Greed is a Wonderful Motivator
February 28th, 2006 by MarkOne thing that’s distinctive about my school, compared to other HFRBs is that we use “points”. At most elite bŭxíbāns, there is far too little positive feedback. To deal with this problem, my boss borrowed the idea of giving kids points from the Big Chains. We don’t do them like they do, though. Our gifts are good. Five percent of total revenues get rolled into the gifts. In other words, kids get things like PS2s, bikes, and computers when then graduate.
Kids can get points from a variety of sources. Anytime they voluntarily raise their hands and answer a question correctly, they get a point. They can get or occasionally lose points based on the quality of their homework and tests. At higher levels, they can also get points for each extra book1 they read. We rank the kids based on their points each class, and assign them ranks- A, B, C, and D. “A” students don’t have to do any taped homework, “B” students do half the normal amount, and “D” students get extra homework. We drill it into the kids every class, that more class participation and better homework equals less homework assigned, better gifts, and ultimately better English. They’re hooked on the less homework part from day one; the gifts are a long term goal, but within the first year any class will develop a few greedy point fiends2; and finally, the goal of better English takes forever to sink in. After dozens of motivational speeches3 over the years, it does sink in, though.
The results? This is the first school I’ve ever worked where 90% of the kids raise their hands whenever I ask a question. It’s getting to the point where its hard to remember how passive the kids were back when I worked at Sesame Street. Now they all pay attention and actively try to participate nearly all the time. And no matter what your views on language learning are, that’s a good thing. I used to think points were a stupid waste, back when I was at Joy. I was wrong. Points rule.
[1:]This is meant to be an extra push to get the kids into extensive reading. We start them out with the first level of the Oxford Bookworms series of graded readers. At the first level, they only include 400 headwords, plus about 20 vocabulary items specific to each individual book. Complex grammatical structures, such as relative clauses, are also rare in these books. By the second part of their second year, the students can read about 20-30 pages per hour. With the incentive of points we can get them to read over 50 pages a week.
[2:]It’s really easy for this to get out of hand. I have to spend a couple minutes every few classes explaining how meticulously I track how many times I’ve called on each student for extra points. It’s crucial to make sure it’s fair and make sure they know I’m making sure it’s fair. I do give D students more chances for extra points, though. That’s part of the system.
[3:]One of my favorite speeches goes like this:
:“Everybody in Taiwan has to study English for years and years anyway, right? Isn’t it better to work hard for four years and have great English for life than to half-heartedly waste 10 years and never get much for your effort?”
February 28th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Mark, this is another example of how the very mainstream behavior of Chinese education has been adopted in the English language school–it should be no surprise that it works (I mean this not directed at your observation, but the discussion over at Scott Sommer’s blog).
獎狀 jiang zhuang (certificate of merit) are given out for almost everything from elementary school to college. For example, there is an award for top of the class (of course, this is what we are familiar with in Chinese education systems) but there is one for most improved, for hard work, for good behavior, physical fitness, outstanding homework from winter/summer vacations, service to other students, service to the school, culture helper (here culture with a big C, like working at the library, organizing the campus’ old stuff, and many more).
When these kids leave school for the day and run over the cram school, anything that taps directly into the motivation orientation they understand and assume to be correct of course works! What I seem to be seeing is some people slamming your observations as drill and kill. You point out that it is not. I think that there is some level of drill, and that it works well, but that the successful approaches work because they are deeply wrapped in local assumptions about what works. Many foreigners tend to adopt the view that the classroom must look and feel like their Western assumptions, with students feeling no pressure and everyone having fun. But, if we go over the the local elementary school, kids don’t look like they are having fun, yet they are. The deeply held assumptions about what behaviors in the classroom mean are so different, that it makes even holding a discussion about this topic difficult. I look forward to more of your input on this topic. I’m also a bit uncomfortable with the general assumption that everyone teaching English in Taiwan is an “economic migrant” and not serious about their work. A while back, Scott and I had some discussion about this, and I pointed out that things are so different here, that people would have to have some interest in things Chinese in order to be drawn here. But the recent large numbers of those from Canada, for example, and the ability of one to live in Taipei without being forced to contact any Chinese context makes me think I may be wrong. I think you’ve picked up a bit on that negative view, and wonder what you think in general. I’ve seen many give up much higher paying jobs in the US, I’m a business professor, my wife was a pharmacist, yet the generalization is so strong. I think it picks up from the local stereotype of foreigners, which is a deep-rooted thing. I also suspect it is a TESOL thing. In general, I’ve found the field of TESOL to be very short on professional skills and core values. Yet they are so quick to put down others as not doing work based on “theory” or not being as “professional” as they are. Compared with business people and computer people, I find the TESOL group to have little standards at all. Yet they jump so fast to attack. I don’t see that with programmers for example, who have a very standardized core of skill and their values seem fairly consistent (I mean job values, how they view the work, what it takes to get the job done, etc.).
