This teacher sent a comment; he or she has figured it out. If the galvanic response skin bracelet will give teachers a high effectiveness rating when students are excited, there is an easy way to game the system and fool the bracelet:
Can this galvanic contraption distinguish between different types of excitement? Sometimes a beautiful new female student joins my class and the young men are visibly excited–about the girl, but not about my thrilling explication of adverbs. If I want to keep my job, do I have to hire supermodels to audit my classes to raise the galvanic excitement levels?
Creative teachers will think of many ways to get their students excited. Suppose you invite students to have a wrestling match in the middle of the lesson? How about bringing out the dice and play a game of craps? Show exciting movies?
Let’s hear how you would fool the bracelet and win yourself a high effectiveness rating.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Allow them to play video games on their smart phones under their desks, while I deliver my usual lesson. The excitement levels will be through the roof, and don’t worry; kids will adapt, and learn to be secretive enough to trick observers.
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Every five minutes, show one highlight for the previous night’s sporting event or ask a question about a celebrity feud. It’ll require me to actually reduce my teaching time, but the readings should have a nice wavelike pattern!
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Let’s have a dance competition at the beginning and ending of every class. It’ll be “So You Think You Can Dance: School GRS Bracelet Edition”. We’ll all learn the latest B-boy dance moves, and tie it into units. They’ll all be “Racing To The Top” with this one! Or what about watching a comedy special…anything Will Farrell, Steve Carrell, Adam Sandler…or how about those Medea sequels? That will keep them all “excited”! What a JOKE!
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Or one could invest heavily in those sugary treats the mayor has declared war upon.
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We can do what the moms on the show “Toddlers and Tiaras” do to keep their little pageant contestants perky – GIANT pixy stix.
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Show your students these photos:
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/12348565-montreal-naked-frenchcanadian-protesters-wow-grandprix-audiences
a lesson in civil disobediance, and, some other stimulating visuals, to boot
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Conditioned responses to bracelet wearing to candy distribution in the younger grades, homework exemptions in the middle grades and test grade dropping of scores in the older grades. The student would be trained to self learn this appropriate learning behavior and there by it would be a win win. which would show continued growth and would clearly be able to show value added trends demonstrated year to year. Collaborative planning would be highly favored and youtube videos of best methods would be available so that the most highly effective teachers could facilitate distance learning.
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Embed your own “commercials”. OK, this is not really gaming the system, because effective teachers do this kind of thing all the time these days, such as when they create raps to teach Math and English.
That wasn’t common place when I started teaching, in the late 60s –before Conjunction Junction, etc. In fact, a relative, who was teaching 1st grade at the time, told me she hated “that new show, Sesame Street” because, she said, kids had shorter attention spans as a result of it and expected her to be an “entertainer” due to it. In my observations, I’d noticed that children became more alert and attentive to the short segments on Sesame Street, which were like commercials for letters and numbers and had a higher energy level than other segments. I didn’t have a problem with being an “entertainer”, so I decided to embed such “commercials” in my teaching. I did this for decades, when I taught Preschool, Kindergarten and 1st Grade, using poems, rhymes, songs and finger-plays. (Previously, these had just been considered activities unto themselves. Nowadays, they are also used for transitions.) I used them throughout the day. I created a lot of them myself and developed a wide repertoire, at different energy levels. I found them to be very effective for regulating mood, attention and behavior, in addition to teaching concepts. (They were often task-related, but not always.) Although I never called them “commercials” to the kids, a student did pick up on what was going on once and said that he reallly liked “our commercials”.
I’m sure that most of you are already engaging your students, but if you want to find out what the research indicates, here’s one article to start you off (Small Groups!): http://www.nasponline.org/publications/spr/pdf/spr363downer.pdf
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Once you start figuring out how to raise your students’ engagement levels–not as parody–but seriously, then the designers of the galvanic response skin thingie have won.
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Good point. Sorry. (Had been up all night on coffee marking papers, but I should know when to stop.)
What I’d really like to do is, each time Internet Explorer and Windows freeze or crash (at least a half dozen times per day), make a conference call to Gates and have the class shout, “Your work does not meet our standards of excellence, and you are preventing us from progressing. Go mind your own business.”
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***Disclaimer-I would NEVER actually do this***
Set a bell to ring at random intervals. When the bell rings, choose a student (mostly) at random and scream in their face for a minute about the slightest thing they’ve done wrong. Not only would those kids be kept in a high state of excitement, never knowing when or to whom a reaming would be handed, but they’d be the best behaved kids in the school, which I’m sure a lot of charter schools would love.
Perhaps one could even create a bit of Stockholm Syndrome by some days being super nice candy teacher and being crazy screaming nutso teacher on others.
I mean, the fun/interesting/cool stuff wears off-kids get used to it and you have to keep upping the ante. Not all kids are excited or interested in the same stuff. But fear? Everyone’s afraid of something…
Plus, it’s a LOT easier to keep the kids afraid than engaged. I know one (as in, only one) teacher who is naturally so awesome that the kids hang on every word because “they might miss something.” I know a bunch more that try to be that way. But if it came down to keeping a job, keeping the kids afraid is a lot easier and I think that a lot of teachers that wouldn’t dream of teaching that way would do that if they felt they had no other choice.
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Scaring kids causes excitement that would likely be measured the same as thrilling them would. This is one of the worst ideas ever.
We already know that good teaching engages kids. Any visitor to a classroom who is paying attention can tell this without some kind of crazy Wii sensor being attached to people.
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This is a video that will instruct any teacher in America how to start any day of school. It is in accordance with the guidelines as bestowed upon us by Gates and was also approved by Bloomberg, Coleman, Rhee, Duncan as the model for the future of public education. This is not a brain wash, this is not authoritarianism, this is not corporatism:
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Finally . . . some inquiry-based science materials!!
I’d challenge the kids to figure out how the devices work and how to “game the system”. My 8th grade science students would be abuzz. They’d probably try attaching the bracelets to the class hamster (his metabolism usually registers as pretty excited). The kids would figure it and come up with incredibly creative ways to outsmart it!
http://www.makershed.com/Galvanic_Skin_Response_Kit_p/msgr01.htm
It’s about time the reform movement offer our kids a means to develop their innovation! Before this, we have been starved of any materials, resources, support, or time for innovation or intelligence.
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once the kids are all wearing the bracelets, teachers will do everything in our power to get ADD/ADHD kids in our classes. their bracelet data will be through the roof.
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Remove any posters that time classroom rules, then randomly and publicly scold students for no apparent reason. See if the increased uncertainty and anxiety registers as ‘engagement’.
Either than, of just run a mild current through their desks and chairs.
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This is a great program for encouraging student engagement. Painful, but no doubt effective.
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As with so many parts of life, this reminds me of an older Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-01-05/
Not sure if the metaphor is teacher and student or evaluator and teacher.
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Just start arguments over the kids’ favorite movie stars, athletes, or the perennial favorite…what’s better, Twilight, The Hunger Games, or Harry Potter?
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[…] This Teacher Knows How to Game the GRS Bracelet (dianeravitch.net) […]
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Let’s see. To keep younger children on the edge of their seats with horror (or maybe excitement), you could keep an adorable cat in a sack at the front of the class, and periodically threaten to torment it (“Finish your text-to-self connections, kids, or Fluffy gets it!”) That would certainly get my seven-year-old’s pulse racing.
The bracelet idea is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start with the rebuttals.
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