Teacher Talk: Give that student a gold star

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Give that student a gold star

Teachers routinely use rewards and punishments in class to guide students to desired behaviors and even to recognize high scores in an assessment. Schools and teachers should stop. The basic premise is simple. If a student receives something desirable for an action, s/he will do it more and if that something is undesirable, s/he will do it less. The problem is the other things which happen.

Rewards and punishments are essentially the same thing. While a punishment is a negative reward, a reward is a negative punishment and every teacher has had experiences of a student or students collecting rewards in the form of punishments to classmates' cheers. The negative has lead to a positive outcome for that student, peer approval and sometimes even adulation, and thus creates an incentive to gain more. Instead of fewer silly comments, the teacher must now deal with increasingly more.

Rewards commoditize education and change the focus to the currency and away from the behavior. Again, every teacher who has used an early release from class has had students turn this into, "Miss, if I finish ten more questions, can I leave 5 minutes early?" The students are less interested in the learning than in the five minutes and will rush through the questions, often incorrectly and causing greater demands on the teacher than if s/he had done them more slowly and carefully. Or the student who produces a list of books s/he read to get five red stars, and cursory questioning shows s/he read little mre than the publisher's blurb.

What gets measured gets done, and anyone watching UK pensions or US mortgage mis-selling, will know this. FInancial "advisors" were paid commissions based on sales, and where producr "x" paid 5% and product "y" paid 10%, you can predict which product was sold, whether it was appopriate for the buyer or not. The result in both cases was an economic collapse and significant harm to those involved, but not to the "advisors".

I remember once observing a class when I noted a student look around to see if he was being being watched; he was by me, but he had forgotten that I was there and was looking for his teacher and classmates. Thinking he was unobserved, the student then smashed a classworks papier mache creation. When I looked in his file, I was not surprised to learn that his parents believed in corporal punishment and his mother had beeen recorded relating on several occasions how she smacked her children. Her punishment did not change her son's behavior or reduce his desire for that behavior; it taught him not be be caught and it resulted in slyness, and dishonesty.

Recently, the practice of awarding participation trophies has come under fire. The question of whether someone should be rewarded just for turning up is another matter, however receiving an award irrespective of one's effort, participation, success or even support for other players is an example of a reward gone wrong. Playing the game, being with friends, developing fitness should be the motivators and not a plastic copy of the Larry O'Brien or FA Cups.

Rewards are related to extrinsic motivation and as teachers we should be concerned with intrinsic factors. Students should behave well and treat each other kindly because that is the right thing to do. They should learn for the joy of learning, study so that they understand, write because they want to create. Education means creating people, and the people we want as a society should not be those who chase shiny objects.

**Please leave your questions and comments below*

Other perspectives

Condemn the transgression not the transgressor