The term personal best is a curious one. Striving to beat oneself; to push past one’s accomplishments towards bigger and better things, it does require a certain mindset. It is not unknown that the concept of personal bests is related directly to the idea of intrinsically motivation and that “inner drive” that powers us forward towards success through none other than our own will. However, what cannot be ignored that this is a difficult mindset to accomplish. One could even say that the nature of IN-trinsic motivation is IN-tricate. IN as IN-side yourself, not OUT-side. Get it?

Well the point of this isn’t for me to make cheesy one liners so let’s connect this to my practicum shall we? Over the course of the past several weeks, I have been developing the concept of a Track and Field unit based solely on the concept of personals bests. This is intrinsic motivation at it’s…well, best. Great concept, however the notion of working against oneself is tricky. For myself, I am not an overtly intrinsically motivated person. I don’t do that well with personal bests and I need some form of extrinsic motivation; another competitor, a timer, etc. Therefore, it is reasonable to imagine the same mindset is present in at least some my students. So how do I encourage a group of students to adopt a mindset that I myself struggle with. Well I accomplish this through example.

From the beginning of my long practicum until now, my SA and I have introduced a new morning routine where the students are reflecting on a motivational video, finding a connection to the theme of a clip, and sharing how it relates to them personally. The shear amount of wonderful, articulate mantras that have been created by my students in connection to these videos on a daily basis is outstanding. “Success is looking at your life and being happy”, “if you don’t take risks, you’re not really living”, “failure is a stop on the road to success” are all credos, although probably not coined, by certainly echoed, by my students. In subsequent PE lessons, I found the concept of personal bests easier to get through to my students, they were sharing their times or distances as would be expected, but I also began to hear comments such as “I beat last week’s time by 10 seconds” or “I did better than I did last week”. In discussion with my class, they related the motivational comments that we created at the beginning of every day to an increase in their intrinsic motivation (this sentiment being paraphrased by me). The videos and discussion of them encouraged them to work harder and not necessarily against others. They seemed happy with beating their previous best and were excited to try again next time to improve even further.

So I suppose the whole idea of this is that you have to use the tools available to you to achieve your desired outcome. This, plus the notion of students exploring concepts on their own to derive their own meaning from it, are a powerful combination when facing a struggle like this one. What I found interesting at the end of all this, the students increase in intrinsic motivation spurred my intrinsic motivation to get into gear. It is the little things in this profession that you derive simple pleasure from.

“Success is looking at your life and being happy”

“If you don’t take risks, you’re not really living”

“Failure is a stop on the road to success”

• My Students Paraphrasing Motivational Videos