Assignment #4: Complete the 4 part assignment format as you read, reflect, and respond to Chapter 4 – Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition.
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Although your course packet asks you to post to blog for parts A, B, C, and D…we are asking that you only post part C and D. We’re trying to make the blog easier to read and more user- friendly. Thanks!
A. Self Assessment of Current Beliefs and Practices: This component asks you to reflect on how and why you currently use the instructional strategies of Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition in your classroom. The intent of this is to activate your prior knowledge of your strategy use so that you can make comparisons as you read the chapter. Below are the questions to help you complete your self-assessment.
• This chapter discusses the potential influence of reinforcing students' effort and providing recognition for their accomplishments. Think back to your own personal experiences and try to identify situations in which your learning was positively influenced when someone reinforced your effort or recognized your accomplishments in some significant way. You might also remember situations that would have been improved if someone had reinforced your effort or had given you recognition.
• Now try to remember examples of situations that you positively influenced because you did reinforce students' effort or provide recognition.
• How do you currently reinforce students’ effort in your classroom and what is your purpose?
• What makes reinforcing effective or ineffective?
• Although verbal recognition seems to be most effective, providing concrete tokens (e.g., stickers, candy, toys) can also be effective. What advice would you give to a new teacher about using tokens as rewards?
B. Read & Reflect “Research & Theory”: This portion of the assignment asks you to read chapter 4 and reflect briefly on your thinking after reading the “Research and Theory” section for both reinforcing effort and providing recognition. You may want to consider reflecting on the bulleted comment below.
C. Practice: Choose one of the specific “classroom practice” strategies or techniques shared in this chapter to teach to your students (If you are not currently teaching, you may share how you would use this strategy in your classroom). You may want to consider reflecting on the bulleted comment below. Please post a brief reflection of how this went to the posting labeled Week Four: Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition. Click on the “comment” link below.
• This chapter recommends the use of rubrics to help students see the relationship between their effort and their achievement. Try to identify a specific long-term, challenging assignment that might be enhanced by using these rubrics.
D. Final Strategy Reflection: Use the following sequence of questions/promps to reflect on what you’ve learned about both the strategies presented in the chapter and what you’ve learned about yourself as both a teacher and a learner. Please post your brief reflection to the posting labeled Week Four: Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition by clicking on the “comment” link below.
How has the information you read in this chapter on summarizing affected your thinking about teaching and learning? What have you learned about yourself as a teacher and learner? You may use some of the following questions to assist you in writing a brief strategy reflection:
• How might I change how I reinforce students’ effort in my classroom?
• What is something you now understand better about reinforcing effort or providing recognition?
• How might you change how you provide recognition in your classroom?
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14 comments:
Hello all! - We're enjoying reading all of your great comments! Don't forget to read what all participants have shared and to comment on their thinking as well as adding your own thoughts! :)
Jackie and Mary,
I am a bit confused about this week. The title says: Week Four: Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers, but the questions are about encouragement. Is the label just a mistake, or should we answer the questions about cues, questions and advanced organizers?
I did not even notice the heading of "Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers", great observation. I did the assignment for Chapter Four on effort and recognition, and I am going to post for that. I think the chapter on cues is chapter 10. I hope I did the right assignment.
C. Practice for Chapter 4
I had a great unit I would teach to my fourth graders called alien skylines, which I learned in a wonderful course taught by Roger Kukas. It was a math/art project. The math goal was for the students to learn a list of geometry terms and be able to draw an example of each term (different angle and shapes). The art goal was for students to apply some different shading techniques and drawing of different kinds of lines. The finished projects were phenomenal when effort and care were used, something to be displayed with great pride. I think using the effort and achievement rubric along with this unit would improve the end results greatly.
For fourth graders having the rubric in the form of a bar graph would allow them to see their results, and compare them, in a visual format. For each step of the project I would have them graph their effort with blue, and next to that, their achievement in red. This unit lasts approximately 2-3 weeks. We would periodically check on our effort and achievement graphs and see how the class thought it was motivating them.
In the end I think this project would provide it’s own recognition for the students. We would display our projects for the school to admire. If student’s put a lot of effort into this project they would feel pride to see it displayed. They would also feel very proud to take it home and share it with their families. I imagine we would glue their effort and achievement graphs to the back of their alien skylines.
I believe this would be successful because it would allow children to slow down and reflect on their work, as opposed to rushing through the work to get it done. I thought of the alien skyline project because it is a very visual project. You can easily see which ones were completed with effort and care, and which ones were not. Taking your time is very important with this project. I feel our completed projects would be greatly improved using the rubric.
