Group items tagged

The most motivating factors are getting genuinely better at something, and getting recognised by those around us. Mastery and relationships motivate most.

we’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into mastery

Tangible rewards substantially undermine intrinsic motivation,

We are deeply and fundamentally attracted, in fact, to games: those places where efforts and excellence are rewarded, where the challenges and demands are severe, and where success often resembles nothing so much as a distilled version of the worldly virtues of dedicated learning and rigorously co-ordinated effort.

Afterward, one group was told, “You must be smart.

The other group was told

“You must have worked hard.”

dialogue is far removed, however, from the intensely heated conflict that exists at the smaller, more personal scale. On the one hand you have the millions of Americans who play games, whether on a console or a smartphone, and have been raised in a time where such things are ubiquitous. On the other is a (generally older) population whose exposure to games has been limited to the most visible examples of the medium, including billion-dollar series like Call of Duty and notorious time sinks like FarmVille that paint a limited portrait of gaming's full range.

"You’re not wrong to be concerned about the time your son spends playing video games," wrote Moody. "But let me ask you this: If there were no video games here, wouldn’t there be some other stimulus that could threaten his time by diverting his attention away from, wait, what did you call it? 'What I feel are much more worthwhile and ultimately rewarding pursuits.’ 

fears about video games are understandable. Like anything else, they can become the focal point of unhealthy behavior all too easily, a point Moody is quick to emphasize. As Moody says again and again, though, that’s hardly the fault of video games.

We’ve created Pine Tree Poetry to interlace students, their peers, parents, teachers and school librarians in a quest for poetry writing excellence. Rarely do students earn kudos or trophies for their writing, but at Pine Tree Poetry, we are dedicated to rewarding the fine writing achievements of students who are 5 – 18. Pine Tree Poetry contributes four important elements to the realm of student poetry. We: 1. Receive, read, evaluate, pick (a few) and publish the best poems written by poets ages 5 – 18. 2. Support schools by awarding thousands of dollars each year for much-needed library materials. Some awards are based upon the number of poems submitted while others are selected at random from among all particiipants. 3. Give a free copy of The Pine Tree Poetry Collection to the library of every school that has one or more students published. 4. Highlight the life lesson that many will write and the best will be chosen. We are not a vanity publishing company! We’re out to change the world one poem at a time and we invite students, parents, librarians, teachers and those who love the written word to join us.

We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.

had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn't understand that. Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper.

“We’ve added a critical new chapter to the story about music and education,” says Kraus. “Due to the overlap between neural circuits dedicated to speech and music, and the distributed network of cognitive, sensorimotor, and reward circuits engaged during music making, it would appear that music training is a particularly potent driver of experience-dependent plasticity in the brain that influences processing of sound related to academics.”