Student Achievement

OK, I hate to be a name-dropper BUT… I had a little e-mail exchange with Rick Stiggins the other day.  I wrote to ask him about what he says in his presentations with regard to the role of experiencing success in building successful, motivated students.  He is particularly eloquent on that topic.  He pointed me to a book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter called Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.  I highly recommend this book!

Partly I like it because I think the finding that people who are successful when they try to do something become more likely to take risks in the future is especially pertinent in education.  (This self-reinforcing spiral is also known as an efficacy-performance spiral or a high performance cycle.)  We want students to be intrinsically motivated, self-directed learners, and getting them on this upward spiral is the absolute best way to do this.  I have written before about the belief that effort, not genes, is what makes you smart (Mindset), and I think getting students on the efficacy-performance spiral contributes to their developing that belief.

Partly I like it because there are so many examples from sports.  I think the sports connection is very important in our getting better at formative assessment.  Good coaches are doing that all the time.  They have a picture in their heads of what quality performance looks like, and they can communicate that to their students.  They are constantly assessing where their students are, and constantly giving them feedback to move them towards higher quality performance, whatever the sport is.  Of course, the corollary benefit of this is that coaches, and other teachers of performance-centered subjects such as art and music, are front and center in our district focus on formative assessment.  I have not known this to be the case before.  So I would be grateful if you would pass this blog post along to the coaches and elective teachers you may know, especially if you know that they’re doing a good job of getting their kids on an efficacy-performance spiral.  I know that teachers in non-CSAP tested subjects, which of course includes all electives as well as athletics, have rarely felt that the professional development in schools has had much to say to them, and now they need to know that I consider them some of our absolute best models of what good practice looks like.

And partly I like it because she’s a great writer and she tells great stories.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Student Achievement and tagged classroom formative assessment, effective feedback, Mindset, motivation, Rick Stiggins, Self-efficacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.