Rewards and Consequences

Rewards and consequences have their pros and cons. When I was in the classroom with my first and second graders I tried establishing a rewards system. I hated the inconvenience of having to pay attention to one more detail! One more thing to assess, document, or put money into. My brain just felt overwhelmed and I honestly wasn't very good at being consistent with a system. It just felt a bit artificial and I didn't really sell it well. I wondered if I was accomplishing the right thing with my students - of course I wanted immediate compliance, but were they learning to gain self-control and self-confidence or was I training them to always expect a reward? I guess I believed that external rewards hinder internal motivation and fostering internal motivation is what really creates enthusiasm for learning. Real learning that lasts, not just finishing homework or following directions during group work.

Now  I have my own kids, and I am reconsidering this issue with potty training. My husband and I have been a little frustrated that we've been working on potty-training our son for 2 years - yes, he is almost 4. I have gone through the whole gammit of thoughts and feelings like "Oh my gosh, I am such a bad parent -we haven't gotten a handle on this - something is wrong with him - we are spoiling him to let this go on so long…etc. etc." We have tried rewards like suckers and toys, but then he just asks for treats all day. God forbid he fail to get a treat, and the tantrums go on and on. He didn't seem to be making much progress. After a few weeks he just stopped caring about stickers and treats and was more interested in playing than stopping for potty breaks. Our pediatrician recommended we take a break from training and try again in a few weeks.

Next, we tried consequences - things like enforced potty breaks every half-hour, restricting favorite TV shows or activities that seemed to be distracting him from paying attention to the potty. This didn't work quite so well either because he would just get mad, resist our efforts to control him, and he actually started having more accidents! I couldn’t believe it. I gave up pressing the issue for a few weeks. He has to learn on his own, right? He has to be the one to decide that he is going to learn to monitor himself and DO IT!  Hence - internal motivation. We have always tried to give him a lot of verbal praise and affirmation for his efforts but in the end it comes down to the child. Some kids are much more independently willed than others. 

I did find some really great ideas for rewards at Child Development Institute. They are segmented by age level and focus on activities instead of material goods. Some of these make more sense to me as far as encouraging internal motivation, or at least your personal relationship with the child.

We are still intermittently using rewards, in combination with some consequences, but I have resigned myself to accept that he's on his own timeline with this. He wants to please us initially, and will hopefully feel good about his successes as he masters this new skill little by little!  I would love to hear any stories, wisdom, or redirection you have to offer! Feel free to leave a comment below! Are systems of rewards and consequences an effective way to get kids cooperating, or just an annoying inconvenience? 

How do they work in your classroom?

Conferences and Communication

Linking up with Love Always Diana Lynn for Math Madness Monday to share my favorite products.

On  March 16, 2015,  Tonya Hackett (TpT Seller) said:

"This resource has saved me! I love using the scales as a pre and a post check. They are kid friendly and a super tool to use during parent-teacher conferences. Thanks!!"

    

This bit of feedback from Tonya who is using the 4th Grade Common Core Math Assessment with Learning Goals and Scales, just reminded of those days when I sat through 30 plus conferences trying to explain in 10-15 minutes what we'd been working on for the last 5 months, and how their child was doing. Until I started using my Student Portfolios I didn't have a simple tool to help you communicate student progress with students, parents, administrators, and other teachers. 

Six years ago I was working at a Title I elementary school as a gifted resource teacher 75% of the time, and a reading interventionist 25% of the time. Talk about different spectrums! Luckily for me I worked with small groups, but since my students came from five different grade levels, and there were at least 3 teachers for every grade level, communication meant a lot of data and meetings! Ugh. I'm one of those weird teachers that found staff meetings to be fun because I got to talk to other teachers! But, data meetings - definitely not fun. Lots of numbers next to each name, but no examples of student work to help understand the fine details that could shed light on why each child was performing at their own level. It seems that with all of the inclusion, clustering, interventions, and enrichment programs being implemented, most classroom teachers have a whole team of co-workers to share students with. This means that communicating about student progress doesn't just happen a few times a year, but possibly every week! 

