What if a child is manipulative?

When compliance becomes an adult's ultimate goal with children, we will resort to, and justify, manipulation, which includes rewards, punishments, carrots, sticks, bribes and threats.

So what's the problem?

Show me a child who manipulates others, and I will show you a child who has grown up being manipulated.

Not only does the end not justify the means, but a well intentioned, but misdirected, means can ruin the end.

Here's what I mean.

Many years ago, I made a conscious decision to try and abolish rewards and punishments from my teaching and parenting tool box. (Here are all of my posts on rethinking discipline)

The inspiration for this move came from being a miserable teacher, looking for change. When I read Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Children Deserve, I came across a quote that would re-shape my mindset for working with children. The quote belongs to Jerome Bruner, but it has become my teaching and parenting mantra:

"Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information."

There are many profound reasons to adopt such a mindset, but here's one of my favourite.

When my students or son and daughter try and manipulate me with bribes and threats or rewards and punishments to get me to do whatever they want me to do, I can turn to them and honestly say, "I don't use rewards and punishments on you, so don't you bribe and threaten me."

When I call children on their attempts to manipulate me, I don't get into power struggles or arguments because they know I don't use manipulation to get them to do what I want. They know that I don't do things to them to get what I want -- I work with them. I inspire them. I don't manipulate them.

So when they try and manipulate me, I have the best argument for rejecting their manipulation.

I don't manipulate them, so I won't tolerate them manipulating me.

And they know it.

3 reasons to stop rewarding and punishing children

Teachers and schools make thousands of decisions, big and small, everyday. Just as we would hope that our doctors and hospitals are making decisions based on evidence and research, so should teachers and schools.

Should schools use rewards and punishments on their students?

Here are 3 reasons why schools and teachers need to stop using rewards and punishments:

1. We want children to do the right things for the right reasons. Too often rewards distract children from doing the right thing for the right reason. Instead of being virtuous and doing the right thing regardless of whether anyone is watching or waiting to catch them, too many children (and adults) will do good only when they stand to personally gain -- then we lament about why some children (and adults) become grade grubbers, praise junkies and bribe bait. We can't teach children to do the right thing with carrots and sticks. We want children to share and adults to slow down in playground zones not because they might get caught -- and yet when we reward and punish children to do the right thing, we teach them to look over their shoulder before they do good or bad.

2. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.

3. To a child, an adult's praise and presents are cheap -- it's our presence that they value the most. There is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing children -- problems occur, however, when our recognition is manipulative and controlling. Too often the children we deem the most undeserving of our recognition and attention are those who need us the most -- too often rewards and punishments rupture our relationships with children. My teaching and parenting mantra is borrowed directly from Jerome Bruner who once said that, "Children should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information". This mindset lays the foundation for shifting away from doing things to children and moving towards working with them.

Further reading:

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Why we do What we do? by Edward Deci

Drive by Daniel Pink

Real assessment for learning

Most educators have come to differentiate between assessment OF learning and assessment FOR learning. (I actually don't - I differentiate only between supportive and unsupportive assessment, but that's a different post)

Assessment OF learning is typically defined as a summative evaluation that usually takes the form of a grade that judges a student after they are done learning.

Assessment FOR learning is typically defined as a time for formative feedback that helps students learn from their successes, failures, mistakes and misconceptions. This feedback is timely and informative in nature rather than judgemental or evaluative.

While it is true that the prospect of abolishing grading from school entirely may be controversial, the idea that we should never grade or judge students during formative evaluation is not up for debate. The point here is that grading practices have no place while students are still learning.

Some forms of conventional wisdom have teachers using rubrics to provide students with feedback during the assessment FOR learning process. As a classroom teacher, I have come across a lot of different rubric designs; yet, despite their differences, there is always one common denominator:

Every rubric I have ever seen involves the use of a fixed measurement scale. 

By definition, a grade is any attempt to reduce learning to a symbol. While it's true that these scales can be represented in a number of different ways (numbers, letters, descriptors, smiley faces, stickers, stars, etc) these reductionist scales are inevitably experienced by the student as a judgment. It's important to note that 75%, B-, and "proficient" have distinctions without a difference. A grade by any other name is still a grade.

While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that we should not evaluate and judge students while they are still learning, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. We often seriously overestimate the effectiveness of judgement and evaluation as a precondition of learning.

Assessment guru Dylan Wiliam puts it this way:

Grades cause an emotional reaction – either positive or negative. Feedback causes you to think and engage, which is reflective learning.

Alfie Kohn suggests:

Never grade students while they are still learning something and, even more important, do not reward them for their performance at that point.

Paul Dressel explains:

A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgement by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.

