The Rewards and Punishments Trap
It’s the beginning of a new school year, and while many teachers called it quits after last year, thousands of new teachers will be entering into their classrooms for the first time this month.
As someone who has worked with student-teachers at NYU and Columbia’s Teachers College–and as someone who is still young enough to remember the struggles of my first year of teaching–I wanted to share some thoughts around one of the most important pedagogical topics: classroom management.
First, the term classroom management is, itself, problematic–but I am going to use the term as it is a commonly understood phrase among teachers.
I was initially inspired to become a teacher after working with my now-mentor and close friend Dr. Ron Butchart of the University of Georgia. Ron, an education historian, got me interested in questions of philosophy: WHY do we teach the way we teach, and what hidden lessons do students learn from the ways that we manage our classrooms.
In his 1997 collection of essays entitled Classroom Discipline in American Schools, Dr. Butchart (and co-editor Dr. Barbara McEwan Landau) lays out exactly how classroom management is typically taught in schools of education–that order is, itself, an unquestionable virtue:
Contemporary behaviorist discipline and management regimes coolly reproduce and reinforce the technical, mechanistic relationships of contemporary technological production. The dominant modes of control arising from a market economy elevate efficiency, predictability, and order to the status of virtues.
Indeed, teaching manuals like the omnipresent Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) tout being able to create efficiency, orderly classroom through easy to teach tips and tricks (one strategy, for example, is called, “Make Compliance Visible”). As a new teacher in a tough school, this can be very appealing. One of the worst feelings in the world is having a classroom that is completely out of control. Many young people who were successful students in college confront the terrible feeling of failure, knowing that their kids aren’t learning much in a chaotic, dangerous classroom. And the thing is, these behaviorist techniques–in other words, training students to behave a certain way using rewards and punishments–DO frequently work in creating the desired behavior (e.g. order and compliance). But at what cost?
by Kenny Eliason via Unsplash
My belief is that these techniques of control lead to students lacking agency and self-control; it prevents students from developing their own internal moral code. Under a behaviorist regime, students view the teacher as a manager–someone they are in a power struggle with. And this is a completely reasonable response. Imagine if your principal or boss came into your meeting and commanded that everyone keep their eyes on them the whole time, or cold called you to answer the question. (For those of you outside of education, cold calling is the practice of calling on a student to answer a question randomly–even when they have not raised their hand or volunteered to answer.) Most adults would find such techniques demeaning–but these techniques are regularly used on kids.
Rewards and punishments teach kids that education isn’t about collaboration or questioning but about compliance and absorbing and regurgitating information. They take the joy out of learning–and these kinds of techniques are at least partly responsible for the loss of joy, the boredom, and the rebellion we see in many secondary classrooms. Dr. Butchart writes:
There is virtually no such thing as an unmotivated four year old; young children are voracious learners. Yet the schools are full of unmotivated ten and twelve-year-olds. The death of voracious learning may, of course, result from natural, genetic processes that drain a child of a desire to learn, though we have little evidence of such a self-defeating genetic propensity. More likely, modern life has constructed children’s lives in such a way that self-motivation is suffocated. Schools treat children much as wage labor systems treat workers, denying them control over the pace, direction, and quality of their own learning, rationalizing and technicizing the processes of learning, and treating children like expendable factors of production. When the treatment of children as alienated labor power, or, alternatively, as raw material, results in boredom and submerged forms of rebellion, schools respond to the behavior, not to the causes, and respond to it precisely the way the dominant form of labor mobilization responds to the behavior of workers–with threats and promises.
And this is why behaviorism is a trap. With rewards and punishments, students don’t actually learn how to behave–they learn how to get rewards and avoid punishments. And they come to resent the teacher and view their relationship with the teacher as transactional. To keep the classroom afloat, the teacher then has to keep using more rewards and punishments, which the students come to expect and without which they will not behave.
It’s not as easy as just getting rid of consequences, rewards, and punishments, though. And this is the mistake that I made in my student-teaching year and my first year of teaching–and it is a mistake I see other well-intentioned young teachers make as well. For the teachers who want an alternative to TLAC, they sometimes overcorrect and throw out all rules. For me, my student-teaching year and first year of teaching resulted in a chaotic classroom–and this is also bad. Students don’t learn, teachers are stressed out, and in some cases students’ emotional and physical safety may be in jeopardy. And I know many educators, especially after the disciplinary difficulties of last year–which were partly responsible for the mass exodus of teachers–may be seeking classroom management systems that guarantee order.
by Taylor Wilcox, via Unsplash
There are some important things to consider when setting up your classroom culture at the beginning of the year. First, remember that most kids have experienced YEARS of a behaviorist system based on rewards and punishments, and you can’t undo that learning in a day. It’s also important to consider your school’s culture–if you are the only teacher seeking to do restorative practices, it is going to require a LOT of deliberateness to help students transition into your classroom. Oakland Public Schools, which is restorative system-wide, suggests a four-year, gradual transition plan for schools hoping to get rid of punitive systems.
In the years since I have implemented restorative practices (to varying degrees and varying levels of success), I have found the extra time to be worth it. It helps students to regulate themselves and develop a moral compass that serves them more greatly after they leave the classroom. It helps them to solve their own problems, express their feelings, and advocate for themselves. Instead of working in a group because the teacher told them so, for example, they are doing it because they recognize that it is good to help out their classmates and that the learning process is valuable to them.
If you are hoping to start implementing restorative practices in your classroom for the first time, here is where I recommend starting:
First, start small. You don’t have to create a fully restorative classroom in your first year. In fact, unless your school is fully restorative, as a new teacher it’s going to be pretty much impossible to do restorative well on your own.
Spend the first month of the year getting to know your students and families and building trust with them. Some things I like to do:
Of course, a limited number of group building activities in the first week.
Positive calls/texts home: if a student does something good in your class, let their family know!
Invite students up during lunch or after school. I like to buy a big bag of the freeze pops or ice cream sandwiches that you can get very cheaply. Talk with your students and get to know them better outside of the classroom context.
Start every class off with a check-in question. Have students sign up for the check in question. You can sometimes do this as a whole class or a think-pair-share or as a small group. (This is great to do right after a Do-Now). Yes, even with high school students!
Co-create rules with students. Keep the list short and specific. You can frame it to students like this: Have you ever been in a classroom that was too strict? Have you ever been in a classroom that wasn’t strict enough? (Most students by high school have experienced both). Students are pretty good at telling you what they want and need!
But then, hold them accountable to the rules they agreed to! Most problems early in the year can be solved with one-on-one conversations:
“I noticed you were doing ____. Can you tell me what was going on?”
“We all agreed at the beginning of the year to ____. How can I help you get there?”
At the end of a unit, check in with the whole class. What’s working? What’s not? I like to do this as a big, whole class circle.
“Restorative” doesn’t mean without consequences. But instead of a detention where a student fills out a form, talk with the student! The consequences should be in service of solving the problem rather than just detaining or punishing them.
If you are hoping to learn more about restorative practices, these are four books I like (don’t worry, I’m not getting paid for this):
The first two books are very practical steps for beginning to implement restorative practices. The third is more philosophical and not explicitly restorative but is in general wonderful. And most of these books are available through the Internet Archive library.
The root of restorative practices is understanding that people are human–that we make mistakes and that mistakes are places to learn. The problem with behaviorist techniques is that they treat behavior management as a means to an end (order) as opposed to an end in and of itself (that behavior is important to learn and not just to produce). In other words, we want to teach students to be good people–not just obedient. This is difficult work, and you are learning it, too, so recognize that you will make mistakes, and treat your own mistakes as learning opportunities.