D. Final Strategy Reflection
After reading chapter 4 I will definitely add some lessons into my plan book with the goal of teaching the connection between effort and achievement. I cannot recall ever teaching a lesson on effort. I have given frustrated “lectures” when effort was low, and I was disappointed with the class’s results. Now I regret that I didn’t explicitly teach and exemplify the results, and rewards, of effort. My lectures weren’t teaching effort, they were asking students to put more effort into their work PLEASE. I wasn’t giving them meaningful examples of what effort can lead to, and what the pay off is for them. The relationship between effort and achievement/success was something I thought children would have known from their own past experiences. Now that I know better, I will definitely teach better! I now have a deeper understanding of how to lead my students into taking ownership and pride in their work through hard work and effort.
This chapter reinforced for me how unhelpful, and even harmful, empty praise can be. Praise that is too frequent, given easily, and isn’t tied to the successful accomplishment of a specific goal can undermine the very thing you are trying to get a student to achieve. Pause, prompt, and praise seems like it will be a very helpful tool in motivating students. If a teacher can help a classroom understand the power of effort, and motivate them to achieve, the gains taking place would be great and beautiful.
C. Practice
I believe it's my job as a teacher to set high expectations for my students and at the same time help them if they are struggling to meet their individual potential. With that being said I chose to work with one individual for my practice.
I have a "top of the pyramid" student that I'm struggling with working very hard to figure out what the best strategies are to ensure his success. Effort is an area that this student struggles with. He rarely gets his work completed and if he does the effort is very low. I decided to use the Pause Prompt Praise technique with him when I find him giving up on something that is difficult.
This student has good skills he just lacks motivation. I have found that in the past I end up telling him to stop playing and finish his work. And with the strategy I decided to take the time to remind him of the basic expectation.
He was having a hard time reading a worksheet today, rather than reading it for him or telling him to generally "keep trying" I gave him one prompt to remind him what our three steps are when coming to a word we don't know before giving up. I then walked away and watched him follow through with my prompt and then continue on with his work. Rather than just be glad he was doing his work and not goofing off I went straight over and patted him on the back told him I noticed how he used our three steps and that it helped him to do his work. I also reminded him how when we try to do things that are hard it only makes them easier for the next time. I then walked away as not to draw too much attention to the whole thing. He KEPT going! I loved it. Now this seems so simple and I know it is, but there are just times that I know this won't work. I did enjoy being reminded how easy it is to encourage students if we just take the time and choose our words carefully.
D. Final Reflection
It took me a while to get through these few pages because I kept getting lost in my own thoughts. I do a lot of reflecting on my students and their behaviors through the day. I feel like I have strong classroom management skills and do a good job of motivating my students. It is the high flyers that I spend so much of my energy on.
At the beginning of the year I always do a teamwork lesson on how important it is that we all use teamwork to help us get through the challenging times. We talk about not giving up and how other teams out there in the world can’t give up otherwise the whole team fails. This leads into other lessons about effort and how there is a first time for everything and it only gets easier. I think it’s important for them to understand this especially since most of them have never been in school before. We have even coined a phrase that came from one of my kinders “Do your best it’s okay it’s the kindergarten way!” All the students use it and it’s wonderful to hear from across the room when you see one student encouraging another to keep them from giving up. I have wonderful classroom community! I agree with Kay that if you want students to put effort into their work then we need to explicitly teach it. She talked about using meaningful examples for them to know what we expect of them. I think that connecting effort to the outcomes is a great way of doing this.
I have never used a rubric to connect effort to outcome with my students. I loved this idea and want to find a way to incorporate it into my behavior plans for my “high flyers”. I use a check-in sheet that breaks the day up into happy face, straight face, and sad face sections within each discipline. I’d love to use that connection maybe in my discussions with students when it’s time to see what they earned. “How do you think you did? Did you do your best work? Are you proud of how hard you tried?” and then connect that to the score they get for that job.
