Thesis Statement

In the future, I hope to teach English to ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelve grade students. I understand that I will have students that have many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and I also understand that they will all respond to their successes and failures very differently. I want to be aware of the differences in the way the students achieve motivation and recognize a sense of self-worth, a sense of autonomy, address the need for relatedness, implement values and goals, and have attributions. One particular example of addressing motivation takes place within a tenth grade classroom. If I am teaching a lesson about how to create a thesis statement and the students are required to complete a worksheet for credit, many of my students

Therefore, these students may have high motivation to complete the assignment worksheet because the value of learning motivates them to “energize, direct, or sustain behavior” (Ormond, 2015, p. 186). Other students from European American backgrounds are “less likely to be diligent when classroom topics have little intrinsic appeal” (Ormond, 2015, p.212). These students may instead “find value in academic subject matters that piques their curiosity and requires creativity” (Ormond, 2015, p.212). In this classroom, I will need to address motivation from every cultural and ethnic background. I may include more creativity in the assignment by allowing students to make meaningful choices about what they want the thesis statement to be about, or I can permit my students to cut out sheets of paper with each word of the thesis statement on them to illustrate the process of creating a thesis statement and help them complete the worksheet. These two ideas address the differences in values and goals and may help European American students find intrinsic value and further motivation in the