If we claim that a child’s education is most important, why don’t we celebrate it the same way that we do with other accomplishments?
Listen to the morning announcements at your school. I bet that they are full of athletic achievements and upcoming events. Mind you, I am in favor of those things, and I understand why we do that, but my point is that we need to be celebrating academic success in our classrooms as well.
HER FIRST A+
I had a student in my 6th-grade intensive math class who was many years behind her grade level in terms of what skills she could do mathematically. But I gave her lots of opportunities to repeat the material until she mastered it. As she began to realize that I was replacing her bad grades with the better ones every time she repeated a learning station on the skill that she was working on, she began to build confidence and eventually she mastered the skill that she was working on.
When she took the quiz at the end of the learning station, she earned an A (mind you, it was the third or fourth time she took a quiz on this standard, but she truly learned the material and got an A on her quiz.) When I handed her the quiz back, she started to cry. “I never got an A before.”
Can you believe that!?!?! She was in 6th grade and had never got an A on any paper before (or at least that was her recollection of it). So I printed a little certificate for her to show to her parents. During my planning period, we called home together. Her parents were equally thrilled.
That moment changed things in my class for that student. For starters, it boosted her confidence. And since she had mastered that skill, she was able to master others because math concepts often build upon each other. She was more focused because she had tasted success and wanted it again. Furthermore, discipline issues with that student went way down. She no longer saw me as a mean math teacher sent to this planet to punish her with algorithms and formulas, but as someone who was on her side and wanted the best for her.
SUCCESS SHOULD BE CELEBRATED
For many of your students, academics do not come easy. And by the time they are getting to your class in upper elementary, middle, or high school, they may already have become disillusioned by the whole thing. After you have failed so many times, you begin to lose hope – and you stop caring.
But you can break through this discontent. You can reach that student by helping them achieve success, and then celebrating it.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN MY ROOM
I taught middle school intensive math at a Title 1 school in South Florida. So I understand what it’s like to have students who are deeply concerned with appearances.
I put my students in learning stations to work on a skill that they had not yet mastered. It was a highly differentiated, scaffolded, approach to education that was very effective for me and my students (I am speaking in the past tense because I am now in administration and no longer have the opportunity to do this type of teaching because I no longer teach classes.
At the end of these stations, which lasted four days, we would celebrate any student who had mastered the skill. I would read their names, play music, and we would all clap for the student as they placed their name under a banner that corresponded to the skill they had just completed.
You would think that such a corny celebration would be looked down upon by these inner-city students. But you would be wrong. They loved it! Every day they would come in the room asking me if today was the day – even though they knew that we only did it every 4 days.
IT’S A BIG DEAL
Everyone loves to be celebrated, so make a big deal out of the most important thing in a young person’s life; their education.
Make calls home, send home certificates, post their work on the walls, and acknowledge them in front of their peers. (And if you’re okay with singing and dancing, do that too!)
These intrinsic rewards will help them want to do better and increase their sentiments towards school, math, you, your class, and their education.
IT’S EASY TO DO
Celebrating success is SO easy, and it doesn’t cost much money.
The other day my daughter, age 6, came home with a blue slip of paper from her school. When we opened her folder to see this slip of paper she danced and screamed for ten minutes. Then she called her Grandparents to tell them all about it!
What did she do to get a blue slip of paper? Her school uses the three colors for behavior (red, yellow, and green). But in her class, if someone does something extra good, they move up to blue, and the teacher puts a slip of paper in their ‘take-home’ folder. My daughter had listened and obeyed right away, and thus the blue sheet of paper.
And that’s it! That was the only reward she got… a blue sheet of paper. In fact, it’s not even a whole sheet of paper, it’s a slip, so the teacher probably gets 4 or 5 slips from one sheet of blue paper. She pre-prints them and then writes the students’ name on the line on the paper when they get to blue on the behavior chart and puts it in the student’s folder. Probably took her a whole minute to do, plus a few minutes before class to print the papers and cut the slips. But it meant so much to my daughter.
The banners I hang around the room, took a few minutes to make, but once they’re made I can use them every year. It also takes a few minutes of class time, once a week, to read the names of students who aced their assessment and acknowledge them in front of the class as they put their name under the corresponding banner. But it meant the world to them. And it motivated them to do better. Plus they enjoyed it! Which makes classroom management so much easier.
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START TODAY!
You should be celebrating your students’ success. Start today!
As I said earlier, recognize them and take the time to let their parents know. Either send home some type of special paper (like a certificate or a blue sheet of paper) or call the parents.
To help you accomplish this, I would like to give you two things.
The first is 6 free certificates to celebrate student success. Get them for free by clicking here.
The second thing I would like to do to help you celebrate student success is to invite you on a journey with me and other math teachers around the world seeking to reach all our students through differentiated instruction. If you download the freebie, you will automatically be included in the weekly emails for the Journey we are taking together.
What’s Next?
If you’re interested in helping your students master math by differentiating your remediation, then I have three resources for you:
1) Take the Uncommon Teacher Challenge
I’d like to send you 10 free teaching resources to help you become an Uncommon Teacher. Do things different than most teachers and get uncommon results. The Uncommon Teacher Challenge includes 10 articles, with 10 resources, and 10 different strategies to help you reach all your students.
Enroll in the Uncommon Teacher Challenge
2) Reach Them All
Reach Them All is a book that will walk you through a step by step process of how to create and implement learning stations in your class that will help you differentiate your remediation so that you can effectively impact every student in the room by meeting them where they are and helping them grow through skills based learning stations.
Learn more about Reach Them All here.
3) The Online Course
We are now offering a 3 Part Online Course that will walk you through the process of creating learning stations that will target students’ weaknesses, build them up, until the student is proficient at grade level skills.
There learning stations will give a reteach, lots of practice with immediate feedback, and not punish students for making mistakes.
Learn more about the online course here.
