Cultivating Persistence with Games, Badges, and Challenges

This is my son Caleb: 

As you can see, he is a silly, energetic lad who enjoys technology. In this picture, he's taking a funny selfie with my phone while my husband captures his efforts.

After the first six weeks of first grade, we knew he was behind on his reading and his math. We needed to do something to support the teacher at home, but we knew that we had to choose our strategies carefully. Caleb is like many 7-year-old kids, and can get bored or discouraged easily. He's also  pretty persistent when he can see that he is progressing. When he plays baseball, he will ask us to throw endless pitches and pop flies so he can perfect his techniques, so we knew that in choosing tools to help him academically, we needed to pick activities that would foster that persistence.

His teacher suggested improving his reading with a program called Raz-kids. This site provides leveled e-books for students and walks them through listening to the book, reading it, recording themselves reading the book, and taking a comprehension quiz. As students complete the activities for a particular level, they move up to the next level and get slightly harder books.

Kids can also earn points for completing activities, which they can use to buy parts to build their own virtual robot. After only using this program for a month,Caleb had advanced a reading level, and once he got on grade-level, he took off and became the second highest reader in the class and won the most improved reader award at the end of the year.

This summer, I thought my boys should practice their math, so I got them both on Khan Academy. My oldest needed some seventh grade review. Caleb watched his older brother completing mastery challenges and earning points and he wanted to "play" too. I set him up with the beginning math activities and had to pry him off the computer so I could work.

The other day, Caleb was frustrated because he was doing some activities with area and was confused. He kept opening the hints and looking at videos. He was actively searching for direction and practicing on his own. Finally, he got five area questions correct in a row and here's the screenshot from that exploit:

This impressed me for a couple of reasons. First, see the number of tries and hints and wrong answers he went through before he got five right in a row. This is what we should be encouraging in education: persistence. Also notice Caleb won a persistence badge for his efforts. He didn't know he was going to get it, but when he did, it reinforced the success he felt in finally understanding the skill. It was a bit of surprise recognition, and I think it's as important to recognize effort in education as much as we recognize success.

By the way, I wondered why he was having so much trouble with the concept, then realized he was working on third grade math, "because the beginning stuff was so easy" (his words).

Not every activity in education should be a game, but if we could do more to reward persistence in skills practice and remediation, we could see vast improvements in both our students' understanding and in their ability to stick with problems despite frustration.

ISTE: A Transforming Experience

I'm home from the ISTE Conference in Atlanta, GA. It was a great four days for us, and now I'm ready to reflect on everything I've learned and how I will use what I have learned to help my teachers in the coming school year. I have to admit that I wasn't that excited about coming to ISTE. For me, the last two years in my new position have been difficult.

Floundering

I just completed my second year as an Instructional Technology Facilitator in North Carolina. I was feeling like a ship at sea with no oars, no sail. I had tried without much success to deliver monthly professional development to the faculty at my schools, but I was faced with many obstacles from an ambivalent school culture to my own inexperience. I felt like I was doing little more than keeping my head above water. In all honesty, I felt pretty useless, and I knew I was failing my teachers in a big way by not providing them with the very best support possible.

It reminded me of being a first and second year teacher. Even though you know the curriculum, even though you understand the list of standards you need to teach, in the first few years it's difficult to see how to make individual lessons coalesce into a unified vision for the semester or year. Over time, your passion for your subject drives your vision for the course. That hadn't happened for me yet in this new education role. So that's where I was - at square one, needing a vision.

Focusing

The conference was, in many ways, like other conferences I've attended. I was inspired by great poster presentations on student choice and voice, TED in the classroom, and digital 3D student projects. I sat in great panel discussions on 20 percent time and digital citizenship. I got cool little geeky prizes and goodies from the vendors. And like all teachers and administers and tech folks, I was buzzing with ideas - too many, in fact to even think about implementing because I had no way to focus it into something clear for myself or my teachers. That little boat was being tossed by some big waves, and I needed to find an anchor.

Then I attended a session on Blended Professional Development with Andrew Miller. Andrew talked about the ways I could make school level professional development meaningful for my teachers by creating a blended environment where they can opt into different strands of PD and mix their online and face to face time. He said, and rightly so, that teachers will not appreciate or use our PD unless they see how it will affect the students. He said that without choice, you're poking teachers with a professional development cattle prod. He said that we need to do away with "drive by PD." He said a lot of things. He's a fast talker.

Finding Vision

Ever have one of those moments when you feel like clouds have parted and a thought you've been struggling with just comes into pinpoint clarity? That so happened for me in Andrew's session. Andrew asked us to tweet an idea for how we could begin blending our PD, and I decided to turn my existing site that is currently just a collection of resources into a learning hub for my teachers where they'll be able to choose, mix and match for customized PD that will be valuable for them. There's so much research to do, so much planning, that I'll be shocked if I have even a third of it complete before school starts again. 

I finally feel like I can truly begin with the end in mind and produce real, meaningful professional development for my teachers. I am truly grateful that I came to ISTE, and I'm especially grateful that organizations like ISTE exist, because I didn't just find a vision for myself, I found the passion I had been lacking these last two years. 

Here are some of my favorite presenters from this year's conference. They are some of the most intelligent, inventive, and passionately driven people I've had the pleasure of hearing: 

Andrew Miller  @betamiller   

Vicki Davis  @coolcatteacher

Marialice BFX Curran  @mbfxc

Don Wettrick @donwettrick

Here's Andrew's Slideshare from his presentation. And you'll want to check out his blog as well.