selection made to place him in this class - there seems to be some self doubt that is limiting his motivation to participate in class fully (or immerse himself in the learning task)

• may feel very powerless due to the ambiguity of the process - learning disposition is not the type that can 'go with the flow' and get to the epiphany

• feels doubtful and because end goal may not be clear to him, it adds to his anxiety and uncertainty about whether he can learn or succeed in this task/ such lessons

• perfectionist - don't want to make mistakes + want to observe first to get his bearings right

• reshape the experience - don't mention anything about expecting only a few to get it right away, but focus on the exploration of ways to solve the problem and what is the range of solutions the class came up with (make the situation less daunting and validate everyone's 'struggles' to solve the problem)

(Scenario 2) Martha:

• avoidance and disengagement with poetry

• rather than only talking about the content as a requirement to remain in the enrichment programme, there should be more focus on the range of skills that one develops through learning about poetry

• there could be more conversation with Martha about what aspect/ field of Science she's interested in and see if there can be any link made between the skills learned in poetry lessons to the areas she's interested in

• perhaps there can be some sorting out of priorities and commitment to various things happening - self management issues (being 'stretched' in too many ways and in too many subjects may have made Martha tired and breed the desire to avoid areas that she can't seem to see any benefits to)