Rewards and Motivation

Imagine for a moment that you are a K12 student who has not been taught to value grades and schoolwork. Since your family doesn’t want truancy issues, you find yourself at your 7 hour prison sentence each day at 8:00-3:00. You float from class to class, messing around with your friends and trying not to get in trouble. Under these circumstances, what would be required for you to learn something? Or imagine a less extreme situation. Imagine that you are a student in K12 that’s usually an average student. Your parents expect you to graduate high school and then either work or go to trade school. You’re enjoying the welding class that you’re taking at the local Tech Center and are pretty sure that you’re not interested in college after graduation. In this situation, what is motivating you to learn? What rewards in the classroom can you look forward to? What are the best student engagement strategies for this type of student?

Motivation is Necessary

Students are like adults in the fact that they need motivation to do something. I know for me, I’m not a huge fan of housework. I do not have much motivation to do housework for the sake of housework. Yet I do it because I am motivated to have a clean house for my family. I especially hate doing the dishes. Yet my motivation to do them lies in not wanting to have stinky dishes in my kitchen. I think that we often expect students to be motivated to do schoolwork just for the sake of schoolwork. That’s simply not realistic for most students. Just like I need outside motivation to do housework, most students need outside motivation to do schoolwork. So what are the best student engagement strategies?

Traditionally, the motivators that educators have used for students in the past include long-term goals for success in the future, missing recess if they do not complete work, calling parents with bad grades, and report cards. Yet many educators say that these traditional motivators are no longer working for many students. These outdated practices are no longer the best student engagement strategies. While it is important to teach students the importance of goal-making for long-term success, what do we do in the meantime to motivate students to do well today so that it does not affect their long-term goals once they are developmentally ready to be motivated by them?

What Can We Do?

So if traditional motivators aren’t working in the classroom, what should educators do? What best student engagement strategies will reach our modern students? Many students don’t think their grades will matter after high school because they plans to go straight into the workforce. So why would good grades be a motivator? The only thing that matters for that student is passing or failing. As much as I would love for my Spanish students to learn Spanish, simply for the pure joy of having the ability to communicate in another language, that ultimate goal is a long-way off. Most students will need some short-term motivation so they can eventually get to that long-term goal of holding a full Spanish conversation.

Best Student Engagement Strategies

So let’s talk about rewards and feedback in the Mastery Gamification classroom and the best student engagement strategies. Honestly, it’s really interesting what students will consider a reward. In athletics, students will spend hours and hours practicing their skills. They will spend their whole weekend at a tournament to bring back a trophy. But, if we look at that reward, it’s not really about the value of the piece of plastic that they received. That piece of plastic is a representation of their hard work and victory. It’s not really about the reward, it’s about what the reward represents.

Value of Rewards

This knowledge makes it easier for teachers to reward students in the classroom. We don’t have to spend a lot of money on rewards for students. As long as the reward reflects the students’ hard work and victory, it will mean something and be valuable. In my classroom, I award badges to students to recognize their hard work and the victory they have achieved. In my classroom, students have to do more than just “pass” a test in order to get their badge. They have to earn the “minimum mastery level.” In my classroom that is a 75% or a C in order to earn their badge.

My logic in coming to 75% as the “minimum mastery level” is that it is higher than the “passing” percentage of 60% or a D- so it is harder the achieve than just passing. Also, as a teacher, I am personally very happy once a student achieves 75% in my classroom. Many students struggle with foreign language. If they are pulling 75% or what most people would consider “average grades,” I’m a happy teacher!

In addition, I need my minimum mastery level to be enough of a challenge that it is a higher standard than just passing but also that it is achievable for all students with enough time, effort, and support. Of course, for my students who are capable and want to get good grades, I encourage them to go for higher grades than the minimum mastery level but 75% is the lowest percentage that I expect my students to achieve and they rise to the occasion.

Once students receive their 75% and their badge, the student almost always feels proud and may even celebrate with a small “whoop” or a “let’s go!.” Their achievement means something and they are proud when they accomplish it. This is an acknowledgement of their hard work, perseverance, and victory. They deserve a “whoop!”

Making Badges

The badges I award to students are very simple. It is a design that I put together in Canva and it’s just a small square piece of paper that has their name on the back. Students have a paper “display case” that they put in the clear front pocket of their folder with spaces for their badges so that they can display how many badges they’ve earned during the semester.

Giving a badge or a reward is a great form of positive feedback. The student has accomplished something and they deserve some recognition! But it’s also important in a mastery gamified classroom to give constructive feedback also. For my classroom, this will routinely happen if a student attempts the boss battle (or test) three times and does not achieve 75%. At that point, if they have tried three times and haven’t achieved a 75%, they are missing something and in need of intervention.

Intervention is One-on-One

So it’s a simple matter of going over their tests and answers in a one-on-one meeting with me and the student and we find out what types of questions the student is getting wrong. This constructive criticism is essential in the classroom because there are many students who will never ask for help, no matter how in the dark they are. So the built-in intervention to go over a difficult test with the student becomes invaluable.

I hope these thoughts on rewards, feedback, and the best student engagement strategies in the mastery gamified classroom were helpful to you. If you want to further engage your students while also increasing the academic expectations in your classroom, I hope that these notes help you. If you are interested in using the Mastery Gamification Methodology in your classroom but it seems overwhelming, don’t worry! Just start one step at a time. I’d also love to guide you through the process so you can avoid the mistakes I made when I was first mastery gamifying my classroom. If you would like support on this journey, send me an email at stephanie@segrovestrategies.com and join our Facebook group to interact with others who feel that education needs a change in order to best serve our modern students. Hope to hear from you soon!