How nice would it be to have one organized place to display student performance data that explains itself! The Math Assessments with Learning Goals and Scales plus the free Student Portfolio Pages that go with each grade level, were created to be a visual tracking aid for documenting student progress in a really simple and consistent way. Click on the video link below to flip through the 4th Grade Portfolio Sample that Tonya used for parent-teacher conferences. Visit my FREEBIES page to try them out for yourself first. Grades 3-8 are available now. Check out the work samples below!

If you'd like to see a quick tutorial about how to put together the math assessment binder with the Student Portfolio pages, visit my YouTube playlist. 

Make Differentiation Easy with Learning Goals and Scales

Differentiation can seem overwhelming when you think about having to plan for 3 or 4 different levels all at the same time. I used to think about differentiation as far as high and low, but that was about it. Often I didn't end up modifying that much and I definitely didn't keep track of who started where or how far they'd progressed. Differentiation seemed like a luxury, that I didn't have time for. Until I learned to plan ahead in a more detailed way. Research shows that students who start with clear and specific learning goals can concretely SEE their progress, and will show more learning at testing time! This sounds great, but how do you organize multiple levels of performance?

Learning Goals and Scales can help!

When you create a scale, each learning goal is broken down into five levels, from 0-4. Proficiency in each math standard is represented by a score of 3. A score of 4 indicates an advanced knowledge of the skill, usually above grade level. The goals assigned to scores of 2 and 1, are either derived from sub-skills of the standard, or from the background knowledge of earlier grade levels. A score of 0 on the learning scale is useful to document for students who really need intervention to grow.

It takes some time and some thinking to put them together at first, but once it's done, it's done!! You can create scales for any subject area and make them a little more general ("I can perform any fraction operation.") or more specific ("I can add and subtract fractions with different denominators.") I found math to be the most difficult to differentiate for, so I spent the most time creating them. I also chose to focus on the standards as my main learning goal so that I wouldn't have to create a separate one for each discrete skill!
                                                                 Here's an example:

When I started posting Learning Goals with Scales for our math standards, it became more obvious to them where they were starting from and where we were headed.  

We started by informally deciding where they were based on their own opinion; "Show me on your fingers if you think you are a 1-2-3-4 right now." This worked fine to get them used to the idea, but wasn't helping me to assess or plan as much until I created some concrete Assessments with Learning Goals and Scales which presented specific tasks for each level 0-1-2-3-4, so the kids had a way to show what they knew already. I spent over 120 hours creating Math Assessments with Learning Goals and Scales for grades 4, 5, and 6, which I was currently teaching the most. I spent these hours reading, researching, and creating Learning Goals and scales for each standard that drew from previous grade levels and future grade level skills. Since I had taught so many different grade levels of math, I had a good idea where to look for standards that progressed.You can see examples of Mrs. L's Assessments by visiting my blog: http://mrslsleveledlearning.blogspot.com

I can't tell you how proud and happy they were to SEE their progress and feel like they had more than one chance to master it!!

Here's the 3 biggest benefits I found from using learning goals with scales...

1. Kids and parents will know exactly where learning and grades are coming from! After every single test, as if it were some unwritten ritual, students would brag, hide, and compare their test scores. Sound familiar? The most painful thing is to see those little jaws drop and faces turn red when they didn't score as well as they thought. "But, why did I get a 'C' Mrs. LiCausi?" (Even B's were a disappointment to those high-achievers!) I received a lot fewer questions from students, parents, and administrators when I could point out the progression of skills that a student had mastered or not, to get them to that place. When scales are aligned to specific grades, students can make a clear connection to their level of mastery and their final grade.
Visit my website to see an example of how to align traditional percentages to scales for grading!

2. Clear and specific guide for planning and assessing student progress. If you aren't lucky enough to work for a district that thoroughly plans your curriculum and mapping guides, then you know the painfully time-consuming process of sitting down with a year's worth of standards and trying to organize all those ideas, and break them down into manageable chunks for your students. The school year gets busy fast, and every time you switch topics and pre-assess your students, you're starting all over to figure out how to teach them where they're at, differentiating for different levels, and assessing again. If you've got learning goals and scales in order, the process goes so much faster because some of the thinking is done for you! You can move onto the fun part like planning and searching for awesome lessons!

