Intrinsic motivation is the greatest power in enjoyable and successful learning. Often teachers might miss the opportunity to learn about their students and what makes them tick. This this information, students can be triggered to use their passion, existing skills and knowledge to excel in any academic area.

As an example (Villegas, Lucas 2007) a child, like Belki, can have a strong business skillset and social skillset, passion, interest and a vision for the future, but teachers would only see the test scores and would be unable to comprehend what’s going on or remedy the situation.

With student profiling, or simply investigation into the person’s background, life and vision, teacher can leverage existing passion, knowledge and skills to enhance the test scores and overall learning experience. In Belki’s case, if the teacher cared, just listening and understanding Belki’s story would have give lots of tools to handle the situation. All a teacher needs to do is to find competencies and transpose those into the tasks at hand.

As an example, this means to take the enthusiasm of business transactions into business related mathematics. This can also mean taking the fluent Spanish skills and Spanish-English-Spanish translation skills to the English learning class.

Transposing involves recognizing the existing skills and knowledge, building self-esteem and leveraging these for a new learning area or extension of previous learning. Recognizing that Belki has already developed lots of skills in mathematics, language, social interactions etc. would help to find appropriate programs, teachers and instruction methods that would make Belki excel also in her classes and the test results.

This example shows the great need to build an excellent relationship between students and teachers. By knowing basic things about the students, teachers can give guidance and leverage all of the positive skills and knowledge student comes to the class with.

Eero

Villegas, Ana Maria, and Tamara Lucas. “The Culturally.” Educational Leadership (2007): 28-29. Print.