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Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
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  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
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    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Roland Gesthuizen

The Risks of Rewards - 54 views

  • Control, whether by threats or bribes, amounts to doing things to children rather than working with them. This ultimately frays relationships
  • The alternative to bribes and threats is to work toward creating a caring community whose members solve problems collaboratively and decide together how they want their classroom to be
  • grades in particular have been found to have a detrimental effect on creative thinking, long-term retention, interest in learning, and preference for challenging tasks
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  • good values have to be grown from the inside out. Attempts to short-circuit this process by dangling rewards in front of children are at best ineffective, and at worst counterproductive
  • Children are likely to become enthusiastic, lifelong learners as a result of being provided with an engaging curriculum; a safe, caring community in which to discover and create; and a significant degree of choice about what (and how and why) they are learning
  • Unfortunately, carrots turn out to be no more effective than sticks at helping children to become caring, responsible people or lifelong, self-directed learners
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    "Many educators are acutely aware that punishment and threats are counterproductive. Making children suffer in order to alter their future behavior can often elicit temporary compliance, but this strategy is unlikely to help children become ethical, compassionate decision makers. Punishment, even if referred to euphemistically as "consequences," tends to generate anger, defiance, and a desire for revenge. Moreover, it models the use of power rather than reason and ruptures the important relationship between adult and child."
Peter Beens

Daniel Pink on Drive, Motivation, and Incentives | EconTalk | Library of Economics and ... - 44 views

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    Daniel Pink, author of Drive, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about drive, motivation, compensation, and incentives. Pink discusses the implications of using monetary rewards as compensation in business and in education. Much of the conversation focuses on the research underlying the book, Drive, research from behavioral psychology that challenges traditional claims by economists on the power of monetary and other types of incentive. The last part of the conversation turns toward education and the role of incentives in motivating or demotivating students.
Maggie Tsai

Online Teaching and Learning: Makin' Whuffie - 1 views

  • A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.
  • Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.
  • Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.
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  • Social capital is a natural and logical consequence/reward of a student's (or anyone's) online behavior and contributions, and as such, it is a powerful tool for educators to include in their online courses to ensure student engagement and retention.
    • Maggie Tsai
       
      Good points. On Group bookmarks we have votes now. Will be adding more meaningful (ie. taken anti-spam into consideration) contribution attributes to reward user participation!
  • A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.
  • If you want to truly learn something, there is nothing like teaching it, so allowing, in fact encouraging, students to help one another solve problems, to teach each other, increases learning for both the helper and the helped.
  • A group can gain social capital by being proud of what it creates and getting positive feedback from other groups. A chance for students, whether working as individuals or in collaborative groups, to give feedback to each other is a valuable tool for creating a greater sense of community and engagement toward common goals.
  • Bookmarking, Sharing, Highlighting, and Annotating Online Resources:Diigo is a great tool for Educators, because you can form a group, and share bookmarks, which each member can highlight and comment on. Diigo is a fantastic tool for sharing resources and collaborating. Now, they have come out with Diigo for Educators, to make it even better!
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    Thoughtful article on "social capital"
Marc Patton

The NEA Foundation // Grants to Educators - 0 views

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    At the NEA Foundation, we support new ideas and practices to strengthen teaching and learning. Our goal is to fund and share successful strategies to educate and prepare students for bright and rewarding futures.
Martin Burrett

Seizing SEND - 6 views

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    "SEND: Supporting and enhancing the learning of children with a special educational need, or living with a disability, can be one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching. Yet, with rules, guidance and legislation also impacting on provisions that need to be met, ensuring that all students receive a good educational experience can be challenging to schools, teachers and leaders."
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
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  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
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    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
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    Excellent summary!
Nigel Coutts

The rewards of highly collaborative teams - The Learner's Way - 2 views

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    Not that long ago I was a writer of interesting and engaging educational programmes. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. The programmes that I wrote and shared with a team of teachers were generally well accepted and the feedback offered was always politely positive. I enjoyed writing these programmes but in recent times I have enjoyed even more stepping away from this process and in doing so empowering the team of teachers that I learn with. The programmes that this team produces far exceed the quality I could ever have hoped to produce but more importantly the students are benefiting from their experience of highly engaged and thus engaging teachers.
Marc Patton

