The Recognition category of the scoring app is used to recognize individual students and/or a class as a whole. Most students love to receive recognition in front of their peers.
Individual Recognition
For individual student recognition, the app lists students in a random order. Choose the first 2 – 4 eligible students for either a Gold, Silver, or Bronze “Effort Award”. To be eligible for an Effort Award, students must have recent strong effort in both behavior and learning. To help you decide if a student is deserving, the app displays the average of the student’s three most recent scores. (The 3-score average is just a guide, so when in doubt, go with your own sense of the student’s overall effort.) To what extent a student has met your behavior expectations should strongly influence your choice of Gold, Silver, Bronze, or no Effort Award.
For Silver and Gold Plans, E4Effort will send a badge to the Student Portal of each Effort Award winner. The badge includes “Effort Shares” which can be thought of as a currency that students can accumulate and also spend. Effort Shares are not tracked in the free Bronze Plan. To learn more about Recognition and Effort Shares, see Recognition for Silver and Gold plans.
If you are sticking with the free Bronze Plan, in lieu of badges, you may want to give recognition winners a small Effort Award certificate. Here is a template that you may use to print Effort Awards.
Notes:
- Effort Awards are reserved for Bronze, Silver, and Gold level Recognition. If you choose one of the “No Medal” options, do not announce the student as an Effort Award winner.
- When using Recognition, rather than selecting ”No Medal” for a student that did not meet the minimum requirement for a Bronze medal, you could just pass over the student to see if they can improve their effort and/or behavior on the following day. Give students three tries to succeed and lower their top medal color each time they don’t meet the Bronze minimum. To help some students succeed, you may want to quietly let them know that they missed their chance at an Effort Award yesterday, but you are giving them another chance during today’s class.
- Print Effort Awards in colors that are close to bronze, silver, and gold and let students know that to earn gold they will need to: 1) earn it on their first try and 2) show excellent effort and compliance with behavior expectations.
Classroom Recognition
Classroom Shares are used to motivate the class to work together like a team!
It is possible to run Classroom Shares on the Bronze plan but it will involve recording Classroom Shares each day, keeping the running total, and informing students of their progress. To see how easy Classroom Shares works with Silver and Gold plans, go to: Recognition for Silver and Gold plans.