McMillan’s Blog – Every Student, Every Day

At Thimmig, we want students to be engaged 100% of the time.  Some people might read 100% of the time and say that is not possible, but I do believe that is the goal for every educator to make every minute with students meaningful.   I strongly feel that for learning to occur, a student must be engaged.  How do you do it? You need to make sure we transform students into learners using the seven strategies from Stiggins, but you also need to create interesting, meaningful and challenging lessons.  Without doing that, students will never become learners.   The lesson needs to be at their level, they need to see the purpose and it needs to catch their interest.  Teachers at Thimmig need be able to recognize the levels of student engagement.

Levels of Student Engagement from

Working on the Work

What are the various levels of student engagement?

These are the terms that researchers use.

Engagement - students find the work interesting, meaningful, and challenging.

Strategic Compliance - students pay attention but are not committed; the learning does not have personal significance.

Ritual Compliance - there is no commitment to the work and students pay minimal attention.

Retreatism - the student does not pay attention or participate but does not engage in disruptive behavior.

Rebellion - the student’s attention is diverted and he or she may be actively disruptive.

One of the nine categories of Instructional Strategies proven to increase student achievement?

29 percentile gain

Classroom Instruction That Works

Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, Jane Pollock

At Thimmig, we are working hard to make sure that students realize that if you apply the effort, you will be successful. Our school improvement goals are focused on growth. Achievement is important, but it is more important to celebrate the growth of all students. 

Effort

Believing in effort can serve as a powerful motivational tool that students can apply to any situation

People generally attribute success at any given task to one of four causes:

• Effort
• Other people
• Ability
• Luck

Three of these four beliefs ultimately inhibit achievement – (Covington 1983,1985)

Not all students realize the importance of believing in effort. Implication is that teachers should explain and exemplify the “effort belief” to students. (Urdan,Midgley, & Anderman 1998) Students can learn to change their beliefs to an emphasis on effort. Students who were taught about the relationship between effort and achievement increased their achievement more than students who were taught techniques for time management and comprehension of new material. (Van Overwalle & De Metsenaere, 1990)

Recommendations for Classroom Practice

• Students need to be taught that effort can improve achievement.
• Share personal examples of times you have succeeded because you did not give up
• Share examples of well-known athletes and others who succeeded mainly because they did not give up
• Have students share personal examples of times they succeeded because they did not give up.
• Have students chart effort and achievement – Charting their effort and achievement will reveal patterns and help students see the connection between the two.

Providing Recognition

Providing recognition for attainment of specific goals not only enhances achievement, but it stimulates motivation

Research

• Rewards do not necessarily have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation.
• Reward is most effective when it is contingent on the attainment of some standard of performance.
• Abstract symbolic recognition is more effective than tangible rewards.

Recommendations for Classroom Practice

• Establish a rationale for reinforcing effort and providing recognition
• Follow guidelines for effective and ineffective praise.

Link effort to achievement

At Thimmig, we want to transform our students into learners.  Classroom Assessment for Student Learning is a focus for our teachers.  We are currently focusing on strategies 1 and 2.  One of the main ideas of 1 and 2 is that it is important for students, in addition to the teacher, to know where they are going.  This provides ownership to the students.  Ask any student what they are learning and why and they should be able to tell you.  They should also be able to explain what proficiency looks like as well.  This takes time, but the staff at Thimmig is dedicated to transforming all students into learners.

Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning

(Stiggins, R. J., Arter, J., Chappuis, J., & Chappuis, S. (2004). Classroom assessment for student learning: Doing it right–using it well.)

Where am I going?

Strategy 1: Provide a Clear and Understandable Vision of the Learning Target

Share with your students the learning target(s), objective(s), or goal(s) in advance of teaching the lesson, giving the assignment, or doing the activity. Use language students understand, and check to make sure they understand. Ask, “Why are we doing this activity? What are we learning?” Convert learning targets into student-friendly language by defining key words in terms students understand. Ask students what they think constitutes quality in a product or performance learning target, then show how their thoughts match with the scoring guide or rubric you will use to define quality. Provide students with scoring guides written so they can understand them. Develop scoring criteria with them.