DimensionU | U GAME. U GAIN. - 57 views

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    A collection of maths games and activities to play online and download. The games can be set to a maths subject and age group. Play both single and multi-player games. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
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    At DimensionU, kids find video games that are fun, educational, and rewarding. Parents find an easy and proven way to motivate their children to learn.
Chris Sloan

Race to the Top Assessment Program - 34 views

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    The Race to the Top Assessment Program provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.
Chris Betcher

Please Stop Thinking About Tomorrow : Stager-to-Go - 53 views

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    I have a suggestion. Let's stop talking about the future and start doing something now! Generations of children have missed-out on rewarding educational experiences while we worry about how corporate meetings will be conducted in 2019. Sheesh!
Roland Gesthuizen

Dan Pink: How Teachers Can Sell Love of Learning to Students | MindShift - 108 views

  • educators are sellers of ideas
  • Games have the potential to make math more relevant or engaging, Pink said, but if they lead to standardized thinking about getting to the one right answer, that can be problematic
  • If the only aim of a game is for points and badges, the game has little benefit for the player. For a game to be compelling and a good source of learning, it should be capable of providing rapid, robust, regular, and meaningful feedback.
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  • Students who are driven by external rewards (grades, trophies), will be fare worse than those who are self-directed, motivated by freedom, challenge, and purpose
  • When students assessed themselves, they held themselves to a higher standard. This changed the way he looked at the kids.
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    "Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas. "
Jon Dorbolo

The World's Richest College Dropout Urges Colleges to Stop Dropouts - Jordan Weissmann ... - 22 views

  • Gates sees this problem largely as a matter of incentives. Publications such as U.S. News and World Report reward colleges for the resources they spend on students and their exclusivity, but not necessarily for their results. High SAT scores will move a colleges up in the rankings (and so, it should be noted, will having a high graduation rate). Making sure your alums have a well-paid job, or a job at all, will not. To begin fixing this problem, we need need flip U.S. News' logic, Gates said, and reward schools that "take people with the low SAT and actually educate them well."  
    • Jon Dorbolo
       
      Taking in less qualified students in order to bring them up to speed is part of the the Land Grant University mission. Sal Khan (Khan Academy) recently observed that for students who take longer to master fundamental math skills, once they do so they accelerate faster such that they catch up to those who are ahead. Ubiquitous learning is species survival.
Josephine Dorado

"9 Minutes" Mobile Game Evaluation Demonstrates Positive Change for Pregnant Women | Ga... - 19 views

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    Positive results of a recent evaluation of the mobile phone game, 9 Minutes, that was produced as part of the "Half the Sky Movement". The game was developed for feature phones commonly used in India and East Africa. 9 Minutes plays out the adventure of pregnancy and rewards pregnant women and their spouses for keeping both mother-to-be and the baby inside her healthy and happy.
Thieme Hennis

A taxonomy of motivation and game design | Instructional Design Fusions - 0 views

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    "The will to learn is an intrinsic motive, one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise. The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in the fact that what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning (Bruner, 1966, p. 127)."
Liane St. Laurent

Rewards of teaching young children to blog SmartBlogs - 53 views

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    Great example of blogging in a third grade classroom
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    Great example of blogging in a third grade classroom.
Roland Gesthuizen

How to Create Nonreaders - 58 views

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    "In fact, it's not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself.  If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things.  That's what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for.  But you can't make them do those things well ... The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do."
Florence Dujardin

Online Game Teaches Citation Skills - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 131 views

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    The game, BiblioBouts, turns collecting citations into a competitive event, pitting students against their classmates. Students are rewarded for their research skills and their ability to differentiate between good and bad material. To play, they find sources, which are judged by their peers for relevance and credibility, and then measure the worth of sources their classmates find. They gain more points the more sources they assess accurately and the better their own sources are judged.
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