"You Matter"

"You Matter." These two simple words can make such a tremendous difference to someone. In her TED talk, posted below, Angela Maiers points out just how easy it can be to make someone feel important. We all share a deep need to feel significant, to be important, yet it is so rare for someone to tell another person that they matter. If everyone has this same desire, why is it so hard for us to communicate it with one another? Angela carries around a notebook and writes down things that she notices - what she sees people (adults and children) doing, and then she goes up to them and tells them "hey, you matter, and here's why - I noticed that you ..." It could be "helped a friend in math class," for example. Angela suggests that we should all do this. Tell someone they are a genius and it will change their mood and how they feel about themselves. She argues that it's not just a statement, it's a call to action - if the person believes what you said, then they will act like it.
In my classroom last week, a parent came in and did a team building activity with our class. The students counted off into 5 groups. One group stood at a time, while the rest of the class sat at their desks with their heads down (no peeking!). The parent read statements like "tap someone's shoulder who you look up to" and the group that was standing would go around the room tapping their classmates shoulders. The taps were anonymous and they could tap as many people as they wanted to.  The groups rotated, so everyone had a chance to tap shoulders. After each round, students would lift their heads up and they were beaming. They were counting the taps they got. At the end of the activity, students shared some of the things that surprised them. They said things like, "I got tapped for being creative, I never thought I was creative!" and "Someone tapped me for having a big heart, and that made me feel really happy."
Everyone left the class that day feeling great. Especially my students who don't hear positive things about themselves nearly enough. Those students who are always getting in trouble and being told how "bad" they are - they need to hear that they're important, that they matter and that they bring value to the world. I was especially carefully to give those students taps, and not only did they feel good to get that recognition, but it felt really good to give it. I think that we often don't tell people how much they matter because it feels silly or stupid to say, but when you do say it, it feels so good! We all need to hear that we matter, so start telling people that they do!

    

The Puzzle of Motivation: A Reflection on Dan Pink's TED Talk

I recently watched Dan Pink's TED Talk: The Puzzle of Motivation. The title of this talk caught my interest because I've been thinking a lot about the topic of motivation in my classroom lately. I don't know if it's the time of year - it's Spring and students have been completing state testing, or if my cooperating teacher and I have just become too lax with the rules, but the behavior in the classroom has become a little wild. I saw this TED talk posted and wanted to see what Pink had to say about motivation.
In our classroom, we use a token economy to encourage positive behavior - students earn fake money for doing homework, being respectful, helping others, etc. and discourage negative behavior - students lose money when they don't do homework, don't follow the rules, are rude, and so on. Everything I've learned in my graduate classes and read in books goes against using these behavior systems, and yet every classroom I've ever been in has one. It seems to me that these reward systems promote short-term behavior solutions, but fail to truly teach or motivate students. In order to truly motivate students, we have to create intrinsic motivation. We have to help them develop a sense of social responsibility and create opportunities for emotional development.
In this talk, Pink identifies the same discrepancy between what science knows and how we behave in terms of motivating people. He talks about business, not classrooms, but the idea is the same. He provides evidence that providing people with an extrinsic reward actually produces inferior results when asked to complete a task that requires some critical thinking. People are less creative and less able to solve problems when they are working toward an extrinsic reward. People who are intrinsically motivated perform overwhelmingly higher on cognitive tasks than people who are extrinsically motivated.
Pink's case points toward eliminating extrinsic motivation in order to encourage more creative thinking and, ultimately, better work. This, however, is where the argument gets tricky. It's easy to see why intrinsic motivation creates more creative thinking, innovation, and problem solving when people are doing tasks that interest them and that they want to be doing. However, what happens if we take extrinsic rewards away from people who are doing jobs or tasks that they don't have any interest in and they don't want to be doing? One of his key points is that for intrinsic motivation to work, mastery of the task or job must be seen as possible. I think this is an interesting point because it also applies to students in a classroom. Many students lack intrinsic motivation because they don't see school as something that they can or want to "master." The difference between business and school is that in the classroom, it's the teacher's responsibility to create interest and a sense that mastery is possible for everyone. If we supported our students by creating interest in academic activities, helped them feel like they could master these activities, and put more focus into character development, we could eliminate these behavior systems and see what wonderful things their intrinsic motivation brings them to do.

 

Collaborating on Cultivation: Our Journey Through Discovering Our PLNs

Kitri and I collaborated on our experiences of cultivating our PLNs throughout this semester. We may have had a little too much fun creating this presentation, but we hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed creating it!