Rubber Duck Day

As grade 4 and 5 teachers, we often reflect on how to meet our students’ needs. After the COVID-19 pandemic, we noticed changes in our students’ attendance and problem-solving skills that seemed to be impacting behaviour. In response, we developed Rubber Ducking Day, and it has changed everything in our classrooms. While it was initially created in response to a need we saw in our students and our classrooms, it has grown into a deeply meaningful and powerfully positive mindset that centres on students as the driving force in their own learning.  

Our Concerns 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we thoughtfully encouraged students to stay home to safeguard everyone’s health, making school attendance optional. The directive, “If you have any symptoms, stay home to be safe,” was necessary. However, shifting mindsets back to prioritizing school attendance has proven challenging. We have witnessed an increase in absences for non-essential reasons that, before the pandemic, would have been rare: haircuts, family birthdays, sleeping in.  Low school attendance has a detrimental impact, eroding confidence and self-esteem. We observe that absences tend to trigger further absences due to anxiety and apprehension about returning to school. 

Post-pandemic, we observed another concerning trend: students readily gave up when encountering challenges within a new unit or subject. They quickly sought assistance and struggled to embrace failure as a learning opportunity. Whereas pre-pandemic, students seemed more able to engage in problem-solving processes, post-pandemic, students seemed to need immediate gratification and wanted to quickly find answers without the discomfort that problem-solving requires. For many students with high needs or Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), this manifested as an inability to self-regulate when faced with frustration, leading to increased classroom disruptions. Anxiety surrounding school attendance also escalated due to students’ inability to effectively manage stress and anxiety, even in situations involving positive challenges. This anxiety often seemed to perpetuate a cycle of absences or rapid fatigue, both of which hindered students’ learning to persevere in the face of challenge. 

As we contemplated solutions for these classroom challenges, we also questioned our emphasis on reading and writing in disciplinary subjects such as science, health, and social studies for assessment of learning.  By primarily focusing on texts and worksheets, we realized that may have been inadvertently excluding many students from effectively expressing their comprehension and learning. 

Our Idea 

“Rubber Ducking Days” were born from our desire to  create a day each week that students would actively desire to attend, dedicated to explicitly teaching problem-solving strategies and skills. We aimed to observe the impact of these strategies on student behaviour.  

During the 2022-2023 school year, we were part of the Canadian Playful Schools Network, (playjouer.ca) and had the opportunity to study the concept of playful learning with international experts and colleagues from across the country.  What we learned was that students need the chance to immerse themselves deeply in learning that is engaging and challenging, and to experience the satisfaction and joy in working on something hard. Computer programmers use a strategy when they experience a glitch in their code. They read each line to a rubber duck, explaining their work until the error reveals itself. The strategy was a great metaphor for the idea of students relying on themselves while working on something challenging, but also embodied the playful approach we hoped to create.    

A Typical Rubber Duck Day  

Two junior classes are doing hands-on work just before winter break. Several students are in a large multipurpose area preparing a presentation.  They have a slideshow on a screen and some are pretending to be in the audience while others are taking their responses to questions. Nearby in the library, a group has set up a studio and are interviewing each other about a homework assignment that involves learning new chores at home. Across the hall in a makerspace, yet another team is working with a green screen to create videos about their first-term learning goals.  In the hallway and classrooms, students are coding in Scratch, harvesting plants, updating portfolio websites, and asking each other to assess their work’s readiness to be posted.  The two teachers are walking through the spaces, documenting student work and asking questions. It isn’t quiet but the sound is like a buzz as students consult, negotiate, and encourage. Designed to support student motivation.  In his book Drive, Daniel Pink (2009) posited that there are three key elements that motivate people in their work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Rubber Ducking is designed to provide students with all of these. 
  

Autonomy Gathering with a song and acknowledging the previous weeks’ successes, students break into small teams to autonomously complete tasks we call “Maintenance” that support the greater school community.  These tasks include maintaining classroom gardens, working with kindergarten students, collecting recycling, creating a presentation for the class, creating a class yearbook, and maintaining portfolio websites.  This final task may be the most crucial. During this time, students update their website portfolios with work from Rubber Duck Day and daily academic activities. They also engage in a conference with a teacher, which is why all other tasks must be completed independently. This conference focuses on supporting students throughout their problem-solving journey, rather than solely on the final product. Four key questions are addressed: 

• What button are you working on? (This question promotes accountability for their button-earning time) 
• How’s it going so far? (encourages them to reflect on their chosen strategies) 
• What has been challenging? (This allows for the identification of challenges and the provision of strategies and ideas to help students overcome them.) 
• What do you need, or how can we help you? (This encourages students to seek support and foster new strategies for navigating challenges and collaborating effectively within their teams.) 

We also review students’ progress toward their individual goals. Finally, we discuss the focus of the next conference in four weeks: will a button be completed? How are the new strategies being implemented? This accountability, implemented without formal assessment, has empowered students to acquire valuable problem-solving strategies while holding them accountable for their tasks and goals. 