Enough said. My point is, I would love to hear more from you on the English stuff.
March 1st, 2006 at 1:38 am
That’s quite a bit to respond to, Clyde! I’ll try to cover it all as well as I can, here.
I have to agree with what you say. There is quite a large variety in design philosophies amongst programmers and a large variety of differing business methods used by business people. At the core, though, both are very results oriented. If code doesn’t work, then it doesn’t matter how “professional” its design was. Similarly, even when two programs work, there are a variety of quantitative ways to evaluate which gets better performance, which is more maintainable, etc… The same is true of business- success is relatively straight-forward to measure. Criticism of Amazon.com’s business model all but died away by the time it was earning a billion dollars a year. In my humble opinion, TESOL would benefit greatly from standardized evaluation metrics.
Having experience both programming and running a business, I tend to be very results oriented. What I do is based on the observations I’ve made at other schools, as well as on the linguistics I’ve studied. I was about 6 credits short of a linguistics degree at UCB, and I did graduate with a B.A. in Japanese. I’ve drawn from quite a bit of experience in L2 acquisition (both as a teacher and as a student), when designing curriculum. That said, I do what works and abandon what doesn’t. Results are my entire focus.
Unlike what Scott said, that does NOT mean that I am just trying to maximize my earnings. By results, I mean I’m trying to maximize the results of my teaching in terms of improvement of the children’s English. To be honest, I was shocked when I saw his post. I was equally shocked by the ferocity of everyone’s attacks.
I had been under the impression that Scott was interested in doing a study on the relative communicative abilities of English students at various schools. I’m convinced my school’s students would have compared favorably with those of any (4 hour a week) other school I’ve seen. The last thing I expected was that he would summarily judge the system bad without even looking at it and condemn it on his blog. Other commenters, who knew even less about the system, jumped in and said my kids’ communicative abilities were lacking because we just do test-prep. I have no idea what basis they had for such conclusions, but it sure didn’t seem to be based on the scientific method to me.
Finally, I find talk of “economic migrants” elitist and annoying. Yes, a lot of Canadians saw that idiotic TV show and came here right out of school. That does not mean that none of them will become good teachers. For that matter, there’s no certainty that people with PHD’s in linguistics are necessarily good teachers, themselves. Before I came to Taiwan, I was making $35USD/hour plus benefits and stock options. After getting here I was making about 17USD per class hour or about 13USD per hour of work. That’s less than my buddy made in high school delivering pizza. People with college degrees can make way more money back home than they will here. Even now, I’m only making about $35USD/class hour plus a bonus someday, maybe.
PS With this job taking up so much of my time, don’t worry. There will be a lot more English stuff on my blog.
November 27th, 2006 at 11:10 am
wow..
i went to Sesame Street before..when i was about 8 years old i guess..
it’s a part of my childhood…the teachers there were very nice…though right now i don’t remember their lookings nor to mention their names, but i do remember i played a lots of games in the class and waited for my mom to pick me up..and i wonder if they still have the sesame street cards for students to exchange for prizes..it was my dream to collect hundreds sesame cards to get that big bird..haha
after sesame street i went to lincoln american school…it was horrible at first..but i did learn some basic grammar there …compare to sesame street..well..sesame street for me was kind easier becuz it only focus on speaking and..playing games~~^____________^