During my internship in an EBD centered special education program at the high school level, I strongly reinforced effort emotionally but do not know that I necessarily did so in the most effective manner for student achievement. When considering the questions presented in the Figure 2.1 tool (Reflecting on Current Practice: Reinforcing Effort), many of my responses reflect a developing rather than mastery level of performance in this area. For example, the questions, “Do I continually provided students with examples of effort and stories about people who have overcome odds and/or worked hard in order to succeed?” and “Do I ask students to provide stories about effort and success?” (Pitler & Stone, 2012, p. 42) are not ones that I have many examples for. I did not include stories that emphasized that relationship and strengthened my student’s understanding of it. I also did not provide students with ongoing opportunities for monitoring their effort.
However, there are some questions that I felt I had answers approaching a more proficient level in. For the question, “Do I help students develop an understanding of the relationship that exists between how hard they work and their success?” I feel that my experiences were more confident. A student in my Targeted Reading and Writing class initially struggled with using READ 180, an intensive reading and writing intervention program. He disliked the content and the various tasks. However, as he made progress, I often called attention to how even his most minimal efforts resulted in improved reading scores. The more attention I drew to the relationship between his effort and achievement on the tests, the more his effort and achievement seemed to improve. I also always included rubrics and checklists for my students to demonstrate what type of effort is required for projects. Every project included a section for on-task work production and a description of what that looked like at each score.
One specific thing I would like to focus on is breaking tasks into smaller component parts so that students can hear about and visualize hard work. This means included a review prior to tests and working with the students to complete the review, while modeling how studying should look to improve student achievement. Overall, I recognize that I did not always explicitly teach the relationship between effort and achievement, but I often called attention to when a student experienced success. When working in an Academic Skills classroom, I often helped students study, but did not necessarily call a lot of attention to how to develop and maintain those skills. And I did not have a method by which students tracked their own effort and achievement to see if they could draw conclusion based on such observations. Therefore, in this area, I definitely have some raw material to work with, but really need to refine my practices and strengthen the connections to promote student achievement.
Pitler, H. & Stone, B. (2012). A handbook for classroom instruction that works (2nd ed.). Denver, CO: Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning.
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