Episode Transcript

Today I want to talk about the use of rewards in the classroom. This is a topic that’s very close to my heart and I promised myself that it’s something I would discuss on my blog and podcast. I know I might ruffle a few feathers, but I encourage you to read to the end.

You may already be wriggling in your seat after that intro. But let me start by stating that I am not attempting to put down any teachers using any of these strategies that I share.

Teaching is really, really hard. I’m sharing my thoughts on this topic with the assumption that every teacher is doing the best they can for themselves and their students. We come to this profession because we believe in the power of education. I believe that teachers are professionals and that you’re the expert when it comes to your unique group of students.

I also believe that we are lifelong learners. And when we know better, we do better. To be completely transparent with you, I’m still working on some of the points that I’m going to discuss today. I’m not perfect, but I strive to do what’s best for my students. And sometimes that means taking a really hard look at what I’m doing and making changes.

So, here’s what you can expect. I’m going to:

• Dig deep into the role that rewards play in the classroom
• Highlight five common forms of rewards in the classroom
• Discuss some of the potential negative consequences to those strategies
• Share some possible alternatives

So, let’s just dive right in.

Types of classroom rewards

Praise

The first type of reward I want to talk about is praise. This is one that I’m really working on in my classroom.

There’s a lot of hustle and bustle going on in the classroom. We have to make sure all our learners are actively engaged in their activities. I tend to get caught up in focusing on that and when a student presents me their work, I might not give it the attention it deserves. Then, I say something simple like “good job” or “well done”.

I’m really trying to be more mindful in my classroom about what those phrases do, and what I really want to be doing. So, for example, when I’m giving praise, I really want my praise to be guiding my students and their learning. I want my praise to be giving meaningful feedback to help them make great choices when they’re doing work the next time. When I simply say “great job”, there’s nothing specific that tells them what they can repeat next time.

A better way to provide praise

Instead, I could take a moment, look through their work and try to pull out something that I would like them to repeat next time or something where I notice improvement. Then, I could say something like, “I noticed that you used a lot of details in your pictures. You must have worked really hard.”

This tells them details are important and that it’s something worth repeating next time. It also lets them know I’m acknowledging their efforts and to keep it up. This goes a lot farther than a simple “well done” or “great job”.

Focus on their effort and accomplishments

Another thing to remember when giving praise is to focus on their efforts and accomplishments instead of their ability. There’s a really great research study that showed when we praise students based on ability, it can actually reduce their willingness to take risks. And, that’s the opposite of what we want.

However, when we praise a student’s effort, there’s a much greater correlation to them being willing to take risks and persevere through challenges.

Use a one-on-one setting

I also like to make sure that when I’m offering praise to students in a one-on-one setting with students. It should make a connection and be meaningful from teacher to student.

Praising individual students in a larger group setting can often be used as manipulation. Let me give you an example because that sounds really scary and harsh.

Imagine I’m standing in front of my line of students and I want them to be quiet. I might single out a student and say, “I like how so-and-so is standing quietly and is ready for the hall.”

That praise was not meant for that student. All the purpose of that praise was to benefit me as the teacher. I’m using this child and the praise that I’m offering them to manipulate the entire group of students into adopting that same behavior.

This is harmful for a few reasons.

The first is what my students learn about praise through this practice. I’m not offering any true substance behind my praise. Instead, I’m feeding student insecurities. I am teaching my students to seek my approval, so they know where they stand with me. And that feels really wrong.

Also, I think praise, when used in a manipulative situation like this, pits students against one another. Essentially, it’s dividing my classroom and that doesn’t lead to any sort of positive classroom community, which you need in order to have classroom management strategies that are effective.

So, I’m doing away with praise manipulation in my classroom. I’m really trying to hold myself accountable because I feel that unless I’m really seeking out specific praise that affirms my students’ efforts and their accomplishments, and that lacks any form of manipulation, my praise is not doing the right thing.

Rewarding expected behavior

You may have heard me talk about this on my Instagram stories or read about it on my blog. But another thing I’m passionate about is not rewarding expected behavior.

