Nudging Re-Write 1

I re-read my post about Nudging, and there is a LOT of I and me. The first paragraph has an I in every sentence.  Heck, the first sentence has three I’s.  Let me try rewriting it to be less me, me, me.

At my school we do the high stakes testing in the classroom. If you were a parent, where do you want your 9 year old to take their test? In the classroom where they learned the material, or in the gym with 100 other students?

This means every day during testing we are setting up computers, privacy folders, mice, headphones, and clipboards.  The students take a test.  Then, everything gets taken down and moved to a new location.

The problem is getting all the equipment back.  Even if you just lose one item per room per day, it adds up to a lot of money.

Headphones are the worst.  Each quarter we lose 150-200 dollars worth of headphones. Losing six hundred dollars a year on headphones is unacceptable. For that amount of money we could have a second STEAM Night!

After rejecting a few bad ideas (making people sign out for them separately, writing grumpy emails) I tried to think of a nudge.

I’ve never read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge.  I should. The Freakonomics Podcasts has a few good episodes on the subject. The general idea is figuring out what small changes you can make to have a high impact.

For my nudge I decided to make a headphone wrap.  The Wraps needed to be . . .

• CHEAP:  We made them with blue duct tape and blank PVC Cards.
• CONNECTED  The headphones can’t separate from the wrap
• Organized: They can’t come back as a mess.

After way too many models and google searches, I came up with t

his.

It seemed to do its job.  100% of the headphones were returned without me having to nag.  One was damaged (a student took off the tape), but that was pretty easy to fix.  Even when they were not wrapped perfectly, it was good enough to keep everything organized.

This nudge was for something pretty small, and frankly not earth shattering. I wonder how we could nudge student achievement.