Jerome Bruner proclaims:

Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

A more profound statement than Bruner's about how children should be assessed is hard to imagine. Bruner's law provides us with both what we should not be doing while simultaneously suggesting a superior alternative to grading and manipulating students. Because learners can only experience grading and other fixed measurement scales as a reward or a punishment, they have no constructive role to play in the learning process. This is precisely why rubrics and their fixed measurement scales have no place place in assessing children while they are still learning.

In other words, we need to fight back the urge to marinate children in our praise, disapproval, bribes, threats, rewards and punishments and dedicate ourselves to providing children with nothing more than the information they need to improve.

Here is a Prezi that explains the three-step process I use as an alternative to grading and judging students in an effort to provide them with information they need to learn.

Formative Assessment on Prezi

While it is true that I use this to guide both my written and verbal interactions, the majority of the feedback that I relay to children is done verbally. The two-way nature of a conversation almost always trumps the one-way nature of written comments.

Assessment's latin root is assidere, which means "to sit beside". This is why it is critical we remember that assessment is not a spreadsheet or a judgement - it's a conversation.

Catching Kids

I think most of us can agree how utterly ridiculous it is to say to students:

Don't let me catch you doing that again!

Some kids might understand this as a warning to stop whatever it was that elicited the comment, but how many will really think to themselves:

Okay, I won't let you catch me next time!

Just like it's not what we teach but rather what they learn that matters most, how kids perceive our words and actions is infinitely more important than how we perceive our intentions. If you say something that you intend to be information for kids to think of in order to learn a lesson, but they perceive it is a punishment - then it's a punishment. Whether we like it or not, their perception is our reality.

We may be able to agree that threatening or punishing children to encourage "good" behaviour is not something we should be doing; however, coming to a consensus on the idea that we shouldn't reward them either, is an entirely different challenge.

Many teachers and parents subscribe to the "catch-them-being-good" strategy. Let's consider this stategy for a moment.

Alfie Kohn provides this description of rewards and punishments:

Rewards and punishments are not opposites - rather they are two sides of the same coin - and it doesn't buy us very much.

There are two themes to the coin analogy. Firstly, rewards and punishments are devices from a behaviourist's tool box. Remember B.F Skinner?  Secondly, too many people see rewards or punishments as the only two choices - this is a false dichotomy.

We should be thankful there are other choices because, as Alfie Kohn explains, there are serious problems with rewarding children to get them to learn, share or even be caring kids.

In general terms, what the evidence suggests is this: the more we reward people for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. Extrinsic motivation, in other words, is not only quite different from intrinsic motivation but actually tends to erode it.[3] This effect has been demonstrated under many different circumstances and with respect to many different attitudes and behaviors. Most relevant to character education is a series of studies showing that individuals who have been rewarded for doing something nice become less likely to think of themselves as caring or helpful people and more likely to attribute their behavior to the reward.

"Extrinsic incentives can, by undermining self-perceived altruism, decrease intrinsic motivation to help others," one group of researchers concluded on the basis of several studies. "A person's kindness, it seems, cannot be bought."[4] The same applies to a person's sense of responsibility, fairness, perseverance, and so on. The lesson a child learns from Skinnerian tactics is that the point of being good is to get rewards. No wonder researchers have found that children who are frequently rewarded -- or, in another study, children who receive positive reinforcement for caring, sharing, and helping -- are less likely than other children to keep doing those things.[5]

In short, it makes no sense to dangle goodies in front of children for being virtuous. But even worse than rewards are awards -- certificates, plaques, trophies, and other tokens of recognition whose numbers have been artificially limited so only a few can get them. When some children are singled out as "winners," the central message that every child learns is this: "Other people are potential obstacles to my success."[6] Thus the likely result of making students beat out their peers for the distinction of being the most virtuous is not only less intrinsic commitment to virtue but also a disruption of relationships and, ironically, of the experience of community that is so vital to the development of children's character.

We could learn a lot from people like Jerome Bruner who once said:

Students should experience their successes and failure not as reward and punishment but as information.

When we trigger the reward or the punishment, it is awfully hard for our students or our children to see us as a caring ally who is on their team - rather, it is more likely that they will start to rationalize the relationship as 'us' and 'them'. They see us as a judge in-waiting who holds the carrot in one hand and the stick in the other. All this completely contradicts Jerome Bruner's wisdom.

There is a big difference between working with children and doing things to them, and Coaches like John Wooden offer us an alternative to the behaviourist's coin. Wooden's athletes didn't need his judgement; rather, they needed his support - his guidance - his wisdom.

No longer are we bound to simply manipulating children's behavior.

If we are truly interested in something more than short-term compliance, then we need to seriously rethink whether we should be catching kids doing anything.