I hope each person reading this email is having an amazing summer so far!! As we enter July, I wanted to send a quick updates about the happenings here at school as we prepare for the fall.
Team Roster Updates
We've had to make a couple of adjustments to our teaching staff team. I am sad to report that Molly Laufenberg decided to take a teaching job closer to her boyfriend in southwestern Wisconsin. A summary of the staffing shifts are listed below:
-Jennifer Hecht will move from her Special Education position to take over Molly's old role and teach 2 sections of 7th grade ELA and 1 section of 6th grade ELA.
-We have hired Jen Kowalefski to teach 7th/8th grade Science. Jen is a graduate of UW-Madison, and will make an excellent addition to our team.
-Earlier in the spring, we hired Kaylee Tsuboi to teach 6th Grade Science and Math, who replaces Stephanie Weckerly, who is sliding into Mrs. Andringa's 6th/8th Math position. Another great addition!
-Krista Andringa will be sliding back into her Special Education Math role.
-Also, Heather Snyder will be staying with us to take on a Special Education role with an ELA emphasis.
-We are finalizing the hire for Ms. Hecht's position this week.
I am very excited about the quality of people that are joining our team. We head into the 19-20 school year with a very strong team!!
1 to 1 Updates
We are working to finalize our 1 to 1 plan for the Middle School. We are going to execute a trial plan for the district, and we will use what we learn to inform plans for the Elementary and High School. We have adjusted our Master Schedule to incorporate Homeroom time at the beginning and ending of each school day. The addition of Homeroom time is intended to strengthen connections among students, and for each Homeroom teacher to lead a close-knit group and be an advocate for their kids. Each classroom will have a charging station that will house a chrome book for each of their Homeroom students. We have also ordered a case for each chrome book. We want to encourage students to personalize the case of their assigned device. In short, students will check out their chrome book as they enter their Homeroom class each morning, and return their device (plugging it in) at the end of each day in their Homeroom. There are many more details of this plan that are in the works that will be shared at a later time.
Efforts to Improve Attendance
In our April staff meeting, we reviewed student attendance data. It was apparent looking at the data that this is an area that we should focus our improvement efforts. Research shows that having a great school culture along with the presence of strong relationships between students and teachers are the best strategies to improve student attendance. In my own research on this topic, I came across this research study (below). It seems to follow more and more prevalent research out there in regards to the use of rewards in schools. A great book on this topic is Discipline with Dignity by Curwin, Mendler, A., and Mendler B. Let me know if you would like to read this or if you have any interest in potentially leading a book study on this topic.
Surprising Findings on Student Attendance Awards
In this Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes paper, Carly Robinson (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Jana Gallus (UCLA), Monica Lee (Stanford University), and Todd Rogers (Harvard Kennedy School) report on their study of awards for students with excellent attendance in 14 California school districts. (The state has emphasized the importance of attendance and encouraged schools to use awards as incentives.) The awards were symbolic (non-monetary) and non-competitive – that is, any student could win if he or she had very good attendance. Attendance awards are very common in schools because research has linked good attendance to a number of positive outcomes and, say the authors, because of a “simple and intuitive belief” that “recognizing effort and performance will result in continued or even improved positive performance.”
So what did the study show? The researchers noticed two distinct ways schools rewarded outstanding attendance:
• Prospective awards – These were “if-then” rewards; students knew the criteria in advance – that they could win if they had excellent attendance. The researchers were surprised to find that these awards, on average, had no effect on older students’ attendance, and only a small positive effect on younger students.
• Retrospective awards – These recognized excellent attendance after the fact – “now-that” rewards. In the schools studied, the awards were given at the end of a marking period or year. The theory is that this kind of award is motivating because it expresses appreciation for doing something that is important and difficult and that the winners might not have thought they could accomplish. Again, the researchers were surprised by the result: after-the-fact awards demotivated students: after they won, they had worse attendance than students in the control group, missing 8 percent more days in the month following the award. The negative effect was most pronounced among academically low-performing students.
Why these discouraging and counterintuitive results? Robinson, Gallus, Lee, and Rogers suggest three explanations:
First, the researchers hypothesize that the school culture may be one in which “the social costs of being singled out outweigh the benefits of the distinction.” Being given an award “could trigger negative consequences if people desire to avoid the peer social sanctions associated with being someone who tries too hard on a dimension such as attendance…” (The peer attitude might be quite different with high achievement with sports.) This negative effect could be mitigated by sending attendance awards home rather than giving awards in front of peers.
Second, giving awards may send an unintended signal about the school’s intent and expectations – that the award recipients were outliers, that they had attended more than the school expected, say the researchers, “thus licensing them to miss more school in the future.” The research on “licensing,” they say, “suggests that when people feel that they have fulfilled their obligations to behave in socially desirable ways, they may subsequently become less likely to perform the socially desirable behavior.” This would be especially true of underperforming students for whom the award was a surprise and out of line with other feedback the school had been giving them.
Third, award winners’ thought process might be that they were outperforming their peers, which, say the authors, could “lead them to reduce their effort, particularly if the behavior is inconsequential and not a reflection of the recipients’ abilities and achievements on an important performance dimension.”
There was another finding: when the attendance awards were no longer given, there was a significant decrease in student attendance. Why? The researchers believe that “the mere introduction of awards seems to have signaled that perfect attendance was neither the norm nor expected, thus crowding out existing motivations to exert effort and attend school.”
“The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards” by Carly Robinson, Jana Gallus, Monica Lee, and Todd Rogers, February 13, 2019, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2019, https://bit.ly/2L6PmmH; Robinson can be reached at carlyrobinson@g.harvard.edu, Gallus at jana.gallus@anderson.ucla.edu, Rogers at todd_rogers@hks.harvard.edu.
Images from the Week
