In this post, I want to briefly discuss the use of competitions with younger students, based on my experiences as a language assistant in Spain.
I love having healthy competitions in the classroom. They increase student involvement and participation. During my first two years as a language assistant, I was placed in a high school. However, in my third year, I was placed in a different school, where I had a mixture of both secondary and primary classes. I quickly realized that I could not lead competitions in the same way with primary students as I could with secondary students. This was confirmed by my personal conversations with a colleague regarding our use of competitions in the classroom. Based on those conversations and my own experience, three separate, but related, main points are revealed.
First, younger students get much more invested in competitions than their counterparts in secondary classes. They love to win, and they hate to lose. In either case, they clearly show it through facial expressions, shouting, and sometimes even tears. Thus, it is extremely important to teach these students how to practice sportsmanship and to understand that at the end of the day, it's just a game to have fun and learn. In reality, there are no true winners or losers in these activities because the main goal is education.
Second, when you communicate rules and norms to these students, they won't let you forget, and you had better stick to them, exactly as you originally defined them. If you make deviations, you must be ready to justify them because the students WILL ask questions. In general, it is not a good idea to make deviations. You risk making yourself appear unfair and inconsistent. Students remember these things. Therefore, it is highly important that you remain as fair and consistent as possible during games, and as an educator in general. In addition, when you do have to make judgement calls, make sure that students already know that "arguing with the referee" is not an acceptable option. Make your calls, stick to them, and move on.
Third, be strategic with point systems. Sometimes it is best to let students count points on their own. In my experience, they seem to like that. That way, point numbers maintain a level of anonymity so that students are less likely to compare, and you are relieved of the responsibility of scorekeeper. I would also recommend against allowing students to actively cause negative outcomes toward their peers, such as taking points from another team of their choosing. One example of this is the Typhoon game that I've written about in another post. In this activity, teams pick boxes that contain either points or special abilities/power-ups. One is the typhoon ability, through which one team may choose another team to lose all their points. This can get heated really quickly with young students (and even sometimes with older students). To solve this issue, I decided to allow the team to roll a die in order to decide which team would lose points; that way, the team to lose points was randomly selected. This has worked well. Thus, leaving negative outcomes up to random chance is a much better option for competitions than allowing students to actively choose who receives and doesn't receive them. This has psychological roots, particularly the concept of attribution. When things are perceived to be caused by chance rather than by the actions of other students, the recipients of negative outcomes are most likely to attribute the outcome to random chance instead of the actions of other students (or even the teacher). Through my experience with Typhoon, the students seemed to be more accepting of the negative outcomes and less likely to quarrel with other students.
Another adaptation from the Typhoon game was changing the bomb's effect. (The bomb ability was something I added to the original game.) Normally, if a student or team picks a box with a bomb, that means that their score returns to zero. This usually incites the other students to laugh. However, with younger students, this laughter may cause those who receive the bomb to become angry and upset. Thus, to solve this issue, I changed the rule so that the bomb means that everyone's score goes down to zero. This way, everyone shares the same experience, and the bomb even becomes a fun part of the game for everyone.
Nevertheless, as a general rule of thumb, it's better to focus on rewarding points than taking away points, especially since you as the teacher are the one giving and taking points away. Any negative outcomes should be strategically considered before implementing them. This also has roots in psychology through the concepts of reinforcement and punishment. It has long been demonstrated that positive reinforcement (i.e., giving points) is much more effective than negative punishment (i.e., taking away points).
Although these points regard competitions with primary students, they must also be kept in mind with secondary students. As always, each group is different, so the teacher must analyze his or her students and adjust accordingly. In sum, it is the teacher's responsibility to provide the most rewarding experience possible during classroom competitions and the course as a whole, and applying these concepts can help to achieve just that.
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