Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Motivation Post 2

   Praise can be detrimental to students when someone praises them for something that seems unbelievably easy or not worthy of lavish praise. This can make children think that YOU think they're dumb. Children who are obsessed with proving their intelligence to others have been proven to have maladaptive achievement patterns. They're so worried about being "intelligent" or "smart" that they obsess over it and still don't achieve as high as the children that are being labeled as "intelligent" or "smart." When children obsess over their intelligence or smartness, they worry about being labeled as dumb and may not participate in class and therefore not do as well as they could. This became a label for certain kids and it meant that they were worried to show they worked hard in class as this made them dumb. We should praise children for their efforts, concentration, effectiveness of their study strategies, their interesting ideas or how they followed on a project. Simply praising a student for intelligence doesn't foster growth. We should praise children when they show improvement or when they successfully complete a more challenging task.
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 23, 2012 at 1:41 PM

    Many students struggle with the idea that school is not about getting the right answers, but about the process to those answers and actually learning. I think that this poster in my field experience teacher's classroom does a good way of explaining this. It says, "It is okay to not get the right answers, but it's not okay to not try." This is how all teachers and students should approach school. If they don't get the right answers, that's okay because at least they are trying and learning in the process.

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  2. JackieOctober 28, 2012 at 6:51 PM

    I like your ideas here. What do you think makes intelligence a bad thing to focus on? Think about how intelligence (how most people define it) is something inherent and uncontrollable, while effort is something that is usually very controllable--so praising it can actually give the students power to keep improving.

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