Archive for Motivation

Even before Nancy Mazza retired eight years ago from teaching art to Appleton, Wisconsin, children, a job she dearly enjoyed, she had discovered an even deeper passion—bookmaking. “I was mostly interested in book forms—scrolls, origami, concertinas, pamphlet stitching, sewn bindings, glued bindings—and I had so much fun making books I tried to think how I could share this with kids,”Mazza recalled.

Hundreds of books later, her pastime has evolved into a rewarding outreach helping struggling readers and writers makes what she calls a “literacy connection.” For her creativity and innovative approach, the Hortonville woman is the 2008 Celebrating Our Volunteers recipient of the Daniel P. Spalding Volunteer Educator Award.

Becky Schuler, a reading specialist at Kaukauna’s Quinney Elementary School and president of Mid-East Reading Council of the International Reading Association who happens to be Mazza’s daughter, was quick to embrace Mazza’s way of motivating reluctant readers and introduced her to her pupils. Schuler nominated Mazza not only for her bookmaking in Quinney classrooms, but also the free workshops she conducts showing local teachers how to use visuals to boost reading comprehension, and showing parents how to support literacy at home. Read more in The Post-Crescent online

Some kids in Fulton County, Georgia, are earning a paycheck just for doing their homework. A pilot project sponsored by a local foundation is offering a group of low-income students $8 an hour to go to after-school study sessions twice a week. Jackie Cushman, engineer of the Learn and Earn program, said she hopes the money will get the kids into the classroom, but that, once there, they’ll start to enjoy learning.

Cushman is the founder of the Atlanta-based nonprofit Learning Makes a Difference. She’s also the daughter of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who suggested paying low-income students to improve their grades in a 2005 speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The students who participate in the Learn and Earn program say it’s helping them, but some educators are troubled by it. Read and hear more at National Public Radio’s website.

At 3:39 p.m., a half-dozen middle school students at Academy Prep, a private school in south St. Petersburg, Florida, tie on aprons. Eggs crack. Pots rattle. Bouillon cubes plunk into hot water. For these kids, today’s cooking lesson is chicken soup and corn bread.

By 3:39 p.m., Pinellas County middle school students are watching the final minutes tick down on a 6-hour, 20-minute school day. But the low-income, minority students in grades 5-8 at Academy Prep start the day two hours before their public school peers, and most stay two hours later. It is a long day. But unlike some public school students, the academy’s 62 students still get full helpings of physical education, music, and social studies. They’re still taking field trips. And they’re enjoying a suite of enrichment activities that would make many middle-class parents swoon: Golf. Dance. Karate with Master Kim.

A 10- to 11-hour day is crucial, says Academy Prep principal Keturah Mills. “We’re concerned about the whole child—academically, spiritually, emotionally. We need that longer day.” Read more about lengthening the school day in The St. Petersburg Times online.

Trying to get your elementary students excited about writing? Children's recording artist Mike Mennard seeks poems about pirates for his Captain Rapscallion's Pirate Poetry Contest. Students can submit their original poems for a chance to have Mennard create a song using their poem for his upcoming pirate album. The deadline is March 31. For further information, visit Mike Mennard's website.

There’s a running boom in San Diego County, California, among the 5-to 12-year-old set. On most elementary school campuses, children run just before the morning bell while you’re on your morning commute—perhaps, in part, because of your morning commute. Parents facing long drives to work drop their children at school early, and teachers and volunteers are using the extra 15 or 20 minutes to fight childhood obesity with before-school running clubs. In addition, a growing body of research indicates that exercise doesn’t just build bodies. It builds brains. For one thing, a healthy child learns more than an out-of-shape one. A California Department of Education study shows a correlation between the number of state physical fitness standards children meet and how well they score on reading and math tests. Read more in The San Diego Tribune online.

Does motivating students to study harder with the promise of cash sound like innovation—or bribery?

That’s a question educators and researchers have been debating, amid concerns that money-for-achievement programs actually decrease students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and send mixed messages about studying.

But the idea is catching on, with new cash-incentive programs planning to give money to students this school year in the Baltimore school district and some schools in an Atlanta suburb. Last school year, the 1.1 million-student New York City school system began a program to evaluate the effect of paying students for academic performance, joining a growing list of those testing the idea. Read more about the pros and cons of the proposal in Education Week online.

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its website, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine. The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore. For more, visit The New York Times online.

What could better motivate students to learn than using rock music to teach? With that in mind, Steven Van Zandt, lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, has launched Little Steven's Rock and Roll High School in Washington, DC, a music education program designed to trace the history of rock and highlight its cultural impact. The program, which is being written with help from the National Association of Music Education, aims to teach students about U.S. history through music they appreciate, according to an article by Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post.

Noted music producer Qunicy Jones agrees with this concept. He created the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, a charity that connects students with technology, education, culture, and music.

