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Category Archives: motivating students
Helping students find their way to success
Some students do not have the work habits that make it easy for them to be successful in school. In class, I talk a lot about the characteristics of successful people and the role that perseverance plays in their success. Unfortunately, perseverance is not the only thing some of my students lack. They lack another important characteristic that successful people share. They lack the emotional support they need to help them be successful. Some students don’t have anyone there for them when the going get tough or even to help them celebrate life’s successes great or small. That’s where I come in. I try to give them the emotional support they need to help them find their way to success at school.
Sometimes students will work on projects and assignments but for any number of reasons don’t submit the assignments for evaluation. They seem to run out of energy, interest or whatever and just give up. I’m always encouraging them to submit things so I can give them the marks they’ve earned. I’m constantly telling them if they don’t hand things in it makes it very difficult for me to find marks to give them. I don’t find it useful to tell them that if they don’t hand work in they’ll fail. They’re used to hearing that. They’re used to failing. I take a different approach. I tell them they have to help me find the marks they need to pass them. Yes, of course it would be nice if my students just wanted to learn for the sake of learning, but that’s not the way it is for some students. I have to start where from where my students are.
I used to get very frustrated when I would see my students working on assignments in class and then not submit them for evaluation. In fact, it used to drive me crazy. I’ve learned to observe and record their progress during the time they work in class so that if for some reason they don’t submit an assignment, I still have some sense of their progress and can evaluate what I have seen. Believe me, there are many reasons why assignments don’t get handed in. Not completing them is only one reason.
It’s important to know that some of my more reluctant/struggling students are not interested in getting high marks. They feel they’ve aced the course when they get 51%. I know because they’ve told me this. Of course I encourage my students to do more than the bare minimum and will often tell them they’ve made a good start. Then, I encourage them to improve their work by suggesting if they just changed this a bit here or expanded on that a bit there I could find more marks to give them. Believe me. It works.
I’ll admit this whole idea of finding marks to give students for assignments they have or have not submitted can seem a bit strange. But, and this is a big but, I teach students who are at-risk academically, and I need to think creatively to find ways to motivate them and give them the support they need so they can find their way to success. That’s what makes teaching so rewarding.
Posted in "At-risk" students, assignments, Behaviour Management, creative ways of finding marks to give students, emotional support for students, Engaging Assignments and Activities for Students, Evaluation, giving students emotional support, helping students succeed, lack, marks, motivating students, my , perseverance, perseverance in school, positive climate, Special Education, submit, success, supporting at-risk students, The way I see it, underachieving students, work habits
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The problem of using common sense to regulate teacher conduct
I was reminded again about the problem with common sense when I read that the Alabama House of Representatives had blocked a teacher code of conduct from becoming law. Opponents argued that the standards were too vague. Supporters argued that they weren’t because they were based on “common sense and something all parents, teachers and legislators should support”.
Common sense is not common. It is very subjective. Let me explain. I teach in a high school with a student population of about 1 700 students. You could easily hear over 60 languages being spoken as you negotiate your way through the halls from one class to the next. Many new immigrants settle in the area served by our school. These immigrants bring with them “the common sense” that served them in their homeland. It may or may not be the “common sense” of the community they live in now.
Some students in my class have told me that teachers ought to be able to beat their students when students misbehave. That made common sense to them. That’s what teachers did “back home” and it worked, they tell me. Kids behaved themselves because they could be beaten if they didn’t. A few parents have even given teachers permission to beat their kids if they misbehave. Thank fully, the common sense that dictates corporal punishment for student misbehaviour is not common to everyone.
I don’t mean to imply here that it is only the case that some immigrants have different “common senses”. That’s certainly not the case at all. I just wanted to make the point that common sense can vary from culture to culture, from community to community and even within a community. There’s nothing common about common sense.
In Ontario, the Education Act, law, sets out the code of conduct for teachers regarding students and for students regarding teachers. The code of conduct is not left to common sense. It doesn’t seem to me there are any major problems with the code. If anyone knows of any, I would appreciate hearing about them. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail here except to say that teachers who break the code of conduct suffer consequences for their actions. Sometimes that means they have their teaching certificate withdrawn; sometimes they are required to get appropriate counseling or training.
