Miles for Motivation

Originally published in Voices from the Middle 10.4, May 2003, pp. 26-28. Copyright 2003 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission.

by Lesley Roessing

I wearily climbed into my car. It had been a long day. I could go straight home. I went to the gym just yesterday. I don’t have to work out. I deserve a break, time to relax. Then I thought of my “reindeer team” at the gym (it was December) and the miles I would earn for the Jingle Bells Team when I logged exercising time. If I went home, I would be letting them down. My car turned right, and I headed for my workout.

During the next days, I thought about how motivated I had been to work out daily over the past month. I had gone to the gym religiously, even when I was tired or had other things to do—papers to grade, lesson plans to make, dinner to cook. . . the usual. I could have found lots of excuses. But still I went—and exercised. What was my motivation? The gym had posted a map of the world, and the trainers had formed teams from the members. Each team would earn miles, depend- ing on the weekly workout time of its individual members. I had never even met my teammates and had no idea what we might win, but still I found myself going to the gym each day. I had never thought of myself as competitive, but now that I was part of a community, I did not want to let the others down. One for all and all for one!

My personal experience caused me to consider how I could transfer this motivational tool to the classroom. I had often wondered how to inspire students, other than by grades, and I had often assigned projects that I didn’t feel should be graded:

• assignments that are personal or where the student takes a risk, such as poetry;
• assignments that are creative, where I do not want to delineate my expectations because, by so doing, I may stifle responses that I have not even imagined;
• assignments that could supplement and enrich the curriculum.

And how about extra credit, fun work, learning games—all kinds of assignments that I’ve wished didn’t need a grade, where I knew that the grading system was actually contrary to the spirit of the assignment. Realistically, however, I didn’t know how to inspire the students to complete the assignment without promising a grade—“payment” for work done. Most of my eighth graders had not yet exhibited a love of learning for learning’s sake. Maybe a team goal, such as my gym’s Reindeer Games, would work.

I decided to begin with my Humanities class. This was an eighth-grade language arts class studying human rights and tolerance issues. I bought a world map, had it mounted on foam board and laminated, and drilled small holes through which poked small colored Christmas lights. The lights shone through the cities that were either settings for our literature, home to our authors, or sites of human rights struggles that I wished the students to research. The trail started at our school and stretched around the world, stopping in such places as Amsterdam and Germany (The Diary of Anne Frank), South Africa (Waiting for the Rain), British Columbia (I Heard the Owl Call My Name), Australia (Aborigine rights)—all together, 32,000 miles.

After piquing interest with my lit map, I had the students form teams of five members each on an amusing news story I shared with the class about two young men who had “borrowed” an older couple’s cement garden frog and took him around Europe, sending home pictures and letters before returning him to the couple and his “lady frog.” Another reason was that frogs are amphibious and can travel on both water and land as my students would be doing. It seemed a good fit. I found frog stickers, stuck them to paper disks of red, yellow, green, blue, and violet, and attached them to the map with moveable wall tacks. Soon my room filled with frogs—from frog borders and posters to frog Beanie Babies and gummy frogs. Frog stamps indicated submitted assignments, and frog stickers indicated satisfactory work.

After choosing team names, the first step was to explain the procedure. Froggie Miles would be earned by the teams for any assignments that were not being graded in the traditional sense. Two hundred Froggie Miles could also be earned each day that all members of the group had their homework completed. For the first assignment, the groups were to research and compute the mileage between stops; the first team(s) with accurate responses earned miles. Creative assignments included vocabulary ads, comma commercials, and illustrations of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Game days included Scrabble for Miles and Grammar Jeopardy, both of which the Pods took seriously, having fun while they played but playing with a goal in mind. These were not “free days,” a mindset that teachers usually have to battle when introducing an academic game.

Personal poetry was awarded a number of miles based on the implementation of literary devices used, such as metaphors, personification, rhyme scheme, and number of stanzas. Students who submitted suitable writings for contests and publications earned miles for their teams; this inspired one of our students to submit to, and win, a county young authors’ contest. Lessons in tolerance were enhanced with voluntary (for miles) research. Since this class focused on human rights, Froggie Miles could be earned for altruistic deeds by group members. One young man spent an afternoon in a nursing home, playing games with the residents, while one young lady donated 10″ of her hair to Locks of Love.

