I was recently listening to a podcast about Richard Simmons, a fitness advocate and TV personality. If you know, you know. The podcasters described a section of his memoir in which he described a heartbreaking scene of attending a Weight Watchers meeting with his friend’s mom while he was in high school. At the meeting, members were weighed and given a pin based on whether they lost, maintained, or gained weight. You received a star if you lost, a turtle if you maintained, and a pig if you gained weight. The mother was reduced to tears when she failed to “make progress.”

While we don’t give out turtle and pig pins to students, we often give some version of stars for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s a sticker for behaving well, a pizza for reading a certain amount of books–remember Book It from Pizza Hut–extra free time for doing classwork. I’ve written before about behavior incentives, but today I want to focus on rewards or incentives for learning.

If you have ever struggled with losing weight or know someone who has, you know that there are a lot of factors involved and support needed to be successful. It’s not just a matter of getting a prize. 

Now think about what a challenge it is for some students to learn to read or complete a set amount of reading. What are the barriers they may face?

Consider the Book It program, you know, the pizza-for-reading scheme. Because I was an avid reader myself and didn’t understand the negative consequences of incentive programs yet, I signed my students up to earn pizza for their reading. What harm could it do? I always loved earning a pizza!

Here’s what happened:

1. Some of the kids who were proficient readers and had access to books completed the required number of books and happily received a pizza certificate. This was a small number.
2. Some of the kids who were proficient readers started reading books that were well below their reading level so they could complete the challenge more easily.
3. Some of the kids couldn’t complete the challenge because they didn’t have access to any other books besides the ones in my fledgling library.
4. Some of the kids that had difficulty reading didn’t complete the challenge because, well, it was difficult for them and they didn’t always have someone who could read to them at home.
5. Some of the kids that didn’t like reading still didn’t like reading and didn’t complete the challenge.
6. No kid that wasn’t already a reader became a reader or became more interested in reading because of the challenge.

For those students that didn’t have the skills yet or didn’t have the access or support they needed, the challenge was just another instance where they were made to feel like a failure. They didn’t get a turtle or a pig pin, but they had to watch other people receive their “stars” in a competition they didn’t ask to be in. Could the kids have opted out of the pizza competition? Sure. But kids can’t opt out of school itself. Instead of focusing on ways to “motivate” kids to learn, our time and energy would be better spent thinking about how to remove barriers to their learning.

What about an example created by the school itself and not a corporation? A colleague of mine works at a school where they decided to give the primary students that learned all of their high frequency words a special shirt. The assumption here is that these kindergartners and first graders would be motivated to learn their words more quickly if they could receive a prize. But what are the barriers for some of these students that are not within their control?

Here’s one more story to illustrate my point. I had an administrator that I loved dearly, except there was one thing she did that I could never get behind–staff attendance awards. Every month teachers who had perfect attendance would get a prize. It might be a breakfast burrito or a gift card or a raffle ticket for something. As someone with very good attendance you might think I enjoyed these incentives. I did not. It made me extremely uncomfortable to be seen with a breakfast burrito or have my name put on a public list. Why?

I knew most of my colleagues that didn’t get perfect attendance were hardworking and dedicated educators. They didn’t come to school for a variety of reasons: they were ill, their child or family member was ill, they needed a mental health day, they were having transportation issues, and so on and so forth. I recognized that I had the privilege of being childless, in good health, and the owner of my own reliable car. It was a lot easier for me to earn that raffle ticket and not because I was more dedicated. You can imagine that this didn’t help create a sense of community among staff either because it pitted the haves and have-nots against each other.

You might be thinking of some “Yeah, but what about…” statements right now. And there are definitely nuances to this whole incentives argument. However, I think one thing we can do as educators before instituting any type of incentive structure is ask ourselves these questions:

1. How does this practice affect the most vulnerable members of the community? 
2. What are the barriers that could get in the way of success?
3. How might I re-imagine/revise this practice? (If something is helpful to our most vulnerable students, then it’s probably helpful to all of our students.)

These questions are a modified version of those from my colleague Cornelius Minor‘s Imagination Protocol. I wrote more about it and school awards here.

I’d love to continue this conversation. Leave a comment, send me an email. Let’s talk about it!

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If you want to do a deeper dive, here are a few texts I’ve found interesting and helpful:

• Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. The 25th-anniversary edition of this seminal work was published a few years ago. 

• Better Than Carrots and Sticks by Smith, Fisher, and Frey. This one is more specifically about behavior.

• Drive by Daniel Pink. This is actually a video of Pink talking about the ideas in his book of the same name. It’s about what actually motivates people.

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