EFFORT AND GRADE

Something that I am constantly thinking about is what motivates students to succeed and what has motivated me to succeed and the single word that everything goes back to is grades. Do I want my students to be motivated by grades, or by learning? I say learning. And while no student may be motivated to do something if you tell them they will learn, you can motivate them by praising their effort instead of their grades, because the only way to learn anything is to work at it, which involves effort.

To relate this to myself, when I was in the 7^th grade I realized that I was putting twice as much effort into assignments than my peers did, yet I was getting the same grades of A. No one ever said great effort, it was always great grade. So naturally I started to slack off, and I graduated high school 12^th in my class of over 200 and even had some college credits. I was motivated in school to get good grades, not learn, and I couldn’t tell you much about anything I did to get those grades.

As teachers, we will get to know our students and what they are capable of. I don’t want students like me that have no motivation to try because what they do is good enough for a great grade, I want students to try because they want to prove they are the best and can do incredible things. I think instead of saying good grade and bad grade, we should say good work, but I know you can do better, I want you to give your best effort. If I had a teacher that told me my grade was the highest in the class, but they were disappointed because they knew I could have done more and tried harder, I would have. I assume recognizing effort and the amount put into assignments would also inspire students who may try their hardest and fall short. Praising their effort will inspire them to continue to try and succeed. Focusing on their C after they tried so hard may simply make them feel like they can’t do better, and this is something no one wants. We need to make sure we praise best effort, not good grades.

Motivate

Yesterday we got the chance to discuss teachers and education with four of the students from district C, and something that I couldn’t help but notice was that all four of these students we student leader and extremely self-motivated. I was a self-motivated person and was in all A.P. classes, so these are students that I can relate to very well. And while hearing these students discuss what they like and what motivates them I felt like I was hearing myself. This is a little scary because that is just one type of student.

I spent most of the panel time thinking of how a non-self-motivated student would answer these questions. I hate admitting this, but the more than a hundred children I work with everyday consist of only a handful of self-motivated students. The rest do their school work because they want go to the next grade and don’t want detention. One of the students discussed feeling that students wanted them to fail first so they can build on top of failures, and they felt like risks were okay. I don’t see that in many of the students I help with homework, but I try to develop that.

So often I see children not wanting to attempt things because they feel they will do it wrong, and what is the purpose of putting in effort if you will get it wrong. I am starting to think that one of the most important things in a classroom is trying, and learning from failure, something that seems to be missing from a lot of classrooms. This could include multiple drafts to be examined by the teacher or maybe a practice test where the teacher can go over every problem to make sure students can pin point the areas where they need help and then the teacher can help them before the final exam. I personally cannot remember multiple drafts in high school, and this definitely puts a stress on students which can sometimes cause students to completely shut down.

Motivation seems to be absent in many students, so how will you help motivate your students to put in the work needed to succeed.

On Modelling

When speaking on teaching strategies, the word modelling gets tossed around a lot. The type of modelling that is often spoken on though is probably not the most correct way of modelling. Chapter 8 of William Strong’s Coaching Writing in Content Areas discusses modelling writing as showing students a few examples of work, looking at the errors and showing students what type of work would get which type of grade. This is not necessarily the only way to model writing because it still keeps writing a little mystified.

Truth is, good writing doesn’t just happen. It is something that needs to be developed and edited. Students will see finished work and think “I can never write that good, why should I even try”. I think the real way modelling should be used is to demystify good writing. In order to do this, a teacher should write with students, and in front of students, illustrating the thought process and how to work through errors. If a teacher’s first draft is sloppy, students will know that they can have sloppy drafts too, allowing them to take risks, and we all know learning happens when risks are taken.

Now modelling like this, or rather modelling “thought” isn’t just a technique that could be useful for writing. In one of my classes last week we did an exercise where we wrote about our thought process while reading through a poem as a class 3 times. The change of focus from one reading to another showed our techniques of decoding poems to ourselves. Showing this side to students is definitely a way of modelling. Most students don’t “get” poetry, but they probably only will read the poem once, I don’t get poems after the first read, so why would they, and why should I act like I can? Modelling thought process could also be used for math problems, or maybe working your way through a primary document. Modelling should be used as a technique to show that no one is perfect, and everything takes work.

Here’s some types of modelling: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4697

Fighting a Hidden Curriculum

Chapter 2 in our book written by Daniel Strong touches upon the “hidden curriculum”, something that I myself am a victim of. I use the word victim because it has caused me to often times believe that learning is about a grade and not being about learning. Learning is about practice, experience, and risk. The risk part of learning is where I feel learning is wounded in our educational practices. The risk isn’t trying something new or expanding on ideas, the risk is passing the class.

With the risk of school work being on making the grade, how can we really make students explore their learning and make it their own? In high school, I could be handed an assignment sheet on comparing a common motif between two novels in four pages, with a clear rubric, and I could do it in a matter of 3 hours and hit all the main points. At the least, I would say that paper would get a B+/ A-, but I couldn’t really tell you about what I wrote about, or what I learned 3 months later.

I don’t think this grade is proof of learning. And I think that it may be because this assignment is fake. I say it is fake because there is no connection to the student. Assignments like this have students regurgitating the ideas that are being passed around in class. There is no real room for personal opinion, or real world connections.

So now I am curious as to how we can eliminate this hidden curriculum of school being about grades, and make it about learning. Some ideas that I have already began playing with are giving real world assignments. Instead of just assigning something where you say pretend we are writing this to the local paper, actually write it to the paper. Connecting lessons to current events, make school about the outside world we are preparing them for. And of course the 5 minute break down at the end of class, where what was learned that day is addressed and the importance of it is uncovered. What are some ideas that you may have to make school about learning and not about grades?

