Why We Work With Principals and Adminstrators

Many organizations provide professional development and consulting to teachers in an effort to improve classroom learning. Motivate Youth, however, goes beyond this and focuses on working with administrators and principals, whose continuing development is often overlooked. Interestingly, this is also a focus of the George W. Bush institute, who has commissioned studies evaluating the impact of effective principals. Here are some of their findings:

• Principals may account for up to 25 percent of a school’s impact on student learning. Among school-related factors, principals are second only to classroom teaching when it comes to impact on student learning. In fact, a 2013 Education Next report found that “highly effective principals raise the achievement.”
• A principal’s impact is even greater in high poverty schools. The impact on achievement can be even greater in schools serving disadvantaged students, according to the same article above, which means it’s even more crucial to attract and retain high-quality principals in schools where the need may be greatest.
• Highly effective principals can increase student scores by up to 10 percentile points in just one year. Research strongly suggests that principals are key to improving a school’s performance.
• 91% of teachers say leadership is key to improving student achievement. And effective principals recruit and retain effective teachers. Effective teachers – the most important in-school factor on a child’s educational success – tend to leave under ineffective principals, while poor quality instructors have been shown leave under high-quality school leadership.

Motivate Youth focuses on one key aspect of principal development: their ability to motivate teachers through assessment. Principals are under a lot of pressure to succeed, and that pressure often leads to strict, authoritarian, and intensely negative teacher assessments that discourage autonomy and personal growth. For teachers, this can be a motivation killer.

Instead, the best principals think of themselves as coaches, guiding teachers to adopt new strategies while respecting their input and autonomy. These coaching skills are rarely taught in any principal education program, so Motivate Youth is proud to step up and fill this critical need.

How Should Teachers Get Their Professional Development?

For a few years now, Motivate Youth has provided professional development for teachers and youth workers in a very typical way. We go to conferences or to individual organizations and give presentations. There are slideshows. There are stories of success. We do interactive activities and problem solving. Questions are asked and answered.

By the end of the day, teachers go home with a few new tools in their toolbox. It helps teachers a little, but is it enough? Is this the most efficient way to provide professional development? The center for public education has several key findings:

• The largest struggle for teachers is not learning new approaches to teaching but implementing them.    

• In order to truly change practices, professional development should occur over time and preferably be ongoing. 

• Coaches/mentors are found to be highly effective in helping teachers implement a new skill. 

The full report features cited research and makes an excellent argument. Professional development is most effective when it happens in their work environment, and is ongoing. This is one reason why Motivate Youth has a new focus on consulting. We want to train teachers and administrators where they work, integrating our expertise with theirs. Motivate Youth consultants are experts in motivation strategies, but teachers, principals and youth workers are the experts on their schools and their students.

In our effort to help teachers be their best, the professionals at Motivate Youth will act less like professors, and more like coaches. We think it's a strategy that can make lasting change.

Our New Website

Welcome to our new website! As we grow, Motivate Youth is undergoing some exciting new changes, and the redesigned website reflects that. It's our goal to make motivateyouth.org informative for those looking for education solutions. We specialize in motivational strategies to help create fun and productive classrooms. If you're a teacher looking for better relationships with your students, or an administrator who wants to build a positive working environment, we hope to provide what you are looking for!

Bratwurst Sale 2016!

The Bratwurst Fundraiser is back! This is your chance to buy some tasty brats and make a difference in the lives of Madison’s youth.

Motivate Youth is launching a brand new initiative called The Motivation Project. Our goal is to motivate 200 Dane County youth through one-on-one meetings with highly trained adults. Research indicates that these productive motivational meetings can help a student improve their behavior, their grades, and their happiness.

Every $20 purchase helps us pay for one more motivational meeting. That’s direct funding to help kids in our area, and brats direct to you from Smith Bros. Meats in Colby, WI.

There are three ways you can help:

• Buy brats online at www.motivateyouth.org/p/brats.html Brats can be picked up in Madison in June, or delivered to anywhere in Dane County.

• Download the Bratwurst Fundraiser Sign Up Sheet and bring it to your work. Just submit the order to aaron@motivateyouth.org at the end of the month. Brat orders over $100 will be delivered to your work for free.

• Contact aaron@motivateyouth.org to place an order.

Motivate Youth and The Motivation Project relies heavily on volunteers and individual contributions to meet our goals. Thank you for helping us build student motivation in Dane County and across the country!

Lessons Learned from #NAA16

Motivate Youth recently presented “Introduction to Motivation Interviewing,” at the National Afterschool Association’s National Conference in Orlando, Florida. It’s our most popular training, and at the same time our most unpredictable, because it contains a lot of unscripted role-play and improvisation.

As a presenter, the unscripted nature of the training allows me to learn as new problems are introduced. At the NAA training, a youth worker presented a problem where a parent was defending her child’s misbehavior. The parent believed the child instead of the after-school staff. The discussion between the staff member and the parent turned into an argument without a resolution.

This type of stand off happens, and there isn’t an iron clad way to handle it. As we explored how the conversation could have gone better, we made a key discovery: In the actual conversation between the parent and the staff person, the child was present the entire time. This probably shaped the entire conversation, and forced everyone involved to be a little less forthright.

Our trainings focus heavily on the futility of argument and ways to avoid it, but something we probably don’t emphasize enough is the importance of one-on-one conversations. Any time a third person is present, no matter who it is, we run the risk that the conversations won’t be in earnest. In our case, the parent may have been defending the child because the child was right there. It’s also possible that the child’s presence caused the tone of the staff worker to change, making the parent more defensive. Any time and extra person is present, many more variables are added, and that can impede efforts to resolve disputes.

Of course, one-on-one time is extremely hard to find in our busy afterschool worlds. Yet, if we really try, I believe we can make these one-on-one conversations happen more often. After all, nothing is a bigger time waste than a having an unproductive argument or a conversation that doesn’t lead toward resolution.