A positive, safe, comfortable environment is crucial for students to feel confident in taking risks in their learning. Best example; strong readers in first grade are given task of collaboratively creating their own story book, then they present to the class. A couple days later, a struggling reader asks teacher, “May I write my own...
Category: motivation
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The fiction of most school mission statements
Over at the PsyBlog, they note that there are only two reasons why we do anything: Because we want to Because someone else wants us to The former is what we term intrinsic motivation. The latter is what we call extrinsic motivation. Summarizing the work of the famous motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan,...
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Take the state assessment seriously or …
Thoughts on the message below? Motivating or punitive? Celebratory or disenfranchising? Meaningful choice or duress? What do you think? As a celebration for students working hard on Iowa Assessments, we are taking all 6-8 graders who showed improvement or evidence of effort to Perfect Games. The schedule is listed below. All students will start their...
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The biggest indictment of our schools is not their failure to raise test scores
The latest results are available from the annual Gallup poll of middle and high school students. Over 920,000 students participated last fall. Here are a couple of key charts that I made from the data: [download a larger version of this image] [download a larger version of this image] The biggest indictment of...
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Every day, every year, we waste the potential of millions of students
Jimmy Casas said: a system which assured [students] of success only to find out [that] meant success for those who were willing to play the game of school and who were compliant. . . . students attended school in body but were absent in mind and in spirit. In other words, they had checked out...