When You Expect Rapid Feedback, the Fire to Perform Gets Hotter is the title of an article reporting on an interesting study.

It basically says that you’ll do better on a project if you have been led to believe you’ll be receiving prompt feedback on its quality.

I suspect that I’m not the only teacher out there who has procrastinated on getting feedback to students on their work. In the world as we’d like it to be, of course, all of us should want to do our best work all the time. However, since we actually live in the world as it is, it sounds like letting students know in advance that they’ll get prompt feedback on their work and delivering on that commitment might be something for us all to strive for a bit more….

At our school, and I suspect at many inner-city schools, we get quite a few new challenging students at semester break. This occurs for many reasons, including families that are often transient and students who get kicked-out — officially or unofficially– from other schools.

“John” (not his real name) is one of them. He has been very disruptive. Several weeks ago he had a good several days in a row, and I called his mother to say how well he had been doing. She was thrilled, and I’d lay odds that she had never received that kind of call before about her son.

Since that time, though, “John” has been going steadily downhill.

Finally, today, I asked him to come outside the classroom to talk with me.

“How do you think your Mom felt when she got that call from me a few weeks ago saying how well you had been doing?” I asked him.

“Really good,” he immediately replied.

“How did that call make you feel?” I asked.

“Great!”

“When was the last time your Mom got a call like that?” (in retrospect, I wouldn’t have asked this question)

“I can’t remember.”

“John, I would like to make more of those kinds of calls to your Mom. Would you like me to make more of those calls?”

“Yeah.”

And then we talked about what he would need to do to make that happen, and what he would need from me to help.

He had a great class today after our conversation. When the bell rang, he came up to me and begged me to call his mom immediately to tell her how well he did. I told him that I would love to call her, but that I needed to see several days in a row of good work and behavior first. I was surprised that he took that fairly well, and he said he’d do it.

We’ll see what happens, but it does point to the importance of making calls to parents with good news periodically, especially with students for whom that does not occur very often….

What has been your experience with making positive phone calls home?

Noah Goldstein at the Inside Influence Report just wrote about a study that is prompting me to try some things out in my class — tomorrow and next week.

He writes about…

“Adam Grant, a scholar in the field of organizational behavior, realized that workers often fail to live up to their potential because they’ve lost track of the significance and meaningfulness of their own jobs. He figured that if he could remind employees of why their jobs are important, they might become more highly motivated, and therefore, more productive individuals.

Grant did an experiment where workers read testimonials from people who benefited from their work. Those workers had a huge jump in their productivity compared to control groups.

Goldstein continues:

there’s significance and meaningfulness inherent to every job in existence—it’s just that employees often lose sight of what that is. The persuasive leader is someone who can help employees regain their sight by reminding them of how meaningful their jobs can be to others and to themselves.

So, how might this relate to the classroom?

First, here is what I’m doing tomorrow:

After students in my ninth-grade mainstream English class (by the way, just to help get a better understanding of this often challenging class,I should clarify that it’s a two hour one for incoming students deemed to need additional support) finish their fifteen minutes of silent reading at the beginning of class, I will ask them to respond to this question on the board:

How do you think working hard and learning everything you can in this class might help you now and in the future? Please list as many possible benefits as you can. If you don’t think it will benefit you, please explain why not.

I’ll then have students share with partners and then with the class.

Next, I’m going to ask colleagues who teach tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade English to ask their students to write about how they felt what they learned in ninth-grade English has helped them so far in their lives, and how they feel it might help them in the future. Next week, I’ll share some of those responses with my ninth-graders and ask them to share what they’ve learned and possibly explore the similarities and differences between their answers and the older students’ answers.

I think both exercises will be interesting, and might offer a comparable exercise to Grant’s experiment (even though I won’t be using a control group or measuring it’s effectiveness in any way). But I figure any kind of reflective activity surely can’t hurt….

Feedback is welcome….