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Dr. Fred Jones's
Tools for Teaching

Adding Motivation to Mastery


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Our focus in the past several segments has been on the prevention of classroom discipline problems. First, we looked at eliminating learned helplessness during Guided Practice by replacing the tutoring of helpless handraisers with efficient five-to ten-second prompts. Next, we looked at eliminating the need for most corrective feedback by creating mastery prior to Guided Practice -- through Say, See, Do Teaching with adequate Structured Practice. By setting ourselves free from servicing helpless handraisers during Guided Practice, we place ourselves in a position to reap dividends that were previously out of reach. The first such dividend is the purposeful management of motivation.

WHY SHOULD I?

How do you motivate a student who simply does not care? Gaining leverage over student motivation is one of the most vexing issues of classroom management that any teacher faces. The question underlying the topic of motivation in the student's mind is, "Why should I?" If you can answer that question successfully, you can get work from an otherwise unmotivated student. If you cannot come up with a good answer to the question, you get nothing.

Answers to the question, "Why should I?" have a collective and generic name: incentives. A successful teacher must be a skillful manager of classroom incentives. An incentive is a reinforcer; by definition, it generates work. Incentive is not to be confused with "reward." Depending on a given student's willingness to work for it, a reward might or might not function as a reinforcer in the classroom. During the past three decades, education has been guilty of the profligate use of rewards in the classroom -- to the point that they have gotten a bad name. But, you cannot turn your back on incentives. One way or another, you must deal with the question, "Why should I?"

INCENTIVES ARE EVERYWHERE

Read More!

Have you seen these Education World articles...

...About Dr. Fred Jones?
* The King of Classroom Management! An Education World e-Interview with Classroom Management Expert Fred Jones
* Preferred Activity Time (PAT) Is Preferred by Kids and Teachers!
* Tips from Fred Jones's Tools for Teaching

...By Dr. Jones? * Beyond Say, See, Do Teaching: Exploiting Structured Practice
* Teaching to the Physical Modality: Say, See, Do Teaching
* Weaning the Helpless Handraisers -- Part 2: Teaching to the Visual Modality
* Weaning the Helpless Handraisers -- Part 1: Reinforcing Helplessness
* Succeeding With Classroom Structure: Rules, Routines, and Standards
* More Time on Task, Less Goofing Off

In this segment, we continue our focus on the management of Guided Practice. How do you structure work during Guided Practice?

Almost any social interaction has incentive properties. If you simply make eye contact with the person speaking to you, you provide an incentive for that person to continue speaking. Whatever you do during Guided Practice will constitute an incentive system for building in your students work habits -- either good or bad.

If, for example, you have students work until the bell rings, you have created a dawdling incentive. Why should students knock themselves out doing the assignment? If no other goal than endless work is in sight, many students will slow down and expand the work to fill the time. The only students who will work hard are the ones with an internalized work ethic that is impervious to your classroom management practices.

If, on the other hand, you provide as a goal a reinforcing activity that students receive upon completion of the assignment -- but before the work is checked -- you have created a speed incentive. Many students will say to themselves, "the quicker I finish this stuff, the sooner I can have some fun." Once again, the only students who will work conscientiously are the ones with an internalized work ethic that is impervious to your classroom management practices.

If you want to train students to work hard while being conscientious, you must check the work as it is being done, so students only receive the incentive when they work to your standards. For that reason, the technology of incentive management for classroom assignments hinges upon contemporaneous work check.

FREE TO CHECK WORK DURING GUIDED PRACTICE

All the previous articles dealing with the weaning of helpless handraisers and the creation of mastery prior to Guided Practice laid the groundwork for the management of motivation. We might characterize those segments as, "Everything in the world you can possibly do to leave yourself unemployed during Guided Practice." Once you are unemployed during Guided Practice, then you can ask yourself, "What more important function am I now free to perform?" That function is checking work as it is being done.

