Blog 3

For this blog I will talk about motivation and effort. In marzano ch. 4 they discuss the importance of students understanding of the difference effort can make in the classroom and in their acedemic performance. Marzano talks about how important it is to show student improvement when effeort is put forth by a student. My content area is social studies and for my clinical I taught a history class. The students in my class were, for the most part, amazing. They always put forth effort and tried in almost everything I asked of them. However, although it was a first teaching experience ever, I would like to take at least some of the credit.

I always tried to make the material as relevent to the students as possible. If we as teachers can find ways to make students care about the inside of a cell, what an adverb is, the elements of literature, or what the main parts of the policy of Containment were during the Cold War were, we can affect their level of effort. Regardless of content area, if you can make students relate to and like the material, they will be more likely to try and put forth effort. This is the say that we should never, ever teach for knowledge or facts' sake. We should always try our hardest to make sure there is a reason for learning what they are learning.

In a history class I can do this by simply relating material from the past to the present. That is what I attempted to do in one of my lessons. I related the fear and paranioa of the Cold War to the same feelings of today and our recent past as Americans. THere were things I could and probably should have done differently in the lesson, however for the most part it was a success. Studetns were engaged and interested and participated in debates and discussions. It helped give them a reason to care about what happened in the past.

Another thing mentioned in Marzano is that we make sure we make a distinction between acedemic outcomes when little effort is put forth and when a lot of effort is put forth by students. I planned a review game the day before my unit test. I told the students that it would be smart to get out a peice of paper and write down what the questions I ask in the game are becuase they may not be the only things on the test, however, if i took the time to include them in the game, the are important. In the first class I played the game in, the students were on task and wrote down nearly everything I said and their test scores were higher than the second class I played the game with. In the second class some students did not pay attention as much and were talking and wrote much less down on their paper. They did not put forth the effort the first class did and their test results showed it. I did not belittle them at all for this. I simply pointed out that the ones that wrote down the material covered in the game and put forth that effort, did generally better than those that did not. I congratulated those students who did put forth the time and effort as well.