Reinforcing+Effort

Reinforcing Effort = = =Read and Reflect=

When I reinforce effort in my classroom, I generally note student effort verbally. After reading about providing recognition, I am trying to make my these verbal statements more specific to the student rather than a simple good job or way to go. In the past, I would provide student with small treats or prizes, but I found that rather than motivate students these trinkets made them greedy and caused them to give effort to receive the gifts rather than experience success. Students began saying, “If I do this will I get a _?” and I could see that the prizes were no longer effective.

My purpose when reinforcing effort in the classroom is to communicate which students in the classroom are on task or following directions. It seems that with younger students this grabs the attention of those off task students and puts them on the right track. I also reinforce effort when I see students who are generally off task performing exceptionally well. I am hoping that this motivates them to continue on the right path.

I am not sure what makes reinforcing effort effective or ineffective. Reinforcing effort is not something that I consciously do. When reflecting on my teaching practice, I can see that I do reinforce effort occasionally, but that is simply good practices I have picked up from fellow teachers. It would be interesting to see what improvements there would be to our classroom environment if I began to purposefully reinforce effort.

Questions I have about reinforcing effort are

Is there a tried and true method for reinforcing effort? What are some ways that I can reinforce effort as well as encourage students to do well for their own happiness?

When I was answering the initial reflection questions, I was not thinking about the correlation between effort and achievement. I really see now how superficial my current practices are! Obviously since I was not making that connection, I am not helping my students to make that connection either. I really liked reading the rubrics about effort as well as the tracking effort vs achievement chart and bar graph. Those are concrete ways to drive the concept home.

It would be interesting to have students complete the effort rubric when they turn in a project or complete a speech. Then after it is graded, they can compare their effort to their score. I can think of a few students now where after looking at their rubric and then their grade a connection may be made.

I could also see myself having the students complete the effort table/graph for a new challenging math unit. Sometimes when the going gets tough students (and adults for that matter) quit. Keeping track of their assignments and effort might motivate students to keep working!

=Apply and Reflect=

When looking at the Academy of Achievement, I chose Jeffery Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. In social studies, we are learning about the economy and students are creating their own businesses. His cover page had a good quote about giving effort. I used Big Huge Labs to make him into a trading card. This brought me to my new idea.



I started getting really stuck on the idea of trading cards when it comes to reinforcing effort. As we have seen time and time again, students do not just KNOW how to do this or that our desired actions need to be MODELED for them. And there are some students who model giving a great effort on a daily basis. Wouldn’t it be interesting to identify what good effort looks like and who practices those skills and then creating trading cards of those students? You don’t have to be a celebrity or sports star to be placed on a trading card. Maybe you could simply be a kid who does makes good choices. Then we could use those trading cards as a way to recognize effort. It would help to really reinforce effort in students who give effort on a daily basis as well as motivate other students to give a greater effort.