The Blue Blog

During my second visit to Meadow Valley Middle School*, I finally had the chance to do some one-on-one work with Lynn*, a student in the sixth grade. I started our session by asking her about her week and what she had been doing, but while we were working on fractions Lynn repeatedly stopped to tell me more about her hobbies, friends, and family, and I felt that I needed to find a way to curb Lynn’s constant stops. I thought that, as a way of helping Lynn focus more on her work, I should tell her that if she continued doing the work we could talk about whatever she wanted at the end of the hour during the last few minutes before lunchtime. I thought that this would work as a method of reward because Lynn would be getting something she truly wanted, the opportunity to tell me about what she likes to do.

However, this did not seem like an effective method since Lynn continued to stop in the middle of problems to tell me stories. When I was first thinking about why this strategy was not working, I thought it could possibly be because Lynn saw the out-of-classroom time as the opportunity to stop doing schoolwork and to just relax and take a break. However, after the tutoring session was over, I got another perspective from Lynn’s teacher, Ms. Smith*. Ms. Smith told me that Lynn craves one-on-one attention, especially since her home life is somewhat less than stable, and will use any opportunity she has to talk to someone who is giving her any kind of attention. This observation made me remember that, the previous week, Lynn mentioned to me that she has a big sister through the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program. Given this information, I think that Lynn might view me as another kind of “big sister” who is there to listen to her and talk to her about what’s going on more than viewing me as a teacher who is trying to assist her with fractions.

Another possible reason that my reward strategy didn’t work could be that Lynn has low self-efficacy when it comes to math. She mentioned to me that she doesn’t like math much because it is hard, so if she feels like she has had low success she may be avoiding the work in order to avoid possible failure. If her motivation is avoidance, my reward of time to talk at the end of the hour would not be motivating for her and would give her no reason to stop interrupting the lesson. However, when Lynn did make it through a problem, her answer was very often correct. Knowing this, perhaps it would have been more effective if I had tried to think of a way to scaffold intrinsic motivation for Lynn so that she can begin to find a ways to feel positive about her ability to complete answers successfully.

*These names have been changed.