Gusher in the Gulf is a series of graphics from The Wall Street Journal that may be one of the best, if not the best, site I’ve found on the Gulf oil spill.
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal about weight-loss prompted me to write this post.
The Power of a Gentle Nudge: Phone Calls, Even Voice Recordings, Can Get People to Go to the Gym talks about a successful experiment where they had people and/or computers call people regularly to remind them to follow-through on their commitments to exercise. Those that received both the human and computerized reminders did a much better job (the human calls did the best) than those who did not get the calls.
It reminded me why I have my students choose “buddies” with whom they check-in weekly on the progress they are making with the goals they set for themselves.
Since I wanted to share this Wall Street Journal article, I thought it would be a good opportunity to collect all my posts on student goal-setting in one place.
Easy to Visualize Goal Is Powerful Motivator to Finish a Race or a Task is a report on a study that found it’s effective for people to actually see that they are making progress towards making their goal. I think that reinforces the importance of having students regularly reflect on how they are doing, and to, as the researchers suggest, even consider writing or drawing some kind of graph showing their progress. I’m not talking about some big public achievement chart and gold stars here — just one that students keep for themselves.
I recently found a video clip that I’m wondering if it might be a helpful addition to that lesson plan. In this clip from Cinderella Man (which is a great movie), James Braddock (played by Russell Crowe) is almost knocked-out, but then he flashes back to the reason why he returned to the rink – to win and make money to support his family (he sees images from his family and their hardships). He then becomes re-energized and wins the fight.
The movie is rated PG-13, and the clip is pretty bloody (boys will love it for sure). I’m thinking of showing it and then asking students why they think he came back to win the fight, and then talk about how in the face of adversity having goals and remembering them can help keep us focused. Check out the clip and let me know if you think it would be effective or not.
A new study finds that sharing a common goal with others increases the motivation people have to be successful. It’s not a brilliant revelation, but it did get me thinking a bit about one thing I do with student goal-setting. After students choose their goals, I also let them choose their own “buddies” to support each other. I wonder if I should be a little more strategic about that and encourage them to choose a partner who has a similar goal?
Plan B: Skip College was just published in The New York Times, and suggested that more students be encouraged to explore alternatives to going to college.
I found it interesting that all the people quoted in the article had graduated from college.
Others have posted much better reflections on this move that — whether deliberately or inadvertently — is aimed at low income students. I’d encourage you to read:
I’d also like to direct you to one of my previous posts, titled Encouraging Low-Income Students To Go To College which, among other things, highlights a study demonstrating that low-income students benefit the most from attending college.
I’ve posted in the past about how, thanks to the Friends Of The Davis Library, we’ve been able to provide thousands of free books to students and their families for their own home libraries. I’ve also posted about studies that have shown the importance of these kinds of home libraries (see “Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage”).
Lazyfeed looks like a great way to create your own personalized “newspaper” of blog posts, tweets, and other resources from the social web. It’s extremely simple to choose your topics, in addition to commenting on them.
Since the content appears to come primarily from the “social web,” it’s probably not going to be accessible to English Language Learners. However, it could be a real asset to teachers and others.
I’ve put the word “motivating” in quotation marks for this post because I hate the word. Here’s how I put it in a previous post:
Anytime I hear or read about “motivating students,” I cringe a bit.
An organizing truism (one that I learned during my twenty-year community organizing career) is that you might be able to bribe, cajole, badger, or threaten somebody to do something over the short-term (I’ve certainly done my share of that, and I’ve written about the negative results). But I don’t think you can really “motivate” anybody to do anything beyond a very, very, very short timeline, after which the initial enthusiasm quickly dissipates.
However, you can help another person find what will motivate themselves.
I’m not sure if any of them are better than the ones I have listed in The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners, but they’re certainly worth a look. That post includes one or two that I have already included in mine.
Let me know if you think any of them are stand-outs that I should add to that “The Best…” list.
Every month I make a short list highlighting my choices of the best resources I shared through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. Now and then, in order to make it a bit easier for me, I may try to break it up into mid-month and end-of-month lists.
I’ve already shared in earlier posts several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in this post.
Tom Barrett is known for his “Interesting Ways” series, which include numerous ideas on how to use Web 2.0 applications (including Wordle, iPod, Google Wave, Prezi, etc.) in the classroom. The series, however, is not only limited to technology, and also includes topics like supporting reading comprehension and spelling.