I think it is useful to have a code of conduct enacted in law because it forces everyone to be on the same page about what is expected from teachers and from students. It doesn’t matter what a person’s “common sense” tells them. It’s what the code of conduct as law says that counts. I think this gets around the problem of different “common senses”. What do you think?
Photo thanks to didbyatgraham
Posted in Behaviour Management, common sense, discipline in classroom, motivating students, teacher behaviour, The way I see it
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Whose fault is it when students fail to achieve?
Whose faul
t is it when students fail to achieve? Some like the eight out of nine school trustees in the Houston Independent School District think that it’s the teachers’ fault when students fail to achieve and plan to fire them. Others think that it’s the parents’ fault when children fail in school because of poor parenting skills or because parents don’t spend enough time with their kids. Still others blame the media or the students’ peer group or the kids themselves for their failure.
I’ve been teaching academically at-risk teens for well over 25 years now, and I can tell you the reason why kids fail at school is a complex one. Kids fail to achieve in school for any number of reasons. It’s easy to point the finger of blame at teachers, at the administration, at the school system, at parents or at kids themselves when they fail to achieve to their potential.
The school trustees who think it’s the teachers’ fault when students fail to achieve are misguided. Yes, perhaps some teachers need support to help improve their teaching practice. I’m not denying that. But some parents also need support to improve their parenting skills, and some students also need support to help them take ownership for their own learning. The education system itself needs some major changes so that schools offer the programs that better meet the needs of all students. Kids also need to realize they have to take responsibility for their learning.
We probably all have heard the statement ” it takes the entire village to raise a child”. Well, it takes the entire village to educate one as well. We need to stop blaming. Blaming doesn’t help. Instead we need to ask what can the villagers do, what support can they give to all the stakeholders so that kids can succeed at school. After all, the village will benefit if it’s kids live up to their potential. The way I see it is that the village supports kids when they are young, and then the kids support the village when they grown up. It’s a win-win situation.
Posted in "At-risk" students, helping at-risk kids, motivating students, reasons for students failing, student success, The way I see it
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It takes a lot of teacher effort to make math easy.
Over the years, I’ve found that it takes a lot of effort to make math easy for my students. End of semester exams are fast approaching, and I am doing my utmost to prepare my students. I’ve created some new review material for my grade nine math students that I hoped would help them better understand the unit on slope, intercepts, lines and the equations y = mx and y = mx + b. That’s pretty abstract stuff for some of my grade nine students, especially the ones who didn’t actually pass math in grade eight but because of social promotion are now in my grade nine math class.
It’s been a challenge all semester long to keep these kids engaged enough so they can learn. I feel as if I’ve been dancing as fast as I can. I have found using the LCD projector or even the overhead projector to teach the lesson and take up work useful. I don’t know exactly why kids pay more attention when my lesson is projected on a screen than written on the blackboard. Maybe the screen reminds them of of a video monitor? I don’t know why, but since it works I keep doing it. Has anyone else found this to be the case?
The last couple of days have been pretty hectic. I’ve been pushing my students to do their best, and to be honest, it’s exhausting. At the end of class today, I was beginning to think that maybe I was pushing myself too much, too. I had spent most of Saturday creating review material and most of Sunday refining the exam so that my students could demonstrate their learning to the best of their ability.
My husband, not a teacher, was watching all this and told me that I was handing my students their lessons on a silver platter. He felt I was doing too much. I told him that I wasn’t handing them their lessons on a silver platter. I was differentiating instruction. I thought that was funny. He didn’t. I guess it’s an inside joke.
Today at the end of class as I was gathering up my materials, just dying for a cup tea to sooth my throat, one of my students came over and told me something that had made all that work on the weekend and all those other weekends this semester worthwhile. He told me that he liked the way I taught because I made math easy. He had never found math easy before. If he didn’t get it, I would explain it in another way. I need to remember those words when I get discouraged or feel overwhelmed. Yes, making math easy takes a lot of work, but it is so rewarding. Now, for that cup of tea.