Posted by Denise Seguin.

A typical classroom is comprised of a variety of levels of motivation amongst students. The high achievers in your class probably don’t need your help with self-motivation. But is there anything you can do for those less-motivated students? Larry Ferlazzo, an award-winning teacher, blogger, and author on education matters, offers practical suggestions for motivating students in his article, "Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves." Ferlazzo based his strategies on a review of research into extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and identified four qualities that lead to a student being self-motivated: autonomy, competence, relatedness, and relevance. In this four-part blog series, we’ll explore each of these qualities in greater depth. Today, we’ll begin with Autonomy.AutonomyGive students some control over their learning. This can be as simple as giving students the freedom to choose their own classmates for a group project, to letting students choose from a "basket" of assessments, the project or assignment he or she wants to complete. While the latter sounds wonderful, it is a lot more work for a teacher to design multiple assessments that are equally rigorous and cover the same objectives. Teachers can’t be blamed for being put off this idea. But if you build slowly, it can be done more easily than you think. One idea that worked for me was to create a repository of assignments or projects over time. Each year I would update the previous year’s projects and assignments. For scenarios or case-based work, I would write a version that involved a different industry or different problem. In a few short years, I had a repository of prebuilt assessments that allowed me to give students the freedom to choose which project or assignment they wanted to do. Try it for a midterm or a final summative assignment, and you will get immediate positive feedback from students. Just be sure that each variation is perceived by the students to be equal in terms of validity to the course objectives. Stay tuned for Part Two of our series "Fostering Self-Motivated Students." We’ll offer more tips on competence.