Introduction
Throughout the Spring 2016 semester, students were expected to volunteer at the Oasis Católico Santa Rafaela tutoring program, which located in a primarily Hispanic community with the goal of serving its local residents by tutoring children to put them on the same educational footing as native English speakers. During this volunteer work, I was exposed to challenges that I was wholly unaware of in a community that is far more underserved than I realized. I will discuss what I observed educationally from the students that I worked with and how those observations carried over from topics discussed in the course of the Education 2013 curriculum. Furthermore, I discuss some of the unique challenges faced by the “first-generation” …show more content…
Praise was a tool that I utilized, and judging by the reactions from the students, it was one that had a positive effect on them both from a productivity and self-esteem standpoint. It was visible when the students felt like they did a good job on an activity and doubly so when they were told. I wanted to make sure I praised students when they did well with an activity or homework. Morris & Zentall write that ambiguous “effort” praise (“great job” or “awesome”) gets the students’ motivation up without having the negative consequences that are caused when you praise based on a trait (e.g. You are a great musician). The ambiguous praise could even extend to things such as a thumbs up or high five due to the fact that society has equated those non-verbal gestures as meaning roughly the equivalent as “good job” (Morris & Zentall, 2014). This research was a little eye opening to me, but it demonstrated that students get fixated on errors when you trait praise as opposed to praise for effort as opposed to ambiguous praise. I used both trait and effort praising while tutoring, but the vast majority of praise given was for effort. From a future teaching standpoint, this is something that I will
Throughout the Spring 2016 semester, students were expected to volunteer at the Oasis Católico Santa Rafaela tutoring program, which located in a primarily Hispanic community with the goal of serving its local residents by tutoring children to put them on the same educational footing as native English speakers. During this volunteer work, I was exposed to challenges that I was wholly unaware of in a community that is far more underserved than I realized. I will discuss what I observed educationally from the students that I worked with and how those observations carried over from topics discussed in the course of the Education 2013 curriculum. Furthermore, I discuss some of the unique challenges faced by the “first-generation” …show more content…
Praise was a tool that I utilized, and judging by the reactions from the students, it was one that had a positive effect on them both from a productivity and self-esteem standpoint. It was visible when the students felt like they did a good job on an activity and doubly so when they were told. I wanted to make sure I praised students when they did well with an activity or homework. Morris & Zentall write that ambiguous “effort” praise (“great job” or “awesome”) gets the students’ motivation up without having the negative consequences that are caused when you praise based on a trait (e.g. You are a great musician). The ambiguous praise could even extend to things such as a thumbs up or high five due to the fact that society has equated those non-verbal gestures as meaning roughly the equivalent as “good job” (Morris & Zentall, 2014). This research was a little eye opening to me, but it demonstrated that students get fixated on errors when you trait praise as opposed to praise for effort as opposed to ambiguous praise. I used both trait and effort praising while tutoring, but the vast majority of praise given was for effort. From a future teaching standpoint, this is something that I will