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 D to the blog as we’re trying to make the blog more user-friendly and easier to read. 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.
• 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?
6 comments:
I agree that student motivation is a key ingredient in learning and would take it even further is saying student motivation is THE key ingredient in learning. I hear it every year, “You’re a better teacher than Mr. or Ms. so and so.” I ask why and students reply, “You make learning fun.” I can’t make learning fun, but I can reward and acknowledge their efforts daily. That is something that sets my classroom apart year after year. I try to inspire them to believe they can make a difference in their lives. When the student can recognize s/he is the one in control of her/his grade and I am just the facilitator, a light goes on in the student’s mind. Having clear goals to reach and being consistent with all students, never showing favorites and showing each student in one way or another that s/he is your favorite. That is motivation to a child.
In my experience I have found students don’t need stickers or certificates or rewards; they need caring teachers who don’t watch the clock for their breaks away from the kids. Someone once told me, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care; then they can be taught anything.”
Being a dyslexic person who can spend several hours studying a list of some 20 spelling words week after week, walk away and only remember half of them. I did not appreciate the book’s insinuation that I may not have put my best efforts into studying and if I’d tried harder I would have succeeded. It is possible to do everything to the best of my ability and still fail a spelling test. I can prove it. The trick is not giving up.
I would never tell a student to “try harder” when they are crying and frustrated about trying their best and still not passing. I would tell them, I understand, and it is frustrating. I know it is not fair that some students can wake up and spell any word you ask them to but students like you and I have to work for hours to just pass a spelling test. Does this mean we just quit and give up? Or do we find another way to do well?”
Teacher’s told me to work harder if I wanted to spell well. So I took spelling all through high school, and still I graduated with a 6th grade spelling level. Effort did not equal success for me and it will not equal success for our students. Each teacher who told me to work harder only succeeded in communicating to me that they were not listen to me, thus they beat me down even more. I wanted to spell so I could be “smart”, like everyone else, but try as I might I could not.
It was not until college when my composition professor told me “Good spellers are not the best writers. Some of the best stories have been written by people who can not spell well at all.” That was inspiration to me. She made me want to try and that is the class in which I became a gifted writer. It was not my trying harder, it was someone who believed in me and caused me to believe in myself. That was reinforcement; that was recognition. That is the person who motivated me to motivate students like me. Good students don’t need much motivation; it is the edge kids with inch thick files that need us to be an inspiration, to believe in them so they can believe in something as well.
Classroom Instruction That Works: Assignment 4
This was a great chapter. My school, like many in Oregon, has been using the PBIS model of rewards and reinforcement. We interpreted this by giving wooden nickels to kids doing what they were supposed to, wildcat cards for kids that did a little beyond and a “principal referral” for those kids who really went out of their way to be safe, kind, respectful and responsible – for example, regularly giving up their recesses to help other students read. We then had a weekly, school-wide assembly to recognize those achievements. We are now shifting away from that, and reading a book by Dr. Marvin Marshal, Discipline without Stress, Punishments or Rewards. I haven’t started the book yet, but did have some basic training before the school year ended. This chapter goes right along with that book.
I have always struggled with giving extrinsic rewards to kids for doing what they are supposed to do. I really liked the idea of providing praise based on specific learning goals – whether they be academic or behavior – and charting that progress. I have done this a few times whole class by awarding daily points based on how transitions flow, or whole class discussion behavior. It sort of worked, but I was always the “judge” of how it went and we didn’t really discuss consistently at the end of the day or month, using the criteria we had developed as a class and it seemed to have no carryover for when we started focusing on a new behavior goal. Perhaps if I increased the discussion, made shorter term goals (not monthly) and I followed with some sort of celebration – making up a clap, a class song, or some kind of class game – that would help.
This year we put up a chart displaying our reading progress based on specific DIBELS criteria and celebrated when students moved up a zone – from red to yellow or yellow to green. I found that really motivated students to work hard during Daily 5, based on the skill(s) they needed to improve. I offered no rewards, just a chart, with no student name, and individual conferences to discuss their progress and goals.
Based on reading this chapter, I would like to provide my students with a list of the core standards that we are trying to achieve as a class (maybe just by unit or perhaps trimester), a pretest testing those skills and them some kind of progress chart that they could use to help them set their own goals for the trimester. Then have some sort of end of unit or trimester celebration. This might also help me design learning centers, practice homework, and guided skills group based on more on student skills then my gut feeling.
We too use PBIS in our school. The problem kids have is what do they do with the recognition cards they get from teachers? Many kids don't want them because they have no value to many kids beyond collecting them. I have turned my classroom into a "Reward Return" where kids can bring their earned reward cards and exchange them for supplies. Because I teach in a low economical area of the state there are many families that can not repurchase supplies as kids run out. I am helping kids "earn" their own materials back. I only wish more teachers in my school would follow suit but spending personal funds the can not get reimbursed is not something many coworkers look forward to doing.
I have the benefit of never having really grown up. I still like having fun and making things enjoyable especially when I have to do them. I do the things that I would have liked my teachers to have done for me when I was a student.
Hi again,
Sam, I meant to say this in the last post. I have a terrible time spelling myself. But I turn this into a teaching point with all my classes, every year.