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t reward expected behavior in my classroom. Ever. If the direction is line up quietly, I expect you to do it. If you remain focused during your math centers and you finish your work on time, that’s great. But you were expected to do it. If you explain the directions to your friend who was absent yesterday, thank you for being a kind friend. You are expected to be kind in this community and take care of one another.

And that’s not to say that I don’t acknowledge their efforts in their hard work. I really enjoy pointing out when students are doing well. And I know some behavior experts will say that’s a reward and positive reinforcement. And yes, it is, but I’m not doing that publicly and it doesn’t involve anything other than honest words. This is where I’m trying to draw the distinction.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a magical classroom where every child does everything right all the time. You’re talking about humans, not robots. And in my case, they’re little humans, so things go wrong all day. The same as every classroom out there. It’s just that I’m choosing not to reward my students for doing the right thing. It’s what’s expected of them.

It doesn’t mean I’m a bland and dreary teacher who’s opposed to celebrating. On the contrary, I feel that by not celebrating when we simply meet expectations, we can place our focus on when students exceed expectations. And, then encourage them to do that often.

So, what do we celebrate in my classroom?

I had an incredible mentor teacher. And when I entered her classroom, she showed me this little marble jar. On it was the phrase, “Bravery and smart thinking”. These were the two things in her classroom that students were earning an external reward for.

You might be asking yourself, “Bravery and smart thinking, what does that look like in a classroom?” My favorite part about this is that it looks different for every single child. What requires bravery for one child might not be the same for another.

Here’s what bravery could look like:

• When a student shares a lengthy account of their weekend when they rarely speak up during whole group lessons.
• A student reached out and made a new friend.
• A student accepted a challenge and persevered.
• If a struggling reader made it through an entire reading group session without saying the words “I can’t”.
• A student performed at a school concert even though they were too nervous.
• The whole class made it through state testing.

You get the idea. Bravery can look different for every student depending on what they are working on. Now, smart thinking can be a bit trickier. smart thinking can be academic, or social.

Here’s what smart thinking might look like:

• A student makes a powerful connection between something we’re learning in class and something they’ve previously learned or experienced.
• An insightful comment is made by a student into a social conflict.
• A struggling mathematician related addition to subtraction and was able to share their understanding with a friend.
• A student noticed a peer was having a hard time not talking to their friend at the carpet, so they offered to switch places with them.
• The conversation is driven to help everyone thing deeper on a topic because a student asked probing questions.

It’s very individualized, but very manageable because you know your students. You can celebrate all of these wonderful accomplishments together. So, every time a student exceeds expectations by demonstrating bravery or smart thinking, they got to put a marble in this teacher’s marble jar.

Now, I have the same marble jar in my classroom.

I keep it close to our morning meeting area because that’s where a lot of our whole group learning takes place.

When my students fill the marble jar with their smart thinking and bravery, I let them decide how we celebrate. We’re very democratic in our classroom, so we vote. I invite students to write their ideas of how they want to celebrate on the board and then we vote.

Oftentimes, it’s as simple as they just want to go outside and play a game together. Or, they want to be able to put the fireplace on the projector screen and bring in their pajamas and read in blankets with their stuffed animals around the fire. Truly it can be any type of reward that they want, as long as it’s meaningful and appropriate for your classroom.

A few things to keep in mind

I want to put a big footnote on this one and acknowledge a few points. First, I think it’s really important to note that many students don’t come in knowing what is expected. My kids come to school with varying school experiences and home experiences. And I always, always, always need to keep that in mind.

Some students also need significant and explicit modeling to ensure that they’ve internalized those expectations. It would be really unfair of me to expect them to do things that they don’t fully understand. It’s also really important to help students recognize how expectations can differ from one setting to another. So, I only implement these pieces once a student can demonstrate a complete understanding of what I expect them to do.

Finally, there are going to be students that require frequent check-ins to ensure that they’re able to regularly meet expectations. You’re going to have students that may have behavioral accommodations that include a reward system. And those trump my opinions about rewarding expected behavior every single day of the week.