When it comes to recognition I could go on for days. We have so many wonderful things set up within my building. There are plenty of school-wide recognition plans that I love. In my classroom I also have an “Accomplishment Tree” that I created from branches off of trees. They stick up out of a big jug full of stones and for each month I have die cut images that they can get their names written on and then placed on the tree. I choose these accomplishments based on the individual and they just love it. I am a firm believer of intrinsic motivation and sometimes we can all get lost in giving out tangible rewards. I want my students to give it their all and my main way of fostering this is teaching kids to strive for attainable goals. It’s all about scaffolding and when they are successful they begin to feel it. I am so sorry this is so long. I wish I could just sit with you all and share all of my thoughts. ☺
C. For the last week I have been working with the pause, prompt, praise technique. I really like the technique a lot because it encourages me to give praise after corrective feedback. For example, today during partner reading time two students were not reading together with the memory stick. I walked over and stopped the students and reminded them of what they were supposed to be doing. I then left and let them get on task, without me being near them. About five minutes later, I went back up to the pair and gave some specific praise about how they stayed on task, shared the book and read the story using the memory stick. Before, I might not have returned to give the students the praise, but this week I have been working on taking the extra time to go back and praise students after I give them a prompt.
D. I sometimes feel awkward celebrating students successes, but am really working hard on changing this. I would like to celebrate students' accomplishments more frequently with intangible things like a round of applause, a high five or other types of acknowledgment. I have also never taught students about the relationship between effort and achievement. Just like Kay said, I tend to address effort when it is a problem, but have not actually had lessons teaching about effort. I would like to do this in the future. I feel like I am trying to change and implement so many different things right now, that I can't make all of the changes I would like to make.
I am in the process of teaching students to make graphs of their reading fluency scores. It is taking students significantly longer than I expected to learn how to graph, but I hoping the students will find the graphs rewarding and a nice way of displaying their accomplishments.
Hi all....sorry about the title error, not sure how that happened. You are all correct in responding to Chapter 4, "Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition". I'm also sorry - I got a little behind...my son had both the Flu (Strand A) and Pneumonia bad enough that we ended up in the hospital...needless to say everything got a little backlogged...and we're just "catching up"...so thanks for your patience.
I loved reading all of the ways you described reinforcing your students' effort. Our students need to see that there is a reward (achievement) for their hard work and effort (even Kindergarteners can relate to the "Little Engine Who Could). :)
Carrah mentioned "getting lost in thought" while reading a section of the text. The same happened to me as I was rereading one of the sections on "Providing Recognition - Following Guidelines for Effective and Ineffective Praise". Just this year, I moved to a new school in a new district, and as a whole, the school reinforces with little prizes for just about everything the children do (stickers for reading at night, tickets for good behavior, lollipops for participating in a monthly math contest and the list goes on...). It drives me NUTS because quite often, children are getting some type of reward for completing the bare minimum, and not really for putting any effort in reaching a particular goal. For the most part, they are not being asked to attain any identified performance standard. This is definitely something I hope to address in the coming years...being the "new kid", I don't want to rock the boat yet.
Hi. This is Suzie Kabeiseman - still trying to catch up! Chapter 4.
C. I chose to use the Pause, Prompt and Praise while working in the computer lab this week. Remember that I see the whole school, once a week in the computer lab to work on literacy. Consequently, I don't have too much time to build strong relationships with every student. There are always a few students that stand out though. One in particular, a 2nd grader, had been uniquly challenging. She was often distracted, off task and basically wanted to go to YOUTUBE and watch videos. My goal is to always remember that their misbehavior is not directed at me or school personally, and is usually a reaction to something external that they are dealing with outside the confines of school.
With this in mind, my goal was to keep the child on task and focused on the lesson which was practicing sight words. After giving the lesson I set them to log in and begin practicing. As I moved about the room, I kept a keen eye on my challenging student. As soon as I noticed her chair swivel and mouse wander, I quietly walked over, prompted her on what I noticed she had done and might do to get back to the quality work that she had begun. She instantly got back to work. Very shortly thereafter, I complemented her on her choice and her effort to read a word that was a challenge to her. She was not a problem the rest of the class.
D. It strikes me how easy it is to turn some of these students around with simple direct and specific praise. So many students are just starving for the positive attention. I really liked this chapter for the direction towards specific praise. We have to be thoughtful about what prompts we give kids and how it can effect their learning. My efforts towards being mindful of this will, hopefully, allow for greater learning AND a happier classroom.
I also really appreciated that effort needs to be taught. The rubrics were something I totally identified with thinking that that would have been something that would have really worked for me as a young student. A rubric, or graph, is such a concrete visual aide that is so simple, yet powerful. I will definitely use it in my future as a classroom teacher.
Hi Suzie, no worries - you'll catch up! Isn't it amazing what some reinforcement of correct behaviors will do for some of our more difficult students? There are some teachers in my building who I wish would give it a shot rather than the berating they seem to prefer...thanks for sharing your thoguhts!
Recently in my science class, I was looking for something, ANYTHING to improve the effort being put out by my students.