3. Research supports it! Check out some of the following citations...

"The starting place for all effective instruction is designing and communicating clear learning goals."

"If teachers aren't sure of instructional goals, their instructional activities will not be focused, and unfocused instructional activities do not engender student learning.

 - Marzano [2009]

"Our collective goal is that the largest possible percentage of our students get there. To reach that goal we must define for ourselves and for them where "there" is. "

- Stiggins [1994]

"Learning targets convey to students the destination for the lesson - what to learn, how deeply to learn it, and exactly how to demonstrate their learning. In our estimation [Moss & Brookhart, 2009] and that of others [Seidle, Rimmele, & Prenzel, 2005; Stiggins, After, Chappuis & Chappuis, 2009], the intention of the lesson is one of the most important things students should learn. Without a precise description of where they are headed, too many students are "flying blind."

- Moss, Brookhart, Long [2011] Knowing Your Learning Target. Educational Leadership.  

68 [6]. pp.66-69.

Who has time to waste on ineffective approaches? 

How do Australian Math Standards compare with Common Core? Are we doing it right?

I'm linking up today with Middle School Math Moments for Workin' on it Wednesday!

Recently a teacher from Queensland, Australia found my Math Assessments with Learning Goals and Scales. They were written for Common Core, and didn't align with her Year 3 classroom, so she asked if I would make one for her. Wow, that would be interesting I thought. I would love the challenge, and since I've spent so much time preparing the Common Core Assessments, it shouldn't be too bad, right? NO, it wasn't bad, it was phenomenal!!!

Ever ask yourself, "What in the world did these kids learn last year?"

Well, if you've had to try and align math skills and concepts from different grade levels in Common Core, you might notice that it is terribly un-sequential. A few grade level groups such as 1-3, 4-5, and 6-8 have some skills that build on each other, but many many of the grade levels will introduce material that wasn't directly taught in years before, and aren't called for very long afterward - meaning that children do not have a consistent opportunity to build mastery in every area from one year to the next. Why was the Common Core written this way? Good Question!! It was explained to me like this; there is x amount of material to cover in x amount of years, so let's divide it up between the different grade levels and make sure they all have about the same amount to cover. Brilliant!

The Common Core committee that wrote the standards also produced a series of documents called the "Progressions Documents for the Common Core Standards"which was essential to me in writing the scales for each standard. They explain that...

The Common Core State Standards in mathematics were built on progressions: narrative documents describing the progression of a topic across a number of grade levels, informed both by research on children's cognitive development and by the logical structure of mathematics. These documents were spliced together and then sliced into grade level standards. From that point on the work focused on refining and revising the grade level standards. The early drafts of the progressions documents no longer correspond to the current state of the standards. 
(See link for citation info).

I think they made an effort, and it seemed logical enough to me, although still very difficult to align different grade levels to show a sequence of skills. Here's a few examples from the 4th grade standards - measuring angles, that is introduced in 4th grade with no previous background knowledge, and then disappears from 5th grade standards just as quickly. In my work I always cite the standards from different grade levels when they apply. The only one I could link to these 4th grade standards was 3.MD.7; adding and subtracting areas. Which really only counts if students are conceptualizing angles as the space between lines, and not the lines themselves. 

Then I saw Australia's standards... here's something comparable. This is a poster from a Year 3 standard that shows an actual progression of skills from Year 3 through Year 4. You can see how each one gradually builds on the next. This is typical of the Australian standards. B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L!

I am currently working with the teacher who made the request to revise the assessment document  to fit their phrasing and methods. The complete assessment, posters, and portfolio pages will be published on teacherspayteachers.com by the end of this month! 

I realize that the Common Core Standards, like everything else in education, will change again. And when that happens, I will have a lot of revising to do! But, hopefully if enough of us have a say in it, we can arrive at a progression that works better for students and teachers. That would be nice. :)