Early Start: EPIC Memo

I find motivation and reward the best part of learning and growing. Students learn best when they actually want to learn the content, go figure. So how do we motivate students to want to learn and grow together? Early Start: EPIC is just an extra thing that freshman have to do because they didn’t “test” well. Their desire to be here isn’t at a high level to begin with, so things like a Facebook group and quests instill intrinsically motivated students who want to learn.

Reading Jane McGonigal I found two concepts that really stuck out to me that relate to my passions of teaching and coaching: fiero and student-led teaching and help. There is no other feeling quite like fiero when competing in sports, playing a game, or accomplishing a difficult task. There is also great satisfaction when you teach someone something and they succeed at it. It affirms that the student knows the subject material and/or task, and gives them a fiero-esque feeling when what they say actually works. It feels like a team effort that is done completely on their own, with no “help” from a teacher. So how do we instill these traits into the incoming freshman at Early Start: EPIC?

From my past four years experience working basketball camps for Point Guard College around the country I have found many leadership and team building techniques that really exemplify what we are trying to do in our class. I have talked a little bit about them in class, but here are some exercises that I found very effective in creating self-motivation and student (athlete)-led growth and learning.

Commitment Statements: a writing exercise that allows students to form their own identity and to commit to a daily practice that will better themselves and others. For example, one student may write “I am committed to rewriting my notes 10 minutes after every Biology class.” Along with the writing of these statements, students are encouraged to share them with other students. It is not forced upon them, but voluntary. With participation, students break out of their shell and share when they otherwise wouldn’t have. They own their commitment and want to share who they are and who they strive to be.

Pods: We split the students into eight pods or groups of 8-10 with their pod leader. On Day 1 each pod leader was very “mom and dad like” and was with each pod for every downtime (breakfast, lunch, breaks, dinner, night). Each day we gave the pods more and more freedom to do what they wanted by themselves, but by giving them rules to abide by (e.g. you could go wander the campus but needed to be in a trio, group of three, and let the group leader know that you were going). This gave them more and more confidence and freedoms while instilling leadership qualities within the groups. This translates to our program in that freshman need to start fending for themselves. Life after high school is not handed to them, they have to go find things out and make things happen on their own. They are adults now.

Lastly, our activity called the Final Countdown. This is the “levels” I have shared in class. It starts with every pod/team completing a level 1 task, seemingly easy. But as they reach each new level and activity they must work together and the tasks become for daunting. Where more team building and learning comes into play is when level 8 is in play. Level 8 cannot begin until 4 total teams have completed levels 1-7 successfully. This allows teams that have reached level 8 to help out and teach the other teams how to beat each level. This is all done without the group leader’s help. Since this is the final challenge for the teams, they are on their own (much like real life) and they must use each other to complete the challenge. This can be adopted into Early Start: EPIC by having teams help each other out on each level as all teams are competing for one final goal. There can be a winner after level 10, but we want every team to complete through level 10 — this is where other teams will help as well.

These are some concepts that I think we can incorporate with the Quest idea. I believe that each team (or however we do it) must help each other out. That is where you meet new people and learn how to go outside your comfort zone to succeed in life. I have seen these concepts succeed with 150-200 middle schooler through seniors in high school and I can see with working with what we are trying to do in some capacity.

Brett Cauchi