This system functioned better than I could ever have predicted. Students worked harder for Froggie Miles than for grades. There was team support of individual members in assignments and team pressure to complete assignments. The Pods even looked out for each other, occasionally award- ing miles to the group who needed them most. In each “contest,” there did not always need to be a winner and four losers; differing numbers of points could be awarded to groups, and sometimes the same number was earned by multiple Pods. No one even asked what the prize was to be (free pizza in my room during lunch). In the end, other Pods gave up lunchtime with friends and paid for their own pizza so they could join us.

The Hoppin’ Frog Contest spread to my other language arts class, and during a six-week unit on Katherine Paterson’s Lyddie, the students divided into six Frog Pods and hopped over a U.S. map research shared on violations in countries not already being studied in our literary works; students within each Pod usually shared the burden of the from Poultney, Vermont, to Lowell, Massachusetts, to Oberlin College in Ohio, just as Lyddie and her brother did. I found that, in this class also, motivation and productivity increased and grades improved. The students had fun even though they were doing more than the usual work expected for the unit. And Ned, notorious for missing homework assignments, was supported to the extent that another Pod member started recording the assignments in his planner so that he would remember them and the group could earn its daily mileage. Students who had never volunteered in class now stepped forward. Extra details were added to writings, and illustrations were added to vocabulary work. Competition, and grades, soared as general motivation increased.

 

Why did the students perform for miles and not for grades? It may seem contradictory that students worked harder for miles, but they also took more academic risks that could have cost them mileage. Students are sometimes afraid to attempt assignments or feel that a grade is not worth the effort. Some have even said, “I don’t need the grade. I already have an A or a B”; “I don’t care about grades”; or “I just want to pass.” But I think that the success of this contest was due to the sense of community and the excitement of competition.

Sometimes students feel isolated when it comes to assignments. Working together, even if not on the same assignment, relieves them of that solitude. I also believe that grades are seen as more threatening and more critical of a student’s product. If a poem earns a “C,” the student feels that he is not a good writer, that the teacher doesn’t like him, or that he cannot do the work. They let the grade define them as students. Earning fewer miles was seen as just that—the student or Pod did not complete the necessary work to earn a certain number of miles; their product did not win the miles. It appeared to be taken less personally, and students took more risks because they could only lose miles. When I analyzed this phenomena, I thought of the analogy of grades as wages and miles as athletic points. Students usually do not think that they are given the grades they really deserve, just as many adults do not feel they are paid the wages they merit; however, when making a basket in a game, the player never thinks, “That basket was worth more than two points” and the half- back doesn’t say to himself, “I worked hard. That should have been a nine-point touchdown!”

Another motivational bonus was the positive public acknowledgment. No teacher would ever post student grades; even the A students—in eighth grade, especially the A students—would be embarrassed. But each period the students would go to the map to see how they, or the other classes involved, were doing. Motivated by curiosity or pride, they celebrated the progress, even if they had moved from fifth place to fourth.

As their teacher, I felt that the contest lessened my reliance on grades as a threat (“If you want to earn an A or pass and go to high school or get accepted to a good college or not serve fries for the rest of your life . . ., you need to do this work”). I became more creative with assignments since I was not obliged to grade them. I wondered what components I could add to increase the Froggie Miles students could earn on this task or to allow them to divide the assignment among group members to take advantage of individual strengths or talents? I thought about extra assignments that would enrich the curriculum. Since these were not mandatory or grade-dependent, students and parents did not complain about lack of time or an overload of “homework,” yet I knew that, if some of the team members had extra time that week, they would complete the work for the Miles, and the class would benefit.

For these reasons, there were very few assignments not completed during the Hoppin’ Frog contests, and the students profited from the enrichment activities, cooperative learning, and creative license afforded them. Students were not working for the grade or for me; finally, they were working for themselves, logging their own exercising time for the good of the team and, ultimately, for their own good.

Lesley Roessing is Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Senior Lecturer in the College of Education, Armstrong State University, Savannah, GA.. Lesley is the author of The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension (Corwin, 2009), No More “Us” and “Them”: Classroom Lessons & Activities to Promote Peer Respect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed; The Sentences They Saved (Discover Writing Press. 2013), and Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Contact her at Lesley.roessing@armstrong.edu or follow Facebook.com/coastalsavwp.