Sunday, September 26, 2010
Reinforcing Effort
I think we should take the time to reinforce effort so that students can recognize the direct connection between their effort and their success. Some students believe that they will be successful or unsuccessful based on things like luck, their genetic background, and other things beyond their control. While those things certainly can have an effect on success, students need to be taught that their effort is the single most important factor in their success. In the past, I don't think I've done a very good job reinforcing effort in my students. I have used simple phrases like, "Good job" and "Nice try", but I need to work on being more specific in my feedback, placing special emphasis on the amount of effort they put forth, which is one of my goals this year. I have had my students chart their progress quite often, but never really thought about grading them solely on effort, or having them chart that. I found some of the rubrics in our chapter interesting, but was wondering, does anyone have any really good ideas for reinforcing effort, with technology, for elementary students?
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You make an excellent point, Andi. Quite a few of my students feel that, just by virtue of who they are or who their parents are, that they deserve certain privileges, or grades. How do you get students to understand that without effort, you won't succeed in anything that you do. I've said many times what a great job someone's done, or that they had excellent questions, or I was proud of them for remembering things said in former classes, but I know that the kids think these are just the standard "teacher thing" to say. Maybe students should be given 2 different grades on assignments - one for the knowledge that they are demonstrating, and one for the effort that they have put into an assignment. It's something for me to think about in the future.
ReplyDeleteAndi - I used to give the generic comments like "nice try" and "good job" but have been making a much greater effort to be more specific when giving feedback. I've been on the receiving end of the generic feedback and am usually frustrated because I want more than that so I am really trying to be better at this as well. My question is....what do you do with the students who aren't putting in any effort at all!?!?
ReplyDeleteAndi,
ReplyDeleteI teach middle school so I don't a solid solution to your question but in my post this week I discussed how I have been using effort to reinforce student achievement. In our last art project some of my students did not do as well as they thought they should have. So I had them take out their daily objective or goal sheets and reflect on how they scored their effort and goal for the day. (they score themselves on how much effort they want to put in before class starts and then again at the end with how much they actually put forth.) For most of the students their self scored effort scores paralleled with their actual project grade. This was very powerful when dealing with my disgruntled 7th graders. The few students that did poorly saw they they didn't put forth much effort and had a tangible example of what happens. EFFORT= SUCCESS!
I am not sure how to adapt for elementary but I could share my system and goal sheet with you. Let me know if you would like that.
Most of the information out there about how to reinforce effort through technology for younger students refers back to the book we are reading. I think the book gives you the info to lead you to the "how". The link, http://www.mcrel.org/pdf/educationtechnology/9713IR_TechEarlyChildhood.pdf gives a few examples of applications/games for the younger ones that cover strategies from the book. For my own kids, Webkinz was a great learning tool for reinforcing effort. The program allows you to play a variety of games to earn $ and then use the money to improve your Webkinz life. My kids learned to read faster and figure math faster just from playing this stuffed animal game.
ReplyDeleteAndi, I love your comment about effort. Working with middle school students I see that they need that enforcement or should I wish I could say re-enforcement. By giving these students that type of feedback is so important at the middle level, these students are still growing their roots and if they had that to go onto high school, they will be so successful! Positive rewards are so important at this level.
ReplyDelete