As the holidays approach, many of us throw our typical eating habits out the window and start a week or two of reckless (and delicious) overload. For breakfast I had a bowl of fiber cereal and several of those sugary candy orange slices. That counts as a fruit, right?

Pretty soon I’ll surely come to my senses and make a New Years resolution to eat more healthfully. I know it’s good for me, but it is always hard to keep up my motivation to stick with it.

While you enjoy that second helping of pie this winter break, remember that even for grown ups it’s sometimes challenging to make a habit of doing what you know is good for you. As you begin a new semester with your students in January, try borrowing a few ideas for motivation from the healthy lifestyle New Years resolution to support the habits that lead to success in your classroom.

• Celebrate results. When students complete their work or study effectively for an assessment, try writing them a note, sending an email home, or catching them for a quick conversation to reinforce the connection between their hard work and their classroom success.

• Help students set incremental goals. If a student ended last quarter with a poor grade or many missing assignments, take a few minutes to work with the student to set a few achievable goals for improvement – perhaps moving up a letter grade, writing down the homework assignment each day, or coming in for extra help once a week. You can always set new goals once the student makes progress.

• Exercise with a friend. You might be tempted to skip your trip to the gym, but probably not if you know a friend is meeting you there. Help students find a homework or class work buddy – someone to check in with a couple of times a week to compare notes on how they’re managing their work. Peer accountability takes very little time on your part and helps form positive bonds for your students.

• Lead by example. As students move through the grades they are increasingly responsible for their own time management, but those skills are rarely taught in class. Share with students how you manage your own work – do you make a to-do list and check off each item? Come to work half an hour earlier to get a head start on busy days? Block out time first thing Saturday morning to work and then reward yourself with an activity you really enjoy?

• Use easy external motivators. A few years back I tried a weight loss program that I tracked on-line. Every time I lost 5 pounds, a little star popped up on my profile. I didn’t necessarily do the work of losing the weight just to get the star, but I honestly felt great whenever a new one appeared. No matter how old (or cool) your students are, they will still like recognition for their work. Consider using a star chart in class for students who complete their homework or come prepared, or write a note of recognition to give to a student who is making progress. As you clean up the holiday aftermath at your house, consider making a classroom prize box. I used to have one filled with things like discarded fast food kid’s meal toys, a free Frisbee I got at a concert, little lotions from hotels, a calendar from my bank, etc. When students turned in their homework they could put their name on a slip of paper in a bucket and every Friday I drew a name for a trip to the prize box. My eighth graders loved it, and my non-teacher friends and family started saving their desirable clutter to refill my prize box.

Have more motivational ideas of your own? I hope you’ll post them here!

– Claire Lambert

Here is Robyn’s latest article from Mindsteps’ December Newsletter. To subscribe to the newsletter, click here.

Have you played a video game recently?  Maybe you play a little solitaire or free cell on your computer to unwind after a particularly stressful day, or you are addicted to bubble breaker and bejeweled on your mobile phone. Perhaps you were the PacMan champion in your day or you secretly rule in Guitar Hero or Halo. No matter how difficult, complex, challenging, or frustrating, there is something about video games that’s just plain addictive

Lately I have been wondering why we can’t seem to  make learning in school as addictive as video games. Why is it that students are willing to engage in complex and difficult tasks in a gaming environment but resist doing so in the classroom?  Why is failure motivating in a video game but devastating on a test?  Why is it that learning is fun during a game but boring in class?  What’s the secret?

I don’t know that I have “cracked the code” entirely here, but I do know that if we really want to make learning more addictive and our lessons more compelling, here are five things we should learn from video games:
 
1.  Video games integrate a variety of skills.  Students don’t learn one skill and then another until they have the repertoire of skills they need.  They are asked to synthesize a range of skills and use them to solve increasingly more complex problems.  School on the other hand teaches discrete skills and tests students on how well they have mastered an individual skill or small group of skills.  Rarely are students asked to synthesize their skills to solve problems.  If we want lessons that are more compelling, we have to stop focussing on merely teaching discrete skills and give students a opportunities to integrate and synthesize what they learn.
 
2.  Video games allow students to solve challenging and complex problems immediately.  You learn how to play the video game by playing the game.  There is no passive sitting on the sidelines while you watch an expert perform.  In the game, you jump right in.  Gamers have to develop hypotheses for the best way to solve problems according to the game’s logic and rules and they have to test these hypotheses and develop new ones within the game space.  They don’t have to wait until they happen upon the right answer before they can play.  It is the act of playing that allows them to learn how to solve problems effectively.  All too often, the exact opposite happens in the classroom where students are asked to get good at something before they are allowed to do it.  Students might become more actively involved, more invested in their own learning, and develop better problem-solving skills that were transferable to other situations if they were allowed to develop and test their own hypotheses as they learned. 
 
3.  Video Games allow customization. Players can create their own avatars, choose the attributes of their characters, and in some cases build their own environment.  They can decide where they want to go in the game space and how they want the game to proceed.  They can make decisions on how to play the game that are best for them within the parameters of the game.  All of these these choices mean that each person’s experience playing the game is unique.  In school, students are rarely offered the chance to make meaningful choices that influence how they will learn.  If we really want students to take ownership over their own learning, then we have to give them a sense of agency and shared control.  We have to structure the learning environment so that they can customize it to meet their own needs.
 
4.  Video games do an excellent job at scaffolding. Players can play a game before they are good at the game.  They don’t have to wait and practice drills and demonstrate competence before they begin playing.  They are thrown right in and learn the game as they are playing it.  When they get stuck, they can access the supports that are built right into the game or ask other, more experienced players. The more they play, the better they get.  Video games also have different levels and each level presents a challenge that is just beyond the skill of the player. At each level, players learn how to solve problems until they can do so routinely and automatically. As players get better at one level, they proceed to a new level with a new set of challenges that require them to integrate their old skills with new ones to reach a new and deeper level of mastery.  This cycle of repetition and new challenge helps players develop expertise rather quickly.  In school, the opposite often happens where struggling students have to languish at lower levels until they demonstrate competence.  School would be much more engaging for struggling students if they received the supports they needed during the learning process, in real time so that they could keep up with what was happening in the classroom and progress to the next level of learning.
 
5.  Finally, video games make failure motivating.  Learning a new game can be tough, but each time a player fails the player learns something that he can use to make his performance better next time.  Video games keep the play just outside of a player’s level of competence so that while they are challenging, they are also doable.  Video games take the stigma and sting out of failure.  Failure is an integral part of the learning process and everyone expects to fail several times before they succeed.  Each time you fail in a video game, you get immediate feedback that shows you how to learn from your failure and do things better the next round. Failure becomes just another event in the learning process rather than an evaluation of your learning process.  In school however, failure is not a part of a learning process; it is a signal that the learning process has gone wrong somehow.  Students don’t routinely get the opportunity to learn from their failures and try again in school.  While they often get feedback that tells them that they have failed, they don’t get immediate feedback from their failure that shows them how to do better next time.  In school, failure is not a natural part of the learning process; it is something to be avoided at all costs. Thus video games encourage risk taking in ways that school does not.

For ways to make your lessons as compelling as video games, check out the December TIP Sheet here
-Robyn R. Jackson