Punished by PBIS Rewards
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how reward-heavy PBIS implementation actually punishes intrinsic motivation — the very thing schools should be building.
Key Takeaways
- Rewards undermine intrinsic motivation - Research consistently shows that external rewards reduce internal drive
- PBIS rewards create dependency - Students learn to behave only when rewards are available, not because it's the right thing to do
- Real PBIS is more than prizes - The framework was designed to include clear expectations and consequences, not just a reward store
Transcript
What's wrong with using rewards to incentivize good student behavior?
I think it's understandable that consequences are kind of unpleasant.
We would prefer not to provide consequences to students, and we would prefer to incentivize good behavior with rewards.
So it's no surprise that we're seeing a lot of platforms like PBIS Rewards.
Sometimes people use ClassDojo to figure out who should get rewards for good behavior.
But I think we have to remember something pretty fundamental about motivation when it comes to rewards, that if you use extrinsic rewards, we've known this for decades.
If you use extrinsic rewards for something that students are already doing, what happens is they lose their intrinsic motivation to do it, right?
Like if most kids are behaving most of the time, giving them a reward for something they're doing anyway is going to cause them to start to see that thing as not something they should do anyway, just because it's the right thing to do, but something they should do to get the reward.
In other words, we can turn intrinsic motivation into extrinsic motivation.
The reward actually ruins the intrinsically motivated behavior.
And Alfie Kohn wrote a book about this decades ago called Punished by Rewards.
And he's been talking about this theme for years and years.
There's just extremely strong evidence that rewards are a bad idea whenever people are already motivated to do something.
Now, in very specific cases, you might have a behavior plan where you are working with a student who is not motivated, who does not have that intrinsic motivation to do the right thing.
You might choose to give them extrinsic rewards and then over time fade those away.
so that once they see how intrinsically rewarding it is to do the right thing, they no longer need those rewards.
But what I'm seeing happen school-wide in an attempt to get rid of consequences, because we don't like consequences, we're trying to reward students for things they're doing anyway, and we're undermining that intrinsic motivation.
And at the same time, we're removing consequences, which provides its own kind of reward for bad behavior, right?
If there's no consequence for bad behavior, and you always get paid in some way with like a treat or a privilege, for good behavior like we've really messed up the natural intrinsic reward system for for good behavior that you know like for the most part students want to do the right thing students want to get along with people around them they want to make their their teachers happy and they need consequences for negative behaviors so that they're not incentivized to do those things because every negative behavior has some sort of you know benefit uh whether it's power or attention you know there are lots of benefits to bad behavior so we have to make sure there are consequences so that we're not unintentionally rewarding it.
But let me know what you're seeing in your school.
Are you seeing rewards that we don't need for behaviors that students are already motivated to exhibit and a lack of consequences?
Let me know.