By Ryleigh Jacobs, teacher on educational leave, Chilliwack
Picture a beautiful, bright middle school classroom, one that screams Pinterest on every bulletin board. Suddenly, a 12-year-old boy stands up mid-lesson and starts twerking while obnoxiously singing “Earthworm Sally.” His classmates aren’t sure how to react. Some laugh, some roll their eyes, while others look to the mortified first-year teacher frozen at the front of the classroom.
The naïve and overwhelmed first-year teacher in this scenario (yours truly) decided she was well past punitive solutions like detention. While diffusing the situation as best I could, I made a mental note to implement a positive behaviour rewards system as soon as possible. My guess is, we have all struggled with management issues and find ourselves somewhere on the continuum between punishment and rewards. Unfortunately, these two staples of classroom management are two sides of the same coin. While we have long touted that punishment is dismayingly ineffective at promoting the skills required of 21st century citizens, I believe it is time we realize the same about rewards.
When it comes to classroom management, it may seem like rewards do the trick by incentivizing students to effectively conform to expectations. Unfortunately, this is akin to slapping a Band-Aid on a wart: a short-term fix. Rewards erroneously shortcut the essential process of cultivating values in our students that can only be done from the inside out.
Research initiated by Alfie Kohn1 reveals that rewards are ineffective: people tend to revert to their default behaviour once reward systems are removed. Even worse, rewards tend to undermine the very thing we strive to promote as educators: instead of motivating students to learn, rewards motivate students to get more rewards. If the goal in our classrooms is to create effective communicators, critical-thinkers, and problem-solvers who care about the well-being of others, then a prerequisite is the removal of rewards.
I am not advocating for anarchy, nor am I intending to leave you in the dark, stifled by classroom management hopelessness. I am, however, advocating for something that might seem messy in the interim but is nevertheless holistic and emblematic of 21st century learning. One such avenue to achieve this is restorative practices.
Restorative practices is a relational approach to learning that aims to establish an inclusive, safe, respectful, and responsible classroom environment. As an alternative to traditional discipline, restorative practices invite students to consider their role within a community, encourage self-regulation, and teach healthy conflict resolution through structured time and activities. Simply put, it is a way of being and learning with others that closely reflects the First Nations principles in our reformed BC curriculum.
When we ditch the rewards and adopt restorative practices, we are forced to examine the social dynamics of our classroom and grow together. Living in a community is messy, and our students deserve to not only know this, but be equipped to deal with it too. In leveraging the mechanisms for social engagement rather than social control, we can offer the space and time for students to develop their potential and recognize their role in a dynamic community where belonging is not contingent on conformity.
Rewards demand that our students quantify each experience as they ask the question, “What will I get if I do this?” Restorative practices, on the other hand, invite our students to wrestle with the important question, “Who do I want to be?” in a way that celebrates, values, and challenges them within a safe community.
One leader in actualizing communities of trust, compassion and awareness in BC classrooms is the North Shore Restorative Justice Project (www.nsrj.ca/programs/schools-initiative). In providing a framework to build community and restore broken relationships, they effectively help all students to grow in a way that beautifully aligns with our BC core competencies of personal awareness, social responsibility, and communication.
Now picture a young girl stepping off the bus, angry and desiring destruction. During morning circle time, she shares about hardships no Grade 6 student should ever face. It took five months to get to that point of sharing: five months of vulgar language and mild violence toward myself and peers. Instead of shoving her peers in the halls, her go-to coping mechanism, she learned to regulate her emotions in the presence of her peers who had grown to respect her through restorative practices.
As forward-thinking educators, we are obliged to ask ourselves the following: how can we cultivate autonomous, critical-thinking learners if we continually insist that students act in prescribed ways based on reward systems? As such, I invite you to abandon the status-quo of rewards, and recognize that your true power lies not in student compliance but in empowerment of all students through restorative practices.
1 Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.