I always let them know that I have difficulty spelling, but I have been told many times that I am a good writer. I want to let them know even though they may have a hard time spelling, their thoughts and ideas are the important part of their writing. Once their ideas are recorded then they need to be respectful of their audience and use different strategies to ensure that the piece is error free and that the reader won't be distracted from their message by errors or poor grammar or spelling. I tell them I circle words that I don't know and go back and check the spelling using a dictionary or ask someone how to spell it. I also have friends and my husband read my writing for suggestions and to check for spelling or grammar errors. I also use spell check, but emphasize that this is not fool-proof.
I would agree with you that it is def. possible for someone to try their hardest and still fail something.
In fact as a side note I LOVE sharing stories about Abe Lincoln and Michael Jordan and others and their failures and how they never gave up. It's a great message to send to our students. Yes, in life you will struggle and even fail, but you need to keep trying. Did you know Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team??? :D
A second side note I'd like to mention is this societal aversion to failure. I have had kids not want to play kickball because they didn't want to lose. Come on... kickball on a sunny day outside instead of being in the classroom? I want all children to experience failure and losing and to know the world is not going to end. It's the reality of life and we need to dust ourselves off and get back up on that horse. OK- I know this is a conversation for another time, but I truly believe we need to help our children learn from early on that failing does not mean YOU are a failure.
HA! I love what your composition prof. said. :D "Good spellers are not that best writers."
Hello Louise!
OH, I am a big fan of PBiS BUT I can not stand the token tickets/cards/buttons whatever you use. In Oregon it was such a stress to hand out X amount of the tickets and not really authentic.
In Vermont, we started PBiS and I was our building coordinator. It was very important to me and our team to create a system that was more of a group effort working together. Each class worked towards earning 100 recognitions and then brought them to the office. The class then earned a special something. Extra recess for example. Then the whole school earned a celebration when X amount of recognitions were collected. This helped our schools to have a buy in rather than only recognizing individual students.
I've heard about this book several times and think I'll check it out.
Yes, I think your ideas for charting and setting goals with your students are good ones.
Sam, I always say we need more fun in school, for both students and teachers. I am constantly thinking of my education and if what I'm asking students (or staff in trainings) to do is something I'd want to do or would be useful to them. :D
Week Four: Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
This was a really hard chapter for me to buy into. As a kindergarten teacher for the last five years I feel like the number one goal I have is to reinforce students each day, a hundred times a day on everything they do from sitting quietly and listening on the carpet to getting an assignment completed in class. I feel that every other word out of my mouth is some sort of reinforcement and the reinforcement is used to teach five year olds what kind of behavior and expectations I am looking for. I truly believe that through this positive reinforcement, kids learn to love school, love learning and love their teacher and therefore their first school experience becomes a positive one - my most important job!
Kindergarten students come in as virtual blank slates . . . they literally know nothing. Each and every thing I teach them is completely new. When students perform a behavior I have taught, they get a verbal compliment and puggy gets a bone (puggy is a stuffed animal pug that sits in the front of the room next to an empty bowl). When the class as a whole is doing what the directions are, puggy gets bones. When the class is not following the directions, puggy loses bones. When puggy's bowl is full we get some sort of “celebration”, maybe time with just our classroom on the big toy, getting to watch something special, extra choosing time, a holiday party . . . The class is reinforced as a team and they learn to help each other to achieve recognition and rewards. Behavior is modeled by the students and pointed out by the teacher. There was several segments of this chapter that made me feel like I should not be rewarding my students in such a manner “abstract symbolic recognition is more effective than tangible rewards”. I hate to argue this but if it is not tangible in kindergarten it doesn’t make a difference to them. I agreed with what was stated in what effective praise looks like but the chapter gave me a underlying tone that rewards decrease intrinsic motivation. While this may be true for older students I firmly believe that this is not true for primary students. I reward for our kindergarten take home reading program: read five books, get five stars on the classroom chart and a treat from the treat jar and all your classmates clap for you. YEAH!!!! You would think it was gold and again I would argue that this motivation not only motivates the individual students but works as a friendly competition and a way to cheer each other on as we learn to READ . . . motivation and reward at its finest. Table points for tables of students that are on task . . . the list goes on with what is done to reinforce effort and provide recognition in a kindergarten classroom.
Our school has been really involved with PBiS the past few years and we are constantly motivating students as a school for behaviors we have outlined and are emphasizing. Quiet hallway behavior earns Royal Rocket tickets which the whole school puts into a huge container in the front hallway to earn jeans day (we have a code of dress and jeans are not allowed). Expected and outlined cafeteria behavior earns Royal Rocket tickets and a dance party is earned for the whole school. Appropriate playground behavior: Royal Rockets are earned to fill the container for a movie and popcorn party and so on.
I feel like this is an area that our school does well and I do well and I feel like it is a crucial aspect of teaching small children. I had to read this chapter twice to really understand what it is driving home and I still don’t think I understand.
Hi Margaret,
This topic will likely have strong opinions connected with it 20 years from now. :) You are not alone in disagreeing with what you read based on your experiences.
Thank you for adding your perspective to the conversation.
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