The Stick and the Carrot

Well I knew this question was out there and up until today I have largely ignored it. As I talked to a colleague, the conversation drifted to standards based grading and they asked how I intended to motivate students without assigning a grade value to their daily work. Well... it's a multi-pronged strategy.

Shhhhh, I don't intend to broadcast the fact that the work doesn't "count". The work does count. I need to get the students to understand where the value is to be found. The work will still be used to assess the students progress toward the target learning goal. If I handle the feedback right, students will use it to track their own progress, set goals for themselves, predict their performance on formal assessments, and design their own remediation in hopes to generate ownership over their work.

This replaces the grade value with value over the investment that they made in their own education. Lofty goals you say? I agree, it will be a challenge but I feel that I have a lot of support from systems already in place school wide and in our small learning community. Also, my administration is supportive and another colleague of mine is also utilizing this grading system. I have access to great technology, the Smart Response clicker sets we use are amazing for providing the quick, effortless, informative feedback needed to pull this off.

I certainly don't have all the answers and I have not put any of this into practice. I would like to have some concrete effective strategies for dealing with the apathy that we already struggle with. It's not like grades have been an effective motivation tool for many of my students in the past.

One thought that I had recently, I think it originated with a tweet, was to bring professionals in the science field in to teach, advise, mentor or just talk about the relevance of education. I would like to have professional motivational speakers come and speak to our students on a regular interval. I think that these are some small steps that we can take to beat back the apathy. But really, in order to defeat it, a larger investment needs to be made at the community level.

Students arrive soon, very soon. I will have some actual feedback instead of the eduspeak chatter, (necessary eduspeak chatter), I have provided so far. It's time to put my money where my mouth is.