On a side note, I type into google, why do we study literature, and I got this dry, boring reply: http://www.ask.com/question/why-do-we-study-literature. As a high school student asking this question, I would have replied, “why does any of that matter in life?” I’m beginning to think that school and “real life” are two different things and that there needs to be a bridge over that gap connecting the two.

Managing Behavior

Controlling all the children in your class is not something that one teacher can do easily, instead a teacher needs to coach the students to control their own behavior inside of the classroom. This is something that I feel Metzger stresses in her letter. In my own experiences I have learned that solid rules and clear consequences for not following rules are the best combatant for undesirable behavior. And of course the consequences need to be followed through upon. If anyone working with children gives clear rules and regularly goes over the rules, the children will be able to recite them and will police themselves.

            With solid rules and consequences, I have noticed that it is a lot easier to deal with those that may not follow the rules and need be redirected. The vice principal at District C told us that he never says he is mad but rather that he is disappointed. The children I work with do not ever want to upset the staff members and often act on emotion without thinking through their actions. When this happens I find the best method is to isolate students and explain why their behavior is less than acceptable. The first question I start with is “why?”. Often this is met with an answer that they don’t know so I break down everything that happened and we figure out where bad decisions were made, why, and the correct approach. Then I normally express how their behavior makes me feel, and when they understand that the behavior effects everyone negatively, they think a little bit more before acting.

 

            The most important thing I feel is that you should not get into a power struggle with a student. The most important thing to remember is that you are the teacher and have the ultimate power. Children will try to drag you down to their level. A teacher needs to diffuse situations instead of heightening them, and that is something that Metzger mentions in her letter. But the most important thing to control classrooms, or any groups of children, is to have a plan and solid rules and consequences. A cool site for classroom management ideas is this one: https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos?landing_page=Classroom+Culture+Behavior+Landing+Page&gclid=COy0qaDotboCFU9o7AodI0cAfg

Dread Central (Essential) Question

            Starting from day one of my process of applying to Rhode Island College, I was stuck on the idea of how I can evenly mix the role of mentor/tutor, that I have become very comfortable with in my work with after school programs, and the role of instructor. I know many things about myself, I can create a safe environment for children, can become a person they run to if they have pressing issues,  and I can coach them through even the toughest problems that their teachers give them. But what I don’t know is how to be the instructor/teacher. I don’t know how to give out the homework, present material, or how to effectively grade student work. Now like everything else, I didn’t become a valued mentor and tutor overnight, it took experience and practice, but I am a little terrified to enter my first class and fail at being an instructor. I know over time, I will come to find the appropriate balance through trial and error, but before I start I’d like to come up with a map, a starting place, I can deviate from if necessary.

            When it boils down to one single question, my essential question is: How can I balance my identity as a mentor/tutor with my future identity of instructor/teacher?

Community

While studying education, something that is always mentioned is the positive classroom community. We’ve all realized that learning cannot take place in an uncomfortable or unfriendly environment, so we need to have a positive classroom community. But what exactly does the word community mean? To paraphrase a large amount of different definitions, a community is a a “group of people sharing common goals and attitudes”. So to think about what I would like my classroom to look like, I would want my students to have an attitude that they can accomplish anything I give them, and a goal to do their best and learn as much as they can.

These are things that go into my personal identity as a teacher. But now the nerve racking question of how can I create this positive classroom community where my students are inspired and motivated to do their best? Luckily, the internet is vast and offers many ideas that I can mull over and decide what I may want to try and what I don’t want to try, here is an example, http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept08/vol66/num01/Seven-Strategies-for-Building-Positive-Classrooms.aspx. Chapter 7 in Subjects Matter also explicitly lists some strategies to build a classroom community.

To connect to the article on mindfulness, while the idea of The Still Quiet Place may seem a little goofy, I think it would really work in a high school classroom. School is stressful enough and sometimes even I find myself needing to take a step back and look at things in smaller pieces instead of just the large final product. A friend of mine that teaches social work classes at RIC was recently telling me about how it’s that time of year when his inbox is swamped with student emails and that he ends all of his e-mails with “remember to take deep breaths”, something I feel everyone forgets. But to get back on The Still Quiet Place, after I read the article on mindfulness on Thursday, I was immediately determined to use this practice at work the next day, and I knew exactly who I was going to use it on.

There is this one 8 year old boy that I often refer to in my head as “the end of the world kid”, because if the littlest thing goes wrong or someone looks at him the wrong way, he seems to act like the world is coming to an end, having a full on tantrum. Well, Friday morning at 7:00 A.M. when his brother told him he didn’t want him on his foosball team, he began crying and screaming at his brother calling him a “stupid jerkface”. Even though I was half asleep still, The Still Quiet Place popped into my head and I quickly called this child over and told him I wanted to try something out. He started to cry more because he thought he was in trouble, saying he didn’t really mean what he said. I reassured him he wasn’t in trouble and when his sobs turned to whimpers I had him close his eyes and find his quiet place. He relaxed very quickly and when he was finally relaxed enough, he gave me a hug and went back to playing. I was impressed at how well it seemed to work and I am definitely planning on using it on a larger group. Unfortunately it was about 20 minutes until it seemed like the world was ending again. I now know I have another tool in my back pocket to use when things seem to get a little out of hand. I’m actually curious about other techniques like this that could be used to relax students.