Our district does not have a retention policy for middle school, and the kids know that they pass right along even if they don't pass. To top this off, many of our parents don't seem to care, and are apparently OK with their student flunking.
An idea I tried recently was to give out SUCCESS tickets for students who scored over 90% on a big science test. The response was good from most students.
Before the next test, I announced that I was going to be giving out SUCCESS tickets again, and would off them to anyone who scored over 90%, or scored significantly higher on their test than their overall average grade.
The response again was fairly good, and I think this type of thing would work well in the long run if I stuck with it.
I have found that anytime I do things of this nature to try to boost morale and effort level, it becomes one more headache and organizational nightmare for me to keep track of. When I see 120 different science kids a day, have an elective to prep for, meetings to attend, e-mails and phone calls to answer, keeping track of recognition programs kind of takes a back seat.
I would love any input on implementing an effective reward program in a middle school setting. In my mind, things of this nature would work better in a self-contained setting.
I have learned some interesting things about effort based rewards in this chapter. When I first stated teaching, I would sometimes offer candy to students who actively participated in class and provided good answers.
I ran into a problem within weeks of starting this, when students began performing only IF they received a treat.
I might in the future, try to find a better, more manageable way to issue simple coupons, stickers, or some such thing to students to reward effort.
I liked the idea of the effort/achievement rubric for students to fill out for certain large projects. I do see a problem with implementing it in my classroom however.
To give you some background...I send out daily e-mails to perhaps 80 of my 120 parents. This lets them know what happened in class, what is coming up in the near future, and if they had homework. I also send home grade printouts to be signed/returned every 3 weeks or so, and post grades (by ID number) on the classroom wall about every week to keep kids updated.
With all this effort to keep them on top of their grades, I still have somewhere around a 50% return on any homework I assign.
I could see this effort/achievement rubric going the same way...either 50% of them won't do it, or that many of my kids will not be honest with themselves, marking high scores for effort, when in fact they were not trying at all. Then, when they failed, they would let me know that "see, I tried REALLY hard, and still failed."
Again, I'm definitely open to input.
Henry,
I wonder if you have ever tried graphing the student homework hand-in rate and then have a special activity (educational of course) on Friday for the two classes that 1) improved the most and 2) had the highest turn in rate for the week.
Good luck,
Sacha
C. I have been in the practice of providing concrete symbols of recognition since I began teaching in 2001. I give the students “Vanduckets”, which are paper money copied from the Mexican 20 peso bill with my face on top of the face of Benito Juarez. The students have always enjoyed the system and get a kick out of defacing them, which I don’t mind as long as it’s not inappropriate. I give them the vanduckets each time they raise their hand and participate in class. I also occasionally use them to positively reinforce student behavior. Example: If I tell them to open their books to page 62 and only a few of them comply because the rest of them aren’t paying attention, I will give those students vanduckets. The rest of the students quickly get their books out in hopes of getting one too, but they are too late by then. The next time I ask them to open their books, the response if much faster in hopes of a reward. The vanduckets are collected each Friday and a letter grade is assigned based on what the class average is for that week. I feel that this is the only way for me to grade participation with something tangible rather than just thinking to myself about whether the students participated that week.
D. As far as how I might change how I recognize students efforts, this has always been a struggle for me. I have to constantly remind myself to give specific praise rather than just saying “muy bien”, or some other blanket phrase. It’s hard in my subject area at times because I feel like I’m constantly correcting students when they are speaking and writing. My focus as of late has been to not over-correct to the point that they are afraid to open their mouths. As far as giving compliments, I’m at a loss at times. “Way to conjugate that verb correctly!” just doesn’t seem all that genuine. I will focus more on recognizing improvements in accents and grammar usage among individual students.
Hi all...boy who thought it would be that difficult to praise students and in return get a positive student behavioral response...but it is isn't it? I tend to have issues with reinforcement that is so extrinsic rather than intrinsic anyway...
Especially when, like Henry says, it seems so small compared to the "must do's" of the day/week.
Thanks Sacha, for the suggestion for Henry (Hank?)...Henry - you are in a difficult situation such a large case load of students. I'm going to speak to a colleague that teaches middle school social studies to see if he has any suggestions. One thing...is there anyway you can avoid those 80+ emails...how about a blog or webpage on the school's site to post your pertinent information so that you're not responding in a bunch of different emails what might be the same information....??? Just a thought...
Karen - I love your "Vanduckets" idea...it was so funny to read it because when I was teaching 2nd grade, I used "Knapp Money", bright colored bills with my beautiful mug in the middle :)
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