The realization that this is a huge undertaking has hit me when I think of how hard it is motivating people to do anything out of their normal day-to-day expectations. The real struggle became glaringly apparent how hard it was to motivate teachers in our district when we were asked to show up to support the negotiations committee by showing up to a board meeting wearing red. I thought there would be hordes of people, a sea of red, a sheer force to be reckoned with, but it wasn't. There were many that showed up in support of the negotiation team and the hard work put in to fight for our contract rights, but not as many as you would think. The level of return on investment should've been very high. This is our salary, insurance, and vacation that we're talking about and still, only about 1/3 of teachers showed up. SO, this gets me to the Capstone Project. How in the world are we going to get investment and teacher buy-in when there is zero return on investment? Incentives are great but we can't really offer anything of much value. Here is a digital badge, or sticker? Somehow we have to figure out a way to make it fun and easy to do. We have to get some buy-in from staff and hopefully encourage a decent level of competition and hopefully turn the spotlight on something encouraging during this bleak negotiation time.
Another struggle is the size of the group. It's tough to motivate a whole class to invest in a project. I like how we broke into smaller more manageable sized groups. From there we must rely on good faith that each group is holding their own and contributing to the success of the project.
I'm excited to see how this all plays out and to hopefully inspire some healthy competition among the grade level teams!
Julie,
ReplyDeleteI share your same concerns with motivating our staff! Although I think we had quite an impact, I was disappointed in the co-workers I noticed were missing last night. I hadn't even considered how that lack of participation may transfer over to our project. Yikes.