Becoming successful is a matter of opportunity and believing in your skills. In education, it is never too early to cultivate success and offer students opportunities to develop their talents. While it is very easy to criticise and point out weaknesses, it is crucial to teach students to approach their mistakes and failures with the right attitude.

A failure is an opportunity to learn and overcome obstacles; it is a window that often opens more opportunities to learn and results in an improved product. Educators are ideally positioned to teach, inspire and lead the next generation of innovators.

Optimising student motivation

Students are motivated best when several factors are in collaboration. Among other things, students must have access to quality education, some degree of control in their learning subject, an inspirational environment and dedicated and responsive educators.

Educators play a key role in developing talents, inspiring, and instilling the spirit of success in their students. The right approach to lead students to success in academics includes allowing them to exercise a certain degree of control and freedom. It is essential that students are allowed to experiment and explore to develop their skills, abilities and talents. A good educator leads the way without pressuring and institutes persistence while being flexible about the individual path that a student takes to solve a problem.

Refining educators

Educating the next generation of innovators is a challenging task in any environment. In addition to resolving classroom management issues, handling multiple personalities and carrying out administrative tasks, educators must upgrade their own professional skills and stay informed about the most recent developments in their fields. However, these tasks may become integrated and complement each other instead of competing with each other. By developing deeper subject knowledge in their professional fields, educators are able to transmit the latest discoveries to their students. They can motivate their students by sharing the excitement of a simple experiment or bringing examples of what a discovery means to the real world. For some students, these efforts appeal to their intellectual abilities, for those who are result-oriented; it bridges the paths of theoretical information and real-life solutions.

The ongoing training of teachers and instructors is a prerequisite for any quality education system. Even the most brilliant educators need feedback in order to review, evolve and improve their methods, to reach out to as many students as possible. The wide array of student personalities and interests makes teaching more than delivering subject matter and perfecting classroom management skills. Educators must learn to recognise and handle a student’s individual needs and respond accordingly, develop specialised assignments to motivate and challenge students, and encourage practical work experience. They can promote collaboration by teaming up students for projects where they can assist and learn from one another, or by assigning tasks and projects related to everyday life and their immediate communities.

Educators can encourage inter-departmental and institutional collaboration, focusing on real life issues such as air-pollution, traffic jams or corruption. By giving students different venues of learning and experiences, educators allow them to develop different abilities and expose them to various learning settings, appealing to more individual interests. Practical learning and internships have significant importance in motivating students to follow a particular path of study or deciding to develop a particular interest. Thus, an educator must pay special attention to assigning such tasks carefully, or at the very least encouraging their students to undertake practical work. In universities, the practical learning of students may be promoted by supporting their business start-up ideas (see: “Student entrepreneurs: Student start-up business centres” Dawn Edu page, Sept 2, 2012).

Other simple steps that educators can take to advance their students’ talents include administering frequent low-stake opportunities to practice skills; monitor progress and offer early and regular feedback on student performance; assign and explain the value of the course or individual assignments; begin a class by determining what students already know or believe about a topic; incorporate active learning strategies such as games and simulations, problem-based learning, or community-based service learning.

Educators hold the key to unleash the power of the next generation of innovators, scientists, artists, and world-changers. We must support and encourage their efforts to motivate the geniuses in the making.

The writers work for the Promotion of Education in Pakistan Foundation, Inc.,

USA.info@pepfoundation.org