In reading blogs this week I stumbled upon something interesting. In "For love of learning" there was an interesting post. It was called “Treating Kids like Pets” the post talks about how giving kids bribes are manipulative and create a competitive nature among student. Where I agree is yes it is manipulative to say that if you answer this question and get a candy. But to me it is more along the lines of motivation. There are just sometimes when students will not answer and has a teacher we need to try and get them to answer. Yes there are probably other ways to get students to answer these questions however there is nothing wrong with being able to offer candy for an answer. Not all competition is bad I feel like this idea is getting blown out of line to say that it is built on mistrust and manipulation is wrong. It is simply a way to motivate students, yes in an ideal place it would not be but they are just rewards for answering a question that is all.
Since there is two different forms of motivation, I think it is important to emphasize which is most appropriate at what age, situation and place. I agree with you Tim, I do feel that we are not treating students like pets, but more so we are trying to get them to actively participate in the classroom community as much as possible. If candy is their type of extrinsic motivation and it works, then why not continue? I feel it is necessary to begin classroom management and contribution through extrinsic motivation because many students like to be able to see and touch the motivational reward. When the students begin to grow into middle school and high school, candy and little toy prizes may not cut it for the students to work hard. They will then need to be intrinsically motivation through self-reward such as being proud of oneself through grades and positive reinforcement through the teacher and staff.
ReplyDeleteBack to the 'treating kids like pets'... candy and prizes work with students in elementary school. Many parents use this as management at home, so many students come to school looking for the same type of rewards. It may not be the BEST way now but it works right now.
One of the things research tells us is that this form of "bribery" rarely has any correlation with long-term positive behaviors. For example, studies which have looked at those Pizza Hut or McDonald's reading rewards programs showed that these efforts decreased reading once the incentives were removed. Further up the line, NYC's experiment in paying students for good grades flopped completely.
ReplyDeleteSo the "incentive question" might be this - if you are offering rewards now, are you willing to offer equivalently valuable rewards throughout the student's life? If not, what is the long term plan?
- Ira Socol
Certainly, there are appropriate ways to go about rewarding students for positive, target behavior in the classroom--connecting to Ira's post, a teacher at State once told me that motivation is closely related to the "weaning" process, in that eventually the avaliability of extrinsic motivation and material rewards eventually must be stopped for intrinsic motivation to ever begin to develop within students. The difficult part of this dilema is that we, as teachers, must make an educated decision for each and every individual student in regards to where and when extrinsic mtivations must cease. This obviously depends on both their age and cognitive, academic, and social abilities/proficiences, so it would be difficult to argue that there is one "foolproof" 'time' or 'place' for these rewards to stop.
ReplyDeleteI agree Brian there are appropriate way to go about rewarding positive behavior. One way i see my CT do it now is that when kids are misbehaving she picks out kids that are doing well that day for recess or an activity that the students like. However what she does that I like is when student get made or are confused about why the did not get the reward she site specific events as to why. This I think for second graders is a great way to handle rewards and she rarely uses candy as incentive because like Ira said about the study once the incentive is taken away ambition goes down.
ReplyDeleteI have actually found that competition among students can help the learning community and be extremely positive if used in the correct way. I think it holds students accountable for what they learn. In my placement my CT asked me to quiz two students at a time on their math facts (multiplication) and I struggled to get the first group or two to get into it. During the third group I noticed that the two students started competing against each other and we started flying through the facts, each question becoming who could answer it correctly first. I took this and had all the other groups compete and now they beg me to do math facts! I didn't even have a reward to give them! I think that competition in a classroom is vital for success among peers and rewards are just another way to promote it. Obviously you would need to be cautious and not reward each and every little thing and be careful that the competition does not become too heated or a student does not ever win and becomes disgruntled, but I completely disagree with the "Treating Kids Like Pets" article.
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