Effort+&+Recognition

Read and Reflect
How do you currently apply this strategy with or without technology?

The article on Effort and Recognition related well to three other recent readings. The first is to Daniel Pink's book //Drive.// His premise is that motivation does not come from the prizes and external rewards, but from the intrinsic motivation to grow and develop. Another text is //Mindset// by Carl Dweck. She refers to a fixed or growth mindest. Smart is something you get not something you are. We oftern praise student's intellegence and ability, not their improvement through effort. The last is Ken O'connor's book //A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades//. While grades motivate some students, they do the opposite for many. Grades also can reflect a false sense of what student's actually know.

I also connected this to a recent discussion that began in my district concerning Accelerated Reader (AR). Does it truly motivate students to enjoy reading and become better readers? Too often, I've seen students selecting books based on the number of points they will receive or even passing up a book because it's not an AR book. Research on effort and recognition would be beneficial to share in this discussion.

I often read stories or referred to effort behind success when I taught special education students. They needed to know about successful people who had struggled along the way. This lesson is beneficial for all students. Too often, we only see the end result - not the hours of practice and failures it took to reach success. I also think about the type of thinking needed today. It is no longer the simple correct answer, but rather innovation, problem solving, and creativity.

Apply and Reflect
Provide evidence of the tool that you learned.

Big Huge Labs was new to me. It contains a wealth of projects and applications for both student and teacher use. I did find the site rather slow and frustrating at times. I changed my mind about continuing to edit the poster. I wonder how it would be used in a lab situation. Despite this, I definitely would use again and recommend teachers using with students. I plan to share the trading cards application as a strategy for summarization, a goal in my district. It also allows opportunities for the creative side in students (and educators). It is good to have a picture in mind, if not, you can spend a lot of time searching. It would be great to use actual pictures of students /staff in your class or building.

After exploring many options, I decided to go with a poster related to a grounding activity that I did with the district school improvement team. Sometimes, we get bogged down in the challenge and time required for second order changes. I wanted to emphasis the importance of recognizing the small steps needed in reaching a vision. So, I came up with the saying on the poster. We also have charts identifying mole hills and mountains that we accomplish. And to make it a bit fun, we use M M's as recognition when someone has moved a mole hill or a mountain. (Acutally it was a backwards design to come up with something that connected with M M's.) I plan to share this poster with the team. Also, little posters could be made to hand out with the M M's.