Increasing Motivation: The Effort Meter

Does anyone have those classes that are super hard to motivate?  The ones where the idea of a zero is not scary and reason enough to to the work.  I do... {insert heavy sigh}

I have tried several motivational strategies (tickets, rewards, praise, punishment) for those students who would just not do their work.

In a moment of frustration {and slight craziness}, I stomped to the white board and announced 7 people did their homework last night and promptly wrote it really big in red expo marker.

Then I announced we were going to do a little math lesson.  We counted how many students were in the class, 31, and I wrote it under the seven.  As a class we talked about how to find a percentage and I had the students figure out what percentage of students did their homework last night.

 Just 23%.

They were honestly shocked.

I kept the number on the board and told them we were going to see if we could increase the number the next time we had homework.  And they did.  Thus, The Effort Meter* was born.

 What do you do to increase student motivation in your classroom?

Happy Teaching,


*It's called The Effort Meter because I got tired of students saying they were not getting close to 100% turn in rate because they weren't "The Smart Class."  I tell them over and over it has nothing to do with what they have coined "smart" and has everything to do with effort.