Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Shrinking the Change!


Welcome Back to School!
 
Doesn't the thought of an entire school year seem daunting and somewhat intimidating at times? And I'm thinking about teaching; just imagine how overwhelming our students feel!
 
Mary and I, in our soon-to-be-released book, Learning That Never Ends, provide some answers to succeeding in tasks that seem just too big to tackle.
 
Shrink the change! One way to motivate action is to make students feel closer to the finish line than they might have thought.
 
According to research, people find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one. Shrinking the change is a significant approach to help students make an initial commitment.

HOW TO SHRINK THE CHANGE

  1. Pre-teach a challenging lesson with a study group
  2. Frontload concepts & vocabulary - there are so many ways to frontload concepts. (quotation mingle, greet and go, give one - get many, etc. - see book for more examples).
  3. Hold an impromptu study session during class immediately before a test.
  4. Chunk projects into doable parts and provide growth feedback so each student can succeed before moving on
  5. Give one or two questions from a test to do in a small group, then give out the rest to do independently

No comments:

Post a Comment