For further information, read the full article.

 The federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing. But how much is really the school’s fault?

A new study by the Educational Testing Service (ETS)—which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT—concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools and using just those four variables, were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy. Learn what those variables are by reading the article in The New York Times.

Once there lived a group of very poor people who could not read or write. Some started attending church, but their illiteracy kept them from joining fully in worship activities. Certain people who saw this wanted to help them learn to read. Others scoffed, saying this was unnecessary—that the illiterates could follow the church services just by hearing. The literacy advocates thought this argument ridiculous, so they started teaching people to read and write. A loosely knit movement helped many to become literate and better themselves, both socially and financially. Then people noticed others in the land also lacked literacy. Many were children living almost wild in great cities. The literacy societies expanded to teach those children also. The literacy movement was, at its heart, a missionary effort. Read about the the Sunday School movement in The Washington Times.

As teachers head into the classroom for the new school year, there is one more item they can add to their back–to–school list: Thinkfinity.org. It’s free, and it makes life easier for teachers. Thinkfinity.org is for teachers looking for a quick and innovative way to find compelling lesson plans and interactive learning tools to engage students. Thinkfinity.org is the Verizon Foundation’s, comprehensive program and online portal to 55,000 educational resources, including standards–based, grade–specific, K–12 lesson plans and other student interactives provided in partnership with the International Reading Association and many other leading educational and literacy organizations. And, Thinkfinity.org requires no downloadable software.

Feeling down today? OK, let’s talk about how you feel and start again. With this touchy–feely approach, the British government is hoping to bring about a revolution in the classroom. Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, will announce September 4 that lessons in happiness, wellbeing and good manners are to be introduced in all state secondary schools. The initiative follows an extensive pilot of a program called SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) in primary schools, which has been found to boost both academic performance and discipline by helping children to better understand their emotions. Read the article at the TimesOnline.

Should cash be used to spur children to do better on reading and math tests? New York City’s Department of Education is implementing a pilot program that will reward fourth and seventh graders with $100 to $500, depending on how well they perform on 10 tests in the next year. Read more about the program in this article from The New York Times.

Starting this fall, the Mount Vernon city school district will roll out a literacy program created by boxing legend Muhammad Ali that is aimed at motivating struggling readers. The program, Go the Distance, installs classroom library collections of fiction and nonfiction books that share the common themes of confidence building, determination, respect and other values. Read more of this article from The Journal News of New York.

Between the Lions, the popular children's television show, will begin a seventh season on PBS KIDS on September 17, 2007. And, on the heels of new research results that demonstrate that the PBS KIDS® series is helping children learn how to read, the Lions plan to hit the road this summer and engage live audiences with readings and interactive performances. Between the Lions airs daily on PBS KIDS.

Five state centers for the book from California, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, and Maine are the 2007 winners of the $1,000 Boorstin Award for innovative reading promotion projects. The awards were announced in May by John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the U.S. Library of Congress. The centers were honored for a wide variety of community-level and statewide projects. For further information about the activities of the Center for the Book and its state affiliates, visit the Center for the Book website.

Individuals, schools, and organizations who organized Read Across America events this past March are invited to enter the first Read Across America Awards. Submit details, pictures, and/or video to the National Education Association by May 15. For details, visit the Read Across America website.

The problem teachers often see is that many students have difficulty reading and therefore do not enjoy it. The theory developed by Parsons High School in Kansas to combat the problem was, if students could learn that reading is an enjoyable experience, they would read more and increase their vocabulary and comprehension. The result? A reading course that provides an elective credit to students who read a minimum of three books every nine weeks, write a two-page college level book report on each book, and go through a one-on-one evaluation with the teacher to discuss the report and comprehension of the book. Read more about this program in this article from the Parsons Sun of Parsons, Kansas.

When pre-teen boys hang out with their dads and other guys, what they most want to do is—read. That’s the hope behind a new father and son reading club that Calderstone Middle School in Brampton, Canada is launching. Read more about a program that brings literacy and character education together in this article from The Brampton News.

The Pig Skull Book Club has two important rules: No sissy stuff and no girls allowed. Both traditions are designed to appeal to fourth-grade and fifth-grade boys because this club, above all else, involves books boys like in a boy-friendly atmosphere. Read more about one library’s method for getting boys to read in this article from the Lexington Herald-Leader.

What would you do to motivate kids to read? Kiss a pig? Be made into a human ice cream sundae? Spend the night on the roof of a school? Read about these and other crazy things principals do to encourage reading in this article from Education World.

Pizza Hut’s Book It, an incentive program used by 50,000 schools nationwide to reward young readers with free pizzas, is now under attack by child-development experts who say it promotes bad eating habits and turns teachers into corporate promoters. But the program—which has given away more than 200 million pizzas—has deep roots and many admirers at the highest levels of politics and education. It won a citation in 1988 from President Reagan, and its advisory board includes representatives of prominent education groups, including teachers unions and the American Library Association. Read more about the reading for pizza controvery in this article from CNN.