Using food as a reward in the classroom

I believe that using food as a reward only teaches our students to have a very unhealthy relationship with food. It teaches our students to see food as something exciting, alluring, and attached to feelings of positivity and happiness. And, I don’t want my students to have that association with food.

I want them to have that association with hard work and endurance and perseverance. If the association is with food, I worry later in their life when they’re struggling and having a hard time that they’ll recall that relationship between happiness and food and look to food as the solution to finding that happiness. I know it sounds like a stretch, but there’s a lot of research that shows using food as a reward can have this negative impact on our students. I just don’t want to be a part of it.

It can also be unfair

But I also want to talk about how using food as a reward is also wrong in terms of it being unfair. As a student, I had to go through a few bouts of eliminating things from my diet to try and support my hyperactivity. I can say that when you can’t have sugar, or you can’t have certain things in your diet, and your teacher is offering it up as a reward, it sucks because you can’t have it. Or, you do have it and then suffer the consequences of having it which is probably getting in trouble because you had an excess of sugar, and your body didn’t know how to handle it.

I can also say, as a parent of a child with some pretty significant allergies, it’s always a worry of mine that my child is going to come in contact with a food that they cannot have or that they are going to be left out of something. Either way, it’s going to have a negative consequence. One is medical and one is emotional, and I want neither of them for my kids. So, I’m not going to do that to my students either.

In a nutshell, that’s my resistance to using food as a reward.

What you can use instead

There are so many other things that you can offer up as a reward for your students. I’ve seen all over Instagram teachers doing Flashlight Fridays or getting to play outside for an extra 20 minutes when it’s nice out. You could do pajama day. Find out what your students are interested in.

Public incentive charts

This can be anything from a sticker chart that monitors how many books or minutes a child has read or a clip chart that monitors individual behavior where students move up and down depending on how they are behaving in the classroom.

What I really want to take a close look at is what they’re really telling our students. I want us to think about if this system consistently rewards the same students and consistently penalizes the same students. And, what does that tell them? What messages are we sending?

Charts that celebrate achievement in the classroom

Let’s start with charts that celebrate what a child is achieving in the classroom and highlights things that they’re doing well. While I think these charts are meant to be celebrations and motivate students to try to achieve more, I’ve come to believe they’re problematic.

Instead of celebrating as a class, we’re celebrating an individual versus an individual. And, a lot of these activities are based on ability or what they’re able to be working on outside of the classroom. Knowing that each student lives in very different situations, these charts are celebrating things that might be completely out of the student’s control.

I don’t care how much community building I do around these public displays; it doesn’t take away from the fact that when it comes down to it, I’m pitting student against student.

Instead, I’ve created a chart where we put up the books that we’re reading. It’s in no way signifying that one student has read more than another. It’s just a whole group display of all the books we read. So, we’re still celebrating all of these wonderful books or all of these wonderful minutes that we have spent reading, but it’s a group celebration.

Charts can become a competition

By keeping out charts as a group we avoid them becoming a competition between the students.

When I was growing up there was a tooth chart. If you lost a tooth, you’d get to put a little tooth next to your name. It was meant to teach students graphing by tracking how many teeth they’ve lost over the course of the year.

I was talking about this chart with my mom recently and she reminded me that it inevitably became a competition between kids to see who could lose the most teeth. How ridiculous was it that students would come home crying because they hadn’t lost enough teeth and their friend had lost more.

It’ was completely out of the student’s control unless they started pulling teeth out with pliers. My mom said it would just seem so ridiculous to her seeing those types of charts in classrooms and knowing what the intentions were but seeing the impact was so different. What about those students that didn’t lose a baby tooth until the 3rd grade? They never got to put a sticker on the chart even though it was completely out of their control.

If you put yourself in the child’s shoes, you can see that it sucks. You never get to move forward on the chart, and you can’t personally do anything about it.

Am I being overly sensitive?

You may think that I’m being overly sensitive and want me to take it down a few notches. But I can’t. I have come to the conclusion, for myself at least, that regardless of my intentions with any reward system, I need to be very mindful of the impact they have on my students.

It’s my responsibility to either tweak them or revamp them in some way when they’re not working for the right purpose. See, it’s not about me. It’s about my students. All of them.

