Let's Stop Rewarding Expected Behavior and Restore Accountability
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that schools should stop bribing students for meeting basic expectations and instead restore meaningful accountability for misbehavior.
Key Takeaways
- Rewarding expected behavior sets the wrong standard - When students earn prizes for simply following rules, the baseline drops for everyone
- Bribing doesn't build character - External rewards undermine the development of intrinsic motivation and self-discipline
- Accountability is more effective - Clear consequences for violations do more to maintain standards than rewards for compliance
Transcript
I think we've got to stop rewarding expected behavior and restore some accountability for student behavior.
See, there's this idea starting a couple years ago that we could stop giving consequences because consequences are unpleasant and they correlate with, you know, worse outcomes.
Kids who get in trouble tend to have worse outcomes.
There's this idea that we could just reward the expected behaviors and then that would, like, do the job of accountability for students' behavior.
And I don't think that has worked out very well.
Let me know what you think about this.
But I think this attempt to reward everything and to give prizes for everything and to give snacks for everything and to just keep track of all these expected behaviors.
And if a student is not behaving well most of the time, we try to catch them in an expected behavior and then we reward them.
I think this just has a lot of unintended consequences that could have been pretty easy for us to anticipate.
And one of them is that often the kids who consistently do the right thing complain that it's other kids who are getting the rewards.
It's the kids with the worst behavior who seem to be getting caught doing the right thing the most.
And I get that we're trying to catch kids doing the right thing.
We're trying to encourage them.
But if this becomes basically just a bribery system, i'm not sure we're doing our students any any long-term favorite favors i think holding students accountable i think having consequences for students actions does teach them things long term is helpful long term but rewarding kids for doing what they're supposed to do anyway like how is that going to transfer in life because i understand how consequences transfer i understand how the lesson of consequences transfers to adulthood right like you understand that how you treat other people matters it determines what opportunities you get And you can't just do whatever you want in life.
There are consequences to your actions.
But if we're teaching kids a maladaptive lesson that the consequence of your actions is that as long as you stop doing the bad thing and sometimes do the right thing when somebody's looking, then you'll get a reward.
That's not how adulthood works.
works in any way shape or form so let me know what you think about this let me know what you think about these like software systems for giving out points and giving out rewards i like my instinct is that this stuff is just a massive waste of time in most cases like i think there's a time and a place for helping a student get their act together like on an individual basis, but not for everybody.
Like we don't need to be blasting points out to everybody for everything.
It's just a huge amount of time.
It's a huge distraction and it undermines the intrinsic motivation that's already there.
Let me know what you think.