Hints to Motivate High School Students for Learning

Alex Fernando Buitrago Hurtado

Doctor en Ciencias de Gestión

Docente de la Maestría en Educación

Universidad Externado de Colombia

Introduction

After pandemic in some high schools in Colombia, students are not motivated for learning anymore (Anđić et al., 2023). In addition, it is necessary to change the teaching process because teachers are not prepared for this challenge (Caner & Ogan-bekiroglu, 2025).  Besides, high school students have difficulties focusing their attention on the learning process (Anđić et al., 2023). Additionally, new technologies are considered both a problem and a solution for teaching (Kotsis, 2025; Legerská & Henriksen, 2025). The problem is the lack of knowledge teachers have in the teaching process when using new technologies (Toma, 2025). This article searches for hints to improve the teaching process and motivate high school students for learning (Kotsis, 2025; Tzafilkou et al., 2022).

This text is composed of three parts: the first one shows the difficulties teachers have regarding students’ motivation for learning. The second part displays possible new technologies to help high school teachers and the third shows how teachers can build new skills for helping high school students.

Difficulties Teachers face to Motivate High School Students

There are three reasons teachers have identified that affect students’ motivation: First, the students get bored easily; second, there are problems of communication between students and teachers; and finally, the students and parents expect miracles for learning (Amaya-Fernández et al., 2024; Berry & Carpendale, 2025; Tzafilkou et al., 2022).

Teachers need to focus on students’ attention because they get bored easily and look for other activities in class (Tzafilkou et al., 2022). For example, students get busy in social networks and prefer playing video games and they become dependent of digital technology (Anđić et al., 2023). Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence generates accelerated responses for students’ assignments without verification and confrontation with teachers (Anđić et al., 2023; Kotsis, 2025; Tzafilkou et al., 2022).

There is lack of communication between teachers and students because they have different languages and different comprehension of both teachers’ and students’ context. This language is acquired by social networks like “Youtube” with “Mr. Beast” and video games online as “Tralalelo Tralala”, with a language created by generative artificial intelligence (Tzafilkou et al., 2022). Thus, the cause of the problem is that parents give technological gadgets in early stages to their kids to avoid their contact due to workload (Sellami & Ammar, 2022). Consequently, there are problems of communication among teachers, parents, and students. In the end, students are isolated (Tzafilkou et al., 2022).

In addition, students and parents expect miracles from learning. Students think that they do not need to learn anything because knowledge is found in AI easily and fast (Kotsis, 2025) and parents leave their kids’ learning process exclusively on the school. Therefore, these abilities can be easily acquired in social networks or for designing video games like “Roblox” and “Minecraft”. Thus, parents leave responsibilities to others (Sellami & Ammar, 2022; Tzafilkou et al., 2022).

Technologies for Helping High School Teachers

After identifying the abovementioned difficulties, there are some hints for solving these issues as follows in convergence technologies for teaching. There are virtual and augmented realities to promote curiosity and creativity (Antonis et al., 2023). This kind of technology allows students to be close to knowledge and learn (Anđić et al., 2023).  For example, in History classes, it can connect students with facts by contextualizing this discipline through games and simulations (Gupta & Tiwari, 2022), so that it promotes the interaction between physical and virtual spaces; for example, the “Magic Cube” permits students or teachers to build objects to recreate complex concepts (Anđić et al., 2023).

Another kind of technology is game platforms. It is used with traditional game platforms for learning; for example, “Minecraft” or “Roblox” (Hu et al., 2022). They are used for building collaborative spaces based on scores for practicing or obtaining new knowledge. The technique for incorporating this kind of technology in learning is called gamification.

Finally, the AI promotes the personalization of learning because not all students learn in the same way (Kotsis, 2025; Menabò et al., 2021); for example, the AI can create one route for each student based on his or her progress, monitored by the teachers (Kotsis, 2025). The teacher becomes a guide for learning. However, it is necessary to avoid the abuse of AI to cause hyper personalization.

The combination of all technologies mentioned is to improve communication and emotional connection between teachers and students to create true social networks for learning (Caner & Ogan-bekiroglu, 2025).

Building New Skills for Helping High School Students  

The process to build new skills belongs to knowledge management. The first phase (tacit knowledge) is to identify critical knowledge and create new knowledge with the purpose of learning (Amaya-Fernández et al., 2024; Caner & Ogan-Bekiroglu, 2025). The second phase is the systematization and socialization of new knowledge (explicit knowledge).