Mastery  When teams complete their maintenance they complete independent work “Button work” – where students select and complete increasingly complex challenges that are scaffolded to enable mastery.  While feedback and coaching are integral to student success, there is no quantitative element to assessment.  Rubber Ducking Day tasks are pass/try again. Students who successfully complete these projects are given a button during a class ceremony that they display on a lanyard to signal to other students that they are able to support them in completing these projects themselves. They begin with very clear and simple instructions at first, becoming more challenging and more student-directed as a student “levels up.” Tasks range from coding, video making, robotics, and other technology-driven tasks, to music, writing, and creating multimedia works.  When selecting ‘Buttons’, we strive to choose tools or tasks that students can subsequently apply in other subjects. We use the metaphor of building a house: on Rubber Duck Day, you get to practice using the hammer, drill, and saw. These days allow students to experiment with these tools in a non-assessed, collaborative environment that allows for mistakes and encourages perseverance. By practicing with these levels to demonstrate competency, you can determine when they are ready to use these tools to build the house. In our context, this allows us to pre-teach all the necessary tools and instill confidence when it comes time for content assessment, enabling us to assess content knowledge rather than their proficiency with the tool. Students post all their ‘Button work’ on their websites, where peers review their work against expectations, providing feedback and advice before submission. This has significantly altered our workload as teachers, allowing us to conference with individual students, while empowering students to take ownership and foster more natural collaboration and leadership opportunities. 

Giving and receiving feedback is another regular part of Rubber Ducking Day.  Everyone receives feedback (ex., two stars, and a wish) from their classmates when presenting, sharing a video or audio recording, or presenting a poster.  The feedback is always respectful and constructive. Students have also begun giving formal appreciation to classmates at the end of each Rubber Duck Day. This was a request from students who wanted an opportunity to celebrate students they saw helping others or experiencing success after struggle. 

Purpose  All of this culminates in a real-life goal of serving the community. In our inaugural year, we organized a film festival showcasing student films that focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We achieved this with the invaluable support of numerous community partners, including filmmakers! Last year, students created a walking tour of our small town by collaborating with archivists and volunteers. We sold plants and merchandise related to the tour to raise funds for Rubber Duck Day and our local food bank. This year, students are focusing on shopping locally, creating advertising campaigns in support of the small businesses in our community. Having a real-life, long-term goal provides students with a strong sense of purpose.  Reflecting on the building metaphor, practicing diligently, and then constructing a house for the community fosters a profound sense of pride. Students who developed skills in filmmaking, coding, creating multimedia work, songwriting, and artwork (as a small sampling of button projects) now apply this learning to a real-world project that contributes to their community.   

Lessons Learned  

1. When students work through their anxiety, they feel satisfaction.
   Students initially felt anxiety about some of the challenges we presented.  We have had many late-night and early-morning emails and calls from parents saying their child was upset or anxious about participating and they were planning to keep them home. Our response was always the same: send them. Let them feel the stress and then the joy of coming out the other side. When they did, the students reported every time, feeling a joy and satisfaction they had never felt before. The anxiety was caused by believing they could not, and reinforced by the protective stance of avoiding the stressor. Finding out they could be successful led to relief and pride. One of the most reported sources of anxiety was public speaking, and we have responded not by eliminating it, but by making it part of the regular rotation of maintenance jobs. If we have an assembly that week at school, the presentation team hosts it. This premise of confronting the fear openly and celebrating each approximation of success has created an environment that feels safe even when the tasks are difficult. 
2. Students benefit from modeling. We have consistently verbalized both the feelings of struggle and success.  By demonstrating our own metacognition, students have begun to do the same. They frequently say to each other, “That was so satisfying!” or mimic musician Craig Cardiff who worked with us and taught them to call out, “You’ve got this!” when classmates step to the front to present.
3. Collective struggle creates community. There is a feeling of camaraderie that they have developed through experiencing the struggle together. They have also had opportunities to see classmates in a different light. Some students who may struggle in traditional classroom tasks demonstrate considerable aptitude and success with coding or robotics, for example. Seeing a student who excels at reading and math asking for help from a student who may need resource help during the regular program but has mastery of these other, equally challenging, skills leads to students recognizing the greatness in all their classmates. All these feats together have helped students create intrinsic motivation that wasn’t there before when taking on challenges. 
4. Students benefit from structure, consistency, regular reflection and opportunities to set new goals. Explicit teaching of the learning skills, setting goals, and regular reflection and modification of goals, resulted in students who have a deep and nuanced understanding of their strengths and areas of growth as learners. Students regularly express their desire to improve in a specific area, set a concrete goal, and meet it.  Students will identify that they work best with some students who are not particular friends, or their need to work in a quiet space to be able to focus on their work more efficiently. Learning skills on report cards are evaluated and written collaboratively with students, and most are extremely accurate when identifying examples of growth and areas of need. Celebrations, too, have created a positive mindset and created a tight community of supportive learners. Theme songs that open an activity or bring us together to clean up help students initiate transitions quickly and happily. Ending with a community circle that allows students to reflect and share in a positive way as well as move to the next activity with a sense of closure. Now students have begun building their own rituals, such as a special rubber duck handshake, team chants, and sharing appreciation with others. This has helped students connect, express gratitude, and see the positive in each situation, in a manner both meaningful and lighthearted.  

To circle back to our original intent, attendance has improved tremendously.  In particular, on Rubber Ducking Day, almost none of our students are away (parents repeatedly tell us it’s their favourite day of the week.) We avoid being away too! We have rediscovered a passion for playful learning alongside the students and participate in a community of kind, hardworking learners who support each other and approach learning with joy. Why would anyone want to be anywhere else? 

Meet the Expert(s)

Leslie Mott

Teacher, North Gower - Marlborough Public School

Leslie Mott teaches grades four and five at North Gower - Marlborough Public School in the Ottawa Carleton District School Board. Leslie has been teaching since 1996. She has a shared passion for experiential learning, student driven projects, and developing relationships with community partners.

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Christopher Rowsome

Elementary Teacher, North Gower Public School

Christopher Rowsome teachers grades four and five at North Gower - Marlborough Public School in the Ottawa Carleton District School Board. Christopher has been teaching since 2011. They have a shared passion for experiential learning, student driven projects, and developing relationships with community partners.

Read More