Carrots and Sticks: Part the Second: Rewards

Are rewards and promises of rewards - "carrots," in other words - really the motivators they're marketed to be? Are rewards and punishments the best way for children to learn and engage in socially acceptable behaviors?

Here's a scenario for you: students in a school are asked to bring in non-perishable food items for a food drive. I can totally get behind this: times are hard and food pantries are really running dry much faster than they have in a long time as more and more families need their services to keep their kids fed. As an incentive, students are told that whichever grade brings in the most food items will win a pizza party for the ENTIRE GRADE!!! *waving flags, big brass band sounds, maybe some cheerleaders*

Over the course of the next week or two, big paper graphs are hung across from the cafeteria where all students will be able to see the progress of their grade and the other grades as the piles of food add up. Every time a teacher or a volunteer gets a chance to count food items and update a grade's graph for the day, you can see the children's excitement building: OUR grade has the biggest bar! No, wait, the second grade is catching up! Oh, NO! But wait, we're still ahead! And look! We're catching up to that grade!  All on their own, kids are excited about, well, they're excited about the bar graph and what it shows. To the younger kids, say up to first or second grade, it's a competition to see who will need to add another piece of paper, or who will have the highest bar, or beat the other grades in sheer quantity of boxes and cans, but to most of them from third grade upward, it shows......who's going to get a PIZZA PARTY!!!! *more waving flags and brass bands here* Very few kids are actually thinking, "Wow, this is great, we're going to be feeding a lot of people and families who really could use this food." (A great big "teachable moment" is winging its way out of the school and away from the children here.....)

Carrots and Sticks, and The New Paradigm: The Background

Originally posted on Thursday, December 15, 2011

I first blogged about rewards and punishments on a friend's blog this past summer [the blog has since gone dormant :-(]; the mothers on the blog had written about their stance on corporal punishment, and I suggested a follow-on post about viable alternatives to spanking and smacking and ended up guest-blogging that week. Not only did I come out against smacking, but against rewards and punishments altogether. That post is pretty much the condensed version of the novel I've written below.

I've had occasion to be thankful many many times throughout the past 10 years of my life for circumstances teaching me so many things. The biggest part of my last 10 years has been parenthood, which in many ways has radically changed how I do, well, EVERYTHING - but in other ways it has also reinforced a lot of things I was already doing as a teacher and began doing instinctively as a parent until I let well-meaning doctors, teachers, and even friends and family get advice in there that made me second-guess myself. It wasn't until I recently found an old evaluation form from a school principal who evaluated my teaching probably 14 years ago, give or take, that I actually remembered some of my pre-parenthood philosophies and realized how true to them I had stayed - or come back to. LOL

I do think that now that I've parented a strongly introverted "atypical" gifted child and a strongly extroverted and also-gifted but more neurotypical one, I have many new insights into children than I did before I had any of my own. I'm also pretty sure that if I'd had a son, or if I had more children, that my parenting - and teaching - would be even different than it already is, so I do recognize that I don't have all the answers - just a lot more than I did 10 years ago (with a lot to go, I'm sure!).