For the first phase, it is necessary to identify critical knowledge, and its purpose is to analyze the information to support the learning process at school. The key aspects for identifying this kind of knowledge are the following:

1. Understanding the academic results to identify critical knowledge for improving academic achievement and recognizing teachers’ successful pedagogical practices (Berry & Carpendale, 2025; Caner & Ogan-Bekiroglu, 2025).
2. Analyzing the success of the pedagogical practices by using the “Functional analyses” and after, by reflecting on how these practices are adapted in the new contexts for improving academic results through “Collective Creating of Senses” (Caner & Ogan-Bekiroglu, 2025).
3. Creating the protocol for segmentation of the practices implies nourishing the Quality Management System, using the protocol for collecting the results of analysis and reflection which means transforming the tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (Amaya-Fernández et al., 2024).
4. Organizing fosters the skills for systematizing practices. There are two possibilities: The first possibility consists of designing a model of educational action research. For creating skills, teachers need planning, design, building, and testing artifacts (Caner & Ogan-Bekiroglu, 2025). After that, it is necessary to create or incorporate knowledge databases.  

The second possibility is systematizing experiences. To do this, it is necessary to set a goal of systematization, by answering 5 questions (What? For whom? When? Why? and Where?) (Bach et al., 2023). Then, it is fundamental to rebuild the experience and search of sources for supporting the practices (Sellami & Ammar, 2022). To rebuild the experience, it is possible to use the process of Participative Action Research (PAR) as shown in the following table.

Step	Activity	Action
1	Workshops for analyzing de sources.  Including all schools’ actors.	a. Critical interpretations b. Collecting experiences with theoretical support and factors of success
2	Workshops for reflection to identify alternatives for adapting to academic achievement.	Selection of the most pertinent experiences for contextsDocumentation of experiences prepared by the teacher (Chronologies, planning, description, indicators, and memories).
3	Workshops for socialization alternatives.  Determination of priority according to impacts and feasibility.	New socialization Choosing the experiences for incorporating them in the context
4	Implementing new knowledge	Updating data base knowledge

The second phase is the socialization of new knowledge (Real & Rojo, 2022). The stages for this phase are the following:

1. Distributing and transferring new knowledge. In this stage, if the first stage produces new skills, it is necessary to distribute one platform of virtual learning objects (VLO) (Valderrama Moreno & Fuentes, 2021). If the fourth stage explained in the previous phase produces meaningful experiences, there is a transfer of new experiences based on communities of practice (Johnston et al., 2021).  

The purpose of distribution or transfer is to facilitate access and guidance. This depends on the audience: the level, the language and the purpose. One recommendation for this aim is to incorporate indicators in distributing and transferring new knowledge. Furthermore, it is relevant to use these indicators and the scalability in other contexts (Berry & Carpendale, 2025). 

• The second stage is the appropriation of skills or experiences. To measure the indicators, it is essential to do and fill in a protocol of monitoring to use them. In addition, these skills or experiences require to be adapted to the new teachers’ needs (Liston et al., 2022). Thus, there is a need to survey the implementation and improvement for identifying the possible new (Galoyan & Betts, 2021). It is not only to measure, but also to manage the interaction with students. There should not be “fear of making mistakes” and teachers are building their own solutions.
• The final stage is the measure and analysis of data. The analysis permits to rate the use for changing or improving these skills or experiences (Yuan et al., 2023). Likely, the analysis allows to identify lacks in knowledge and misinterpretation of practices based on periodical surveys. Finally, with the abovementioned results, teachers can reinitiate the process.

Conclusion

In the end, based on this learning process explained previously, the most important is the students. Teachers need to increase their capacities to use active methodologies to be integrated into technology (Jiménez-Becerra & Segovia-Cifuentes, 2020). Nonetheless, technology is one channel and not the end. It can be a way to reduce this gap between students’ motivations and their academic results (Anđić et al., 2023). 

For acquiring these capacities, teachers must manage critical knowledge to transfer it to students as an appropriation and achievement (Graça et al., 2022). This kind of appropriation means that students can use their knowledge in a daily basis. To achieve it, it is essential not only to transfer theoretical concepts, but also to acquire knowledge in technologies with critical pedagogy and didactics to foster creativity and curiosity in students.

In sum, teachers require changing their thinking and their motivation towards technology since the world is evolving constantly, and the needs have to be adapted to diverse contexts (Ilori & Ajagunna, 2020).

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