In the news!

We tried this for the first time this year. The lead up went shockingly well. As soon as a kid coughed someone else would be out of their seat with phone in hand to report it. The kids got their first real taste of trying to handle large sets of data and thinking about how best to sort and group.

http://www.newstopic.net/news/local/x1866990066/Using-tech-Gamewell-Middle-students-serve-as-disease-detectives

Zombie attack

This is one of the highlights of my year. It involves nearly everything I love about teaching. Physical activity, math, science, ethics, role playing, class generated data, and high engagement both during the lesson and in the subsequent write up. We start the model with a single zombie. Students must get food and water each "day" (30sec.). If the zombie tags you, you become a zombie at nightfall. We chart how quickly the zombie virus spreads. Then we play again but implementing a semi voluntary quarantine. Now the bitten can choose to quarantine themselves or not and become zombies. Finally we run it again with a vaccine present. The next day we graph, analyze, draw conclusions, and look at reasons why people refuse vaccinations and the results from that decision.  Two survivors left facing down the zombie horde.

Why bonuses don't work, but an overall pay raise would

This post is influenced very heavily from the TED talk by Dan Pink. Specifically, I want to focus on the study he discusses with regards to motivation and rewards for completing various tasks. I would encourage you to watch the whole thing but occasionally I dabble in reality and know that won't happen so I will sum it up for you.  Extrinsic rewards (higher pay) work well to motivate people to complete basic skill tasks.  What we see is, the more you pay someone, the better/faster they will work.  The less you pay, equals less productivity.  This model is being applied to education across the nation.  NC is following this model.  We will give our best and brightest a bonus each year, for four years then they have to re-up for the bonus again.  The idea behind this, I think, is it rewards those that are doing a good job, and will provide an incentive for others to do better.  This will not work, or at least will not provide the desired outcomes I assume the state is looking for.  There are a number of other studies that have shown this type of motivator leads to an increase in divisiveness.  I know of no teacher that operates in a vacuum.  As a profession, we cannot thrive with this in place.  (For full disclosure, I would not refuse the bonus if I received it, however I don't think it would motivate me to do any better.)  So where should that money go...
Across the board salary raises.  We need to bring in the best possible candidates to be teachers.  We then need the best teachers to actually stay in the profession.  Teaching is not a simple skills task.  The extrinsic incentive of the bonus will not lead to an increase in scores or anything else.  However, making the profession more attractive to bright minds will.  People are leaving and/or not considering the profession because of the pay, and a potential 4 year, one time bonus will not change that.  Going back to the study in the TED talk, there was no increase in productivity on tasks that required even "rudimentary cognitive skills".  Effective teaching requires even more than that.  It's possible that this bonus will backfire and we will even see a decline in those that were identified as being the best.  With a significant increase in pay, you remove the extrinsic motivator (bonus) while making the profession more attractive to those it needs the most.