So, I want us to really be thinking about these systems. Who we are rewarding with them? And, who is constantly being penalized?

Classroom management systems

I want us to think about some of the classroom management strategies teachers are using because they’re struggling, and they need something.

Keep in mind as I talk about this, I’m coming from a place of being a former student who struggled and was often labeled because of my behavior. Some management systems and strategies feel like student shaming. I want us to really be thinking and reflecting on our choices.

Do our management systems have the same students being rewarded and the same students being penalized?

What does that tell the student who is always at the bottom of the cliff charts in the red? Instead of encouraging me to move up the chart, it just reinforced a negative image that I already had in my mind telling me I was a failure and would continue to fail. All the clip chart did was make that information public for all of my classmates to see.

I think these systems also do harm to us teachers and not just our students. I feel instead of being seen by our students as caring and empathetic people, we’re being seen as judgmental. They are seeking to get approval instead of seeking help and support.

Rewards that pit groups against each other

These can include pitting teachers against students or groups of students against each other. One example o this is when one table tries to clean up quickly or try to be quiet and ready to learn, before another table.

While I understand the thinking behind these types of incentives, I can say as a student who was on the receiving end, it did a number on my social standing amongst my peers.

I want us to think about little Jillian for a second…

And all of the other little Jillian’s out there. When it came time for reading, I often decided that it would be in my best interest to be a behavior and get kicked out of reading or have to take a break, then to have my friends laugh at me and find out that I couldn’t read.

Now, with the table point system implemented, I was faced with a really crummy decision. Was I going to have to behave, stay and fear being laughed at and ridiculed because everybody would find out that I couldn’t read? Or was I going to do what I always did and get kicked out to save face and not let everybody know I was stupid, but have my entire table be frustrated and not want me around because I was interfering with their ability to get points for their table and get a reward?

I usually had to face the fact that my friends were going to be upset with me and over time, that became a reason for people not to want to sit near me or to be around me. When table spots got moved, they would roll their eyes if I was at their table.

It’s not about shaming teachers

So, just hearing that perspective, I hope that I’m making it clear that I’m not shaming teachers that are using this practice. If you’ve never thought about it from that point of view, or you don’t have that experience to tell you that, then you wouldn’t know that there might be possible negative consequences of these incentives.

Now, you know and maybe you will rethink or tweak your program so that’s inclusive of the struggling students and not forcing them to make these decisions. I think the same can be said for incentives that have teachers against students.

Teacher vs Students

An example of this is when the teacher gets points on the board if the students are acting out, not behaving, or not meeting expectations, and the students get points when they are meeting those expectations, doing a good job, lining up quietly or whatever those markers might be for your classroom.

That feels wrong. Why would a teacher get rewarded for the class doing a bad job? Why are we looking to benefit as a winner when our students aren’t doing what’s expected? This one just feels like backward thinking to me. And, again, I understand the thinking behind it. But the message it sends is that teachers win when students misbehave, and I’m just not comfortable sending that message to my students.

Rethinking Rewards

So, I’m working on all five of these points and figuring out how to make my classroom management strategies really send powerful positive messages to my students about expectations and behavior.

Here’s a quick recap of ways we can reshape our thinking:

• Make sure praise is specific and focused on efforts and accomplishments instead of ability. Don’t praise in group settings as a way to manipulate other students into doing what you want.
• Stop rewarding expected behavior. We don’t want to teach students to be comfortable doing the bare minimum and expect a reward for it.
• Using food as a reward could subtly be encouraging a negative relationship with food. And, it’s unfair to those students that can’t, or shouldn’t, have that incentive.
• Think about who public displays of rewards are actually rewarding and punishing. Consider how to tweak them to celebrate entire classes while creating community.
• Think about the subtle messages we teach students when we pit teachers against students, or students against students, for a reward system and the social ramifications that come with it.

Thank you so much for taking some time to really think critically about how we’re supporting our students in our classrooms and allowing me to share some of my story with you. If you’re interested in keeping up with more messages like this, please subscribe to the Teaching with Jillian Starr podcast and follow me on Instagram.