The strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and workers can be rephrased as:
“Do this and you’ll get that”
While manipulating people with incentives may seem to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and does lasting harm.
Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn – the author of the book “Punished by rewards”, demonstrates that people do inferior work when enticed with money or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people’s behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run.
“Do rewards motivate people?” asks Kohn. ”Yes. They motivate people to get rewards.”
Does it mean that rewards are just as undesirable as punishment?
By virtue of being controlling, they’re likely to be experienced as disgusting in the long run. The reason is that while students would certainly like to have goody itself – the gift or money – none of us enjoys having the things we desire used as levers to control our behavior. Rewards are most damaging to the interest when the task is already intrinsically motivating. That may be simply because there is that much more interest to lose when extrinsic rewards are introduced; If you are doing something boring, your interest level may be at rock bottom
There are at least 70 studies showing that extrinsic motivators – including A+ grade, sometimes praise, and other rewards-are merely ineffective over the long haul but counterproductive with respect to the things that concerns us most like desire to learn, commitment to good values and so on.
Another group of studies shows that when people are offered a reward for doing s task that involves some degree of problem solving or creativity-or for doing it well-they will tend to do lower quality work than those offered with no reward
That seems so contrary to our everyday experience right?
Everybody is used to getting rewards and giving them. Educators think it’s only right to give rewards; kids who do good things deserve rewards
However, Alfie Kohn, presents an argument unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss.
Now the question is…
How can we expect all kids will find all the curriculum intrinsically motivating?
Though it is not realistic to expect intrinsic motivation from all kids.The author says, a given child is likely to be more interested in some things than others, but we’re not talking about putting something on the chalkboard and expecting kids to jump up and down and say,”I can’t wait to get this!”
Skillful teaching involves facilitating the process by which kids come to handle complex ideas – and those ideas have to emerge organically from the real-life interests and concerns of the kids. ”Which is bigger, 5/7 or 9/11?” Kids will say, “who cares?” But kids care very much about how fast they are growing. Within that context, the skills necessary to figure it out become interesting to most kids
What about praise? Because it’s not a tangible reward.
If you tell one of your staff members that he or she did a terrific job on something, are you giving a reward at that point? Positive feedback that is perceived as information is not in itself destructive and indeed can be and encouragement –helping people feel acknowledged so that their interest in a task is redoubled- is not a bad thing.
However, most praise given to children takes the form of a verbal reward, which can have the same destructive impact as other rewards: it feels controlling, it distorts the relationship between the adult and the child-and between the child and his peers-and it undermines interest in the task itself.
So what author is suggesting instead of rewards and praises?
There are three Cs of Motivation:
- CONTENT – Our school environment also provided the content of the tasks that the children could do by having a three-year progression of lessons for the three-to six-year old displayed on low shelves. The work at school was meaningful to the children with practical activities such as sweeping, buttoning, cutting an apple, as well as learning letter sounds and shapes, reading, writing, spelling, number work, geography, music and more. Kohn quotes Herzberg, ”’If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do.”’ The classroom content was full of interesting and challenging work.
- COLLABORATION – Our classroom provided for collaboration, as children were free to observe each other at work, free to ask questions and free to move around. The children also knew they were at school to learn to do new things and be with their friends. The children were given basic rules of behavior on how to treat each other and the materials in the classroom and the consequences for not following those rules. Children understood they were at school to learn and work together.
- CHOICE – The element of choice in the classroom was a critical factor in creating an environment of achievement, thus leading to the children’s motivation to learn and challenge themselves. The children knew they were free to choose activities a teacher had presented. The children recognized they could work with their chosen activity all day if desired, without being interrupted or told to ”share” the activity with another child. Children were also allowed to ask for a new or challenging lesson. Kohn cites 47 studies that show that the higher the level of decision-making, the higher productivity and job satisfaction in a work environment. Choice created powerful learning in our classroom.
You show me a school that really has those three Cs in place-where students are working with one another in a caring environment to engage with interesting tasks that they have some say in choosing-and I’ll show you a place where you don’t need to use punishment or rewards
About Author: Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The author of fourteen books and hundreds of articles, he lectures at education conferences and universities as well as to parent groups and corporations. Kohn’s criticisms of competition and rewards have been widely discussed and debated, and he has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades and test scores.”