Let's use math as a simple case for conceptualizing management practices. Let's imagine that, due to Say, See, Do Teaching and adequate Structured Practice, your students can do the problems in today's lesson "with one eye closed" before they transition to Guided Practice. If they need help during Guided Practice, they will get five seconds of your time as you point out a critical feature in your Visual Instructional Plan.

Now, imagine yourself working the crowd with an answer key in hand, checking work as it is being done. You are, in effect, moving paper grading forward in time from this evening to Guided Practice. Freeing up your evening is only one benefit, however; the greater benefit is your ability to employ a Criterion of Mastery.


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CRITERION OF MASTERY

A lesson is simply a learning experiment with teaching as the independent variable and learning as the dependent variable. Every learning experiment must have a Criterion of Mastery -- an operational definition of success at learning. When you reach the Criterion of Mastery, you can terminate the learning experiment.

A Criterion of Mastery is stated in terms of consecutive correct performances, it is not stated as a percentage. Keep in mind that an 80 percent success rate is, in fact, a 20 percent error rate -- a level of performance that is incompatible with any meaningful definition of excellence or mastery. A Criterion of Mastery should be a sensible and practical number of consecutive correct performances. Most criteria of mastery for classroom assignments fall between four and ten. The number of repetitions of a skill that are useful before you start "beating it to death" is a judgment call on your part.

USING A CRITERION OF MASTERY IN THE CLASSROOM

In the previous installment, I described Say, See, Do Teaching and Structured Practice as it occurred every day during my grade school years. Imagine, once again, a math lesson. My teacher would send the class to the board, where we would walk slowly through the first example -- one step at a time, with the teacher continuously checking our work. Then we would walk through three or four more examples in the same way, picking up the pace as we went. By the time we took our seats at the end of Structured Practice, correct performance was nearly second nature.

Now, listen to my teacher giving the transition to Guided Practice: "Class, would you please open your books to page 173, and look at the practice set at the top of the page. As you can see, we have done problems one through four at the board. Would you please write "4C" at the top of your papers as a reminder that we have done the first four problems correctly? Now, class, let's start with problem five. I will be coming around to check your work. When you get five in a row correct, I will excuse you to work on your project."

PROJECTS AS A PART OF CLASSROOM LIFE

My teachers were big on projects. We always had an art project or a science project to work on if we finished early. In addition to being "sponge activities," they functioned as incentives. My sixth grade teacher, Miss Bakey, had us bring from home shoeboxes with our names printed on them. We spent one whole class period choosing a science project and collecting the supplies and materials we needed for it. We placed the materials in our "project boxes" and lined them up on the shelf that ran above the radiators by the window. I knew that, as soon as I knocked off those five problems in a row, it was project time! I also knew that if I became sloppy by trying to work too fast, I would have to work longer to get five in a row correct.

A Criterion of Mastery automatically trains kids to work as fast as they can without working too fast. It develops conscientiousness. None of this would have been possible, however, had Miss Bakey spent her time during Guided Practice servicing helpless handraisers instead of providing contemporaneous work check.

NO JOY, NO WORK

Let's add to the question "Why should I?," the adage "No work, no joy." If you want kids who have no great internalized work ethic to get on the ball and work, you must give them a reason. Since those kids do not work well for delayed reinforcers, you must provide reinforcers soon -- immediately upon completion of the task, if possible. Attempting to answer the question, "Why should I?" in a meaningful fashion will push you toward structuring enjoyment as the counterpoint to work in every lesson. Chances are, you will have your students doing more than a few projects. You might even use Miss Bakey's project box.

WHAT IF MY CLASSROOM IS MORE COMPLEX

Hopefully, this article will clarify your thinking about building motivation into classroom assignments. As in all of classroom management, however, "the devil is in the details." We have presented a simple case by using an elementary math assignment as a model. But, what do you do when students are working at different levels? How do you check more complex work, such as writing? Tune in next month.

This article is condensed from Dr. Jones' award winning book Tools for Teaching. Illustrations by Brian Jones for Tools for Teaching.

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