Every year, my third grade teachers request that I do an effort on “Best Effort”. I think some of it is the teachers and their expectations and I think another part is the huge jump between 2nd and 3rd grade in regards to rigor. Last year (2019), this was the first request of my 4th grade team.
What is best effort?
I start the lesson with a super short PowerPoint walking them through different levels or degrees of effort. The students take turns reading different parts of this to make it more engaging. Here’s a fly by of what it looks like:
In some classes, specifically with 3rd grade, this needs to be fleshed out even more. Enter: anchor charts! We created this together whole group. Students did a turn and talk with a partner to brainstorm ideas for each section, then shared out as I added their thoughts onto the chart. My teachers loved this as a visual that stayed behind for them to reference!
Acting it Out
The next step is for me to get a couple volunteers to help act out a story I’m going to tell. I have it in the PPT and also separate as a teacher ‘script’. The two student volunteers wear character signs and I try to get them to act out what I’m reading whenever possible.
After I read about how each character responded to the pretend assignment, I project their assignment and give each table group a copy of the rubric and have them score the effort.
I ask some discussion questions once the stories are over:
- Which student does your teacher want in her class?
- Which student will achieve their goals?
- Which student is going to get a better job when their an adult?
- Which student will get raises at their job?
Processing and Reflecting
In my 4th grade classes, I needed to try and incorporate something about the reasons why students don’t give their best effort. I talked with some kiddos and teachers to get the most common ones, then turned those into sheets for students to practice helpful self-talk with. Students worked on these in small groups and after a few minutes, I asked them to erase what they had and then swapped the sheets around for groups to tackle different excuses and unhelpful thoughts.
The last piece to our lesson used to be for the students to self-evaluate their effort in class. This takes a lot of coaching! The best outcome is when the teacher joins me for this piece of the lesson to help students be more accurate. Even with examples of what best effort looks like, they still struggle to identify what they personally need to do differently in order to show more effort – they just don’t have this self awareness yet. I have one self-evaluation form that I use when we think the students can truly evaluate their general effort. The other one is for specific assignments, and I ask the teachers to direct the students to pull out a very recent assignment to look at.
The truth is that nearly all of the students want good grades and to give their best effort (they don’t lack the motivation), and don’t struggle from fixed mindsets, they just haven’t developed great schoolwork skills (reading the directions, checking work, ignoring distractions, writing multiple complete sentences, etc.) yet. This is the kind of lesson I do that is more about providing a knowledge base and common language – it takes consistent teacher reinforcement for behavior change in this arena.
2 Responses
Great job!
what is the next lesson after the thermometer and how do I access it today? I have a class tomorrow. The kids enjoyed the thermometer.
Hi Juliet! I often did a lesson Time Management after: https://shop.theresponsivecounselor.com/product/time-management-activities-bundle/
This resource shows all the lessons in the unit – the order is really up to your discretion: https://shop.theresponsivecounselor.com/product/study-skills-activities-bundle-or-group-counseling-curriculum/
Best,
Sara