Shared by Mark Warner during Patcham High's 15 Minute Forum

1. The Homework
Conundrum
How do we get more willing volunteers to
complete it?

2. Mindsets
Some students are in a fixed mindset:
• they will not complete h/w
• they believe they are incapable of reaching the next
level
• they are not willing to take the risks or do the work to
move them forward
• they lack confidence in your subject area
• they think that other students are clever and they are
not.

3. What’s your best strategy for getting
most students to complete h/w?

4. Would the following clip make you more or
less likely to pollute the environment?
https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=lR06-
RP3n0Q&noredirect=1

5. My morale-boosting yr11 mantras:
• You are not really upping your game here.
(I’m not going to up my game.)
• Please don’t forget that your homework is due in on
Monday.
(I’ll forget about this.)
• If you don’t do this you will miss out on the best grades.
(I will not get the next grades.)
• Get the work done now, don’t wait until the last minute.
(I’ll wait until the last minute.)
• Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your books or that you had
no time to get it finished
(I will forget my book, I will have no time.)

6. “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft
losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a
small piece at a time."

8. Psychologist Robert B. Cialdini about creating
social norms through the way we
communicate.
Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the
Environment
When we are trying to establish behavioural
norms in groups of people, it can often
“backfire to produce the opposite of what a
communicator intends.”

9. There is an understandable, but misguided, tendency to try to
mobilize action against a problem by depicting it as regrettably
frequent.
Information campaigns emphasize that alcohol and drug use is
intolerably high, that adolescent suicide rates are alarming, and—
most relevant to this article—that rampant polluters are spoiling the
environment.
Within the statement “Many people are doing this undesirable thing”
lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message…
“Many people are doing this.”

10. They displayed the sign,
“Many past visitors have removed petrified wood
from the Park, changing the natural state of the
Petrified Forest”
(With this was an image of three visitors taking
wood)
The percentage of wood stolen over a 5 week
period was 7.92%.

11. In contrast, when the sign they displayed read,
“Please don’t remove the petrified wood from
the Park, in order to preserve the natural state
of the Petrified Forest”
(accompanied by an image of a lone visitor
stealing wood with a red circle and bar
superimposed over the top)
Only 1.67% of the wood was stolen.

12. DESCRIPTIVE / INJUNCTIVE NORMS
Injunctive norms (involving perceptions of which
behaviors are typically approved or disapproved)
Descriptive norms (involving perceptions of which
behaviors are typically performed).
Much research indicates that both kinds of norms
motivate human action; people tend to do what is
socially approved as well as what is popular.

14. Results grid…

15. What do I now say to create
more positive, descriptive
norms?

16. • Everybody in the class has now emailed me their
first draft.
• I got 16 updated drafts mailed to me over the
weekend.
• I can’t believe that so many of you completed the
next question too.
• Look how well you are doing in the lesson
because you all made a start on this at home.
• I’m just waiting for three more pieces of h/w.
Thank you for explaining to me why I will get them
tomorrow.

18. Everybody is doing it
therefore I want to be
part of it.