A for Effort

Last school year after reading The Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano, I wanted to work on helping my students see the direct relationship between how hard they work and how much they learn. I chose this aspect of the book because my students struggle and strive each and every day to keep up with the fast paced curriculum in the general education setting. So I created an Effot Log with the purpose of having the students to reflect upon their effort in the lesson in correlation with the success they had in that lesson or improvement they made in their fluency scores.

When I arrive in the students' classroom, I first remind them of how greedy I am....I only have 30 minutes to work with them, and I am demanding their best for these 30 minutes. I also tell them that I am their biggest cheerleader and I always brag about how smart they are to all of the teachers I work with. We review the effort log (and if I forgot to give them a copy on Monday, they eagerly remind me of the logs!) at the beginning of the lesson. At the end of the lesson, they put their initials where they think they ranked on the log. I then have brief individual conferences with each student as to where I think they landed and I tell them specific reasons why I thought they landed on a certain spot. I was always amazed at how honest they were with their logs. The logs were used with 1st though 5th graders.

As I reflect back on these logs, I want to do a better job tying them in with leaning goals. So added a weekly goal statement. Often times, if it I see the students for reading, they have fluency goals, which we will put in the goal statement. I also have a challenge for them with their direct instruction workbooks. I can envision some students choosing workbook scores as a weekly goal. On Friday, when I do individual conferences, I would like to quickly review how well they did in regards to the learning goal.


Ok....enter my dreamworld.....wouldn't it be great if I could collaborate with the general education teachers and get them to implement this log with my students for another aspect of the school day. I am not saying each subject, just one area in particular....addition facts, science vocabulary....and track their progress. I would love to see if this is effective outside of direct instruction land!

The primary version has stars, smiley faces, and sad faces to help with the understanding of the different levels. Please feel free to use, cut apart, add to, etc. I would love to hear what you do with it and how well it does with your students!

***I know it is hard to see on this blog, but if you email me, I can send you a copy of the log!