A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
My mom pointed this quote out to me today when we were talking about what I could do to motivate my students to pass their classes. It struck me how true this is. I had a slight addiction to eProps on xanga a while back, enjoying accumulating as many as I could from friends. Lately it’s been the cheers I mentioned in the previous post. It’s funny how intensely driven one can get for something that physically isn’t valuable. I’ve been chasing after “cheers” on 43things, which is nothing but a integer on a webpage that almost nobody but I care about. Yet, that was a top priority in my time on the Internet… anytime I had a cheer it was of the utmost importance that I use it (sorry if you don’t use 43things and that didn’t make sense).
So, when it comes to the students I work with I started wondering if a pizza party would be a big enough motivation. What if they where only getting a slice or two each week, that just isn’t that much. And that’s when my mom mentioned this quote. Trophies, medals, ribbons, certificates, tiny gold stars, these are often motivating forces for people to do great things (Nobel Peace Prize, Olympic Gold, Congressional Medal of Honor), and maybe this sort of thing is enough for some of my students to start completing their homework and passing their classes.
The question is: How do you build into your awards the prestige and honor that should come with accomplishing the goal?
Here’s 3 things that come to my mind, I’m not an experienced teacher, so use salt to taste:-
1) Make them real, but attainable prizes. It may be unrealistic to ask some students to become straight A students this year, but you could give them a prize for raising their GPA a certain amount this year. But don’t make the prizes things that you don’t have to work towards. You’ll probably feel tempted to affirm everybody, but in order for the prizes to be effective, you’ll have to affirm non-prize winners another way.
2) Ceremonies are good. People like to be recognized.
3) Talk to other adults/teachers about the students’ acheivements with pride, and occasionally within earshot of the kids. Again, people like to be recognized, and it also helps them to know that you are really rooting for them, and not just giving them prizes because it’s your job.