Emotions: 2 or 3 Making steady progress
Journals: 8
What type of extrinsic motivation works best for students?
Wow where to begin...A lot of interesting things have been going on with my project since our last meeting.
All 3rd-5th graders had their 2nd Personal Best Day (9 minute run, curl ups, push ups) and I was really surprised by the data. My 5th grade self motivated class had only a handful of students who recorded on their exit slip that they wouldn't like to do another PBD. Everyone else put how excited they were about it. What was interesting to me, is since I know who filled out each paper, it was the students who didn't improve in anything that didn't like the PBD. If a student improved in at least one area, they wrote how much they liked it. While this surprised me a little bit, I was shocked with the results from my 4th grade challenge class. All but 7 students said they thought it was fun and would want to do it again. The kids who didn't like the PBD from this class were the ones who had interpersonal issues during PE that day.
The next week my self motivated 5th graders had earned their 2nd game of Star Wars. They are the first class to earn the game and were super excited about it! They didn't want PE to be over and all kids wanted to play again.
4th grade did the PECentral Challenge this week where they can earn pins based on how many challenges they complete. This class had several "pot stirrers" absent and they had a great day. The kids were very motivated to earn the pins! All but 1 student said they wanted to try this again.
The 2nd grade class I had chosen as my challenge class had been being really good for several weeks and I was sure that the exit slip and filling out how hard they were working was making the difference. The last two weeks however, they went back to being the way they were when I originally chose them. While I didn't like this as a teacher, it really helped my TIC project! We did parachute games one week (something younger kids love) and this class didn't get to play every game due to their personal choices. This carried over to this week. The kids who had wanted to play the games were very vocal to their classmates to make good choices. The reminders from classmates seemed to snap the kids out of the attitude problems they were having which was interesting because this class has a lot of cattiness between the girls.
1st grade is my self motivated class and this week they struggled. I think it is because so many kids were sick. They still worked hard, but they were not the same as "normal."
OK now that I have written a novel...
Help: I am going to be making posters for each grade level (3rd-5th) about their Personal Best Day and I am wondering what to include on it as well as if I should make additional posters for my two data collection classes.
Here are my ideas for my poster so far:
Include how many students improved in one task, two, or all three
Include how many students met their goal in one task, two, or all three
Divide this out by class?
Anything else you can think of? Also let me know your thoughts about my data so far!
Thanks!
Kara
Kara,
ReplyDeleteWow, sounds like you have great things happening. I am really excited to hear that the students are doing better and really enjoying and appreciating PE. I love how the students' personal choices dictate what will happen in PE.
As far as your poster, I think it is a fantastic idea. I like the ideas of graphing how the kids did. I would separate it into classes. This way the students own the data. This may also motivate those students who didn't improve. If they see all the kids that did, hopefully they will start to believe they can too. Maybe you could get the teachers involved too. If you are doing another PBD maybe students can graph their own success. I don't know how or if this would work, just an idea.
Hope this helps. I am glad things are going well.
Kara,
ReplyDeleteI'm with Kenna-glad things are going so well, and that the effects of the kids' choices are becoming apparent to them.
What is the purpose of the poster? I'm not quite clear. If it could incorporate graphing lessons, all the class teachers would be thrilled. :) I do think doing it by class would be good. They could even make a "living graph" by having each of them represent a student (not necessarily themselves) and line up on a line. Then let them hop out of line to see how it looks.
The poster is to give them a visual representation of how they are improving. While they see it on their paper, I think it will be more obvious when they see it in graph form. I am hoping this will motivate more students to realize they CAN improve in the different tasks.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you are having great success! I like the graph idea. Could you first focus on one skill or area. Then after the next Personal Best day you could then have 2 graphs, etc.?
ReplyDeleteKara,
ReplyDeleteAs we learned in TIC, last session, I love the power of graphing data. I do wonder if it will motivate the ones who didn't, though. Or if they will just look at the graph and see "Oh, so many kids improved, and I'm one of the 7 who didn't. I suck."
I wonder if what would help those unmotivated ones would be some sort of graph showing how little it takes to improve, to help them see how close they actually are to being on the growth side.
Aaron that is a great idea! I could add in something about how close they were to their goal...or what it would look like if they hadn't switched from doing push ups on their knees to regular...any other ideas on this?
ReplyDeleteMichelle,
ReplyDeleteI could look at which area the most kids improved in and use that for my first one...There are only 3 tests and there are 3 more PBD so it would be pretty easy to do.
Kara,
ReplyDeleteMaybe use the area for your graph in which they were closest to achievement? And then maybe give those kids a mini-PBD day in between to see if they improve, or mini-workouts in class to help them improve. So they have some scaffolding on how to acheive more. Or maybe all of your kids break into groups by which one they achieved least in, and practice that for the first three minutes of each class, and then they can see how they affects their achievement.
Awesome comment Aaron - differentiated instruction!!!
ReplyDelete