I’ve written about incentivizing students as a way towards engagement. I recently hit upon a great idea — a real brain wave. AP Chemistry students completed a challenging lab where they carried out (and analyzed) a bunch of redox reactions. Afterwards, we had a discussion, which included repeating several of the reactions as teacher demonstrations, with explanations along the way.
When you see a similar question on the test, you’ll have no reason to get less-than perfect. I’m settin’ y’all up for success.
Rather than the typical hand-in of answers to post-lab questions, I gave my classes a post-lab quiz the following day. But not any post-lab quiz: an open-book, collaborative, post-lab quiz. My pitch was something like this: “When you see a similar question on the test, you’ll have no reason to get less-than perfect. I’m settin’ y’all up for success.”
What students haven’t understood from my insightful, eloquent, witty explanations — they can get from each other.
To really sweeten the pot, this was out of, like, 30 marks. Which is a big chunk of change, with excellent odds of a high-grade result for everyone.
When I distributed the papers at the start of the next class, everyone got to work; everyone stayed on task, everyone was engaged… to the max.
Did I mention this was after lunch on a Friday?
All it took was some good ol’ fashioned incentivization for everyone to get some high quality work done on a challenging topic.
I invite you to steal this idea…