Strategy 2: Use Examples and Models of Strong and Weak Work

Use models of strong and weak work—anonymous student work, work from life beyond school, and your own work. Begin with work that demonstrates strengths and weaknesses related to problems students commonly experience, especially the problems that most concern you personally. Ask students to analyze these samples for quality and then to justify their judgments. Use only anonymous work. If you have been engaging students in analyzing examples or models, they will be developing a vision of what the product or performance looks like when it’s done well.

Model creating a product or performance yourself. Show students the true beginnings, the problems you run into, and how you think through decisions along the way. Don’t hide the development and revision part, or students will think they are doing it wrong when it is messy for them at the beginning, and they won’t know how to work through the rough patches.

Why did we make the switch this year? (4th and 6th still give Honor Roll certificates.)

The article by Dweck (See below) explains how important it is to have a growth mind set.  The growth mind set will allow us to celebrate all students who are achieving a year’s growth,  not just students who are high achievers. We want to focus on rewarding student’s effort, a growth mind set, rather than student’s achievement, a fixed mindset.  This challenges our on or above grade level students to continue their learning journey and students who struggle, the recognition that they ARE learning!  Our school improvement goal is for all students to make a year’s growth.  Is this challenging?  Absolutely!  Is it a goal that we can meet and should meet?  You bet!

Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

Carol S. Dweck (2006).  Mindset: The new psychology of success.  New York: Random House.

http://isobelstevenson.edublogs.org/

Dweck has a very simple premise: people can be divided into two groups depending on what she calls their mindset.  People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence, or any other trait, is pre-determined and not malleable.  People with a growth mindset believe that intelligence is “cultivated through effort”–in other words, you become more intelligent as you learn.
This basic distinction has a cascade of consequences, which Dweck has demonstrated with her research.  From the answers to a set of questions designed to determine whether a person has a fixed or growth mindset, she (and therefore we) can predict how that person will behave in many different situations.
For example, when given a test when she doesn’t know all the answers, the growth mindset person pays more attention to the corrections than the fixed mindset person does.  When given feedback, the fixed mindset person reacts defensively, and is hurt and humiliated.
The growth mindset person has a different orientation to risk–he sees any given situation as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to become better at something, a chance to be stronger.  A fixed mindset person doesn’t see the chance to grow, because she believes her ability to be a fixed amount.  Therefore she has to protect herself from failure, which would be a negative reflection on her intelligence.
The fixed mindset person is proudest of achievement, whereas the growth mindset person is proudest of effort.  Effort, in particular, is tough for the fixed mindset person–”I could have done it if I’d tried” is a very convenient excuse.  A fixed mindset does not value effort–”if I am smart, I don’t need to try.”  Effort, therefore, is only for people who need to try hard because they won’t succeed any other way.
The fixed mindset person has to explain failure so that he does not have to conclude that he is not smart.  His way of coping with not coping is to blame others, or the particular circumstances in which the failure occurred.  In the most amusing part of the book, Dweck chronicles all the excuses John McEnroe gives in his autobiography for all the matches he did not win–the common thread is that it was never his fault.  The growth mindset person doesn’t have these issues–quite the opposite, she is likely to see her failures as the learning experiences on which her successes are built.
Dweck talks a lot about gifted children, and how the fixed mindset can be such a handicap to them–they have been told they are smart, they believe intelligence to be innate and immutable, and therefore they do not cope when being smart is not, in and of itself, enough.  This leads to a discussion of praise which is a major theme in another of her books–we do harm when we praise for being smart instead of for trying hard, and we should explicitly teach that we become smart through work and being able to respond to feedback.

Parents are the first and most important teacher in a child’s life.

Do parents know what their child is learning each day? Do parents know what a grade means in class and what their child’s grade is currently? Do parents know what their child needs to do at home to make at least a year’s growth? If the answer was no to any of the questions, what can you do to make sure they can answer yes to each one? Together we can make sure that every student, every day is successful!