Kumi district authorities in Uganda have passed a by–law banning parents from sending children to school without a packed lunch. District chairperson Ismail Orot said this would enable pupils, especially those preparing for final exams, to concentrate on their studies. The decision comes after a decline in performance of schools in the area attributed partly to children attending afternoon classes on empty stomachs. Read more at allafrica.com.

Bureaucrats in Russia have been sent back to school to improve their spelling and grammar. Two thousand officials in Russia’s Volga River region of Ulyanovsk had to sit for a special test on spelling, punctuation and spoken Russian today (February 3) after the local governor grew tired of seeing documents full of mistakes. In an echo of the Soviet Union’s mass education drives of the 1920s and 1930s, Russia’s Parliament has declared 2007 the year of the Russian language and ordered an improvement in spelling standards. Read more about it.

The ickier the better. The bloodier, funnier, scarier and more action-packed, the better. That’s a motto that Judi Kubicki, a teacher at Boulan Park Middle School in Troy, Michigan, is sticking by when it comes to engaging her sixth-grade boys in reading. Read more about this “Boogers and Farts” approach to reading in this article from the Detroit Free Press.

Some Nigerian teachers now have an incentive to perform well—cars and buses are being awarded to top-performing teachers and schools. From being known as the poorest of the working class, teachers are earning a better reputation as a result of school reforms instituted by Kwara State Governor Bukola Saraki. Saraki says that for any investment in education to produce the desired results, teachers should be encouraged to put in their best performance. Read more about the reforms at allAfrica.com.

Jeff Rubin, founder of National Punctuation Day, has created “Punctuation Playtime,” an interactive assembly program geared toward first- through fourth-graders. The idea is to help students learn how to use correct punctuation in sentences for their corresponding skill level. The 45-minute program features games such as “pin the punctuation on the sentence” and relay races, and even includes a punctuation rap song. Students receive punctuationally correct worksheets and bumper stickers to help facilitate learning. Read an article from The Contra Costa Times to learn how the program is being used in California. Visit the National Punctuation Day website.

College graduates in China are reluctant to work in the countryside to improve the lot of farmers, despite the government’s push based on the idealism of youth, the Xinhua news agency said. China, which struggles to find jobs for millions of new graduates leaving universities annually, is encouraging them to spend time working in the economically underdeveloped countryside as teachers, nurses and in other skilled jobs. During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, millions of Chinese students went into the countryside to learn from the peasants out of revolutionary zeal. Read the article at Chinadaily.com.

Reading teacher Kathy Eppley’s little brainstorm was to ask all students and adults at Hernando Middle School in Spring Hill, Florida, to wear cards around their necks with the titles of the books they're reading. The idea turned out to be so elegant, and apparently so original, that national reading experts are vowing to steal it. Linda Gambrell, president-elect of the International Reading Association, said she loved the idea. She said many incentive programs discourage less fluent readers or encourage students to read below their ability in order to rack up points. But Eppley’s idea, she said, promotes the opposite: genuine discussions and excitement about reading. “What that idea does is it simply shouts, ‘I am a reader, I enjoy books,’” Gambrell said. “It’s not a competition.” Read the article from the St. Petersburg Times website.

A U.S. Congressman pays kids to read over the summer, and they oblige him, at a rate of $2 per book.

A new study finds that zoning out—that is, allowing the attention to wander while reading—really does harm comprehension, and is hard for at least some readers to avoid. IRA Board member Karen Wixson and IRA Director of Research and Policy Cathy Roller are quoted in the article.

Children and teens benefit from reading over the summer, and one county's library system offers incentive programs for them—and for adults too.

They are highly educated, well informed, and enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why, then, do the people of Saudi Arabia seem so uninterested in reading? Khaled Almaeena, editor-in-chief of Arab News, considers the question and offers a choice.

How do you challenge and motivate gifted students? An article in the March 2006 issue of Edutopia magazine offers a variety of practical suggestions from a number of educators at various levels. Some of the suggested activities involve reading; others could be adapted to include reading. The full article is available on the Edutopia website.

Concerned that the label of failure could undermine children’s enthusiasm for school, retired British teacher Liz Beattie will call on the annual gathering of the Professional Association of Teachers to “delete the word ‘fail’ from the educational vocabulary” and to replace it with the concept of “deferred success.” Read more of this story at BBC News.

Traditional comics could be the key to encouraging more young boys to read, according to a new survey. Research published this week revealed that while 17 per cent of boys aged between seven and 11 do not read books outside school, 60 per cent regularly read comics. In a comment on the new findings, experts said that encouraging youngsters to read comics could be a vital tool in the fight to improve literacy rates. Read this article in The Scotsman.