Are children in control of their misbehavior?

When faced with working with children who are the hardest to like and educate, some adults like to pronounce that:

Children are in control of their behaviour. They choose to either behave or misbehave.

I've often heard this as a kind of Aha! moment -- as if this statement told us something we did not already know about a child who has difficulty navigating their day.

While it's true that some children in extreme cases may not be able to control their behaviour, this is far from the default. For the most part, every child is in control of their behaviour. But focusing on the idea that children are in control of their behaviours and are choosing to behave or misbehave can lead to a predictable and unfortunate mindset:

If we focus on the idea that children are choosing to misbehave and be unsuccessful, we might be tempted to frame this as a motivation problem which we believe can be solved with rewards and punishments. If we apply the right kind and amount of carrots and sticks,  we can make kids make better decisions.

It's at this point that I use some of Dr. Ross Greene's work to help me reframe this mindset. Like Ross Greene, I believe that children will be successful if they can -- this differs greatly from the mindset above which tends to believe children will be successful when they want to. The point here is that children don't go bad -- they get lost, and it's our job to help them find themselves.

My experience working in both a mainstream middle school, a lower socio-economic K-8 and a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit tells me that misbehavior is not the problem -- it is a symptom of a much larger problem that tends to get ignored because we are busy snuffing out the misbehavior. 

Like Ross Greene, I frame a child's difficulties not necessarily as a choice that needs to be convinced otherwise -- instead, I see a child's difficulties as proof that the child is lagging skills, and it's our job to help teach them those skills.

Are children in control of their misbehavior? 

Who cares. 

We are far better of spending our limited time, effort and resources using misbehavior as a symptom that helps us identify the lagging skills that are creating unsolved problems for the child and the adults in their life.

Rewarding & punishing students for test scores

An Orange County High School was using a student ID colour-coding scheme to visibly rank and sort students according to their scores on standardized tests. The Orange Country Register reports:

Kennedy High School in La Palma is requiring students to carry school ID cards in one of three colors based on their performance on the California Standards Tests – black, gold or white – plus a spiral-bound homework planner with a cover of a matching color. The black card, which is the highest level, and the gold card give students a range of special campus privileges and discounts, while the white card gives students no privileges and forces them to stand in a separate cafeteria lunch line.

There is so much wrong with this that I'm not sure where to start... but here goes:

• Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information. Psychological research tells us that there are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Not only are there two different kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic, but they also tend to be inversely related. That is, when one grows, the other tends to shrink. Because of this, adults have no business ever prying on their children's extrinsic motivation to learn. Also keep in mind that this was both a reward and punishment system; the absence of the reward is the punishment (the stick is hidden in the carrot). If we wanted to extinguish a student's love for learning, I could not devise a better program than this.

• Sometimes with the best intentions, schools end up doing questionable things in the name of raising achievement. When achievement is code for high scores and increasing achievement means nothing more than test scores are low make them go up, reward and punishment schemes like this are as predictable as they are destructive. Ultimately there are two problems with tests: right answers don't necessarily signal understanding and wrong answers don't necessarily signal its absence.  Because tests measure what matters least and often encourage a narrowing of the curriculum and test preparation, low scores on tests is nothing to be ashamed of and high scores are nothing to be proud of. So even if this colour-coded caste system scheme did increase test scores, this at best provides us with no useful information about the school and at worst tells us the school's priorities are about raising scores not raising children. In other words, the goal is as flawed as the method.

• The trouble with this approach is that it intensifies the damage our obsession with testing is doing. Anthony Cody writes about this on his blog where he explains that through branding and labelling a student's worth is literally defined by testsandgrades in such a way that the majority of the children are relegated to a subclass. Cody explains that the quality of a student's learning should never be reduced to a few test scores because the tests can't tell us what we ask of them. Real learning is messy - standardized tests are nothing if not infinitely tidy. See the problem? Or as Alfie Kohn puts it, "I've come to realize that standardized tests serve mostly to make dreadful forms of teaching appear successful."

• Those who decided on this policy may not know anything about eugenics or believe in eugenic principles, but this policy is what a eugenicist would do, under conditions a eugenicist would have endorsed. This is what David B. Cohen wrote about in his post Eugenic Legacies Still Influence Education where he makes the point that this ranking and ordering of students served absolutely no useful educational value. The stratification and segregation of students does nothing but endorse a caste system. While I can see why schools might want to educate student's on what a caste system is - this is not even remotely the same as suggesting we should immerse children in one.

• Campbell's Law tells us that the more any one indicator (such as test scores) are used for decision making, the more that indicator will suffer from corruption, therefore, bastardizing the very processes it was meant to monitor. We can bemoan this inconvenience all we want. We can play the blame game until we are blue in the face, but it won't change a damn thing. We can no more successfully ignore this social science law than we could ignore a law like gravity. 

Since this story broke, the California school district has chosen to discontinue some elements of the incentive plan including the removal of the colour-coded binders and student IDs. They also noted that the incentives of a public nature, such as different lunch lines, would be no longer used. While some may see this as a victory, I don't. The school district has already pledged to create a similar but less public way of rewarding and punishing their students via test scores. This tells me that the only thing they deemed inappropriate about their incentive program was that it was too public and they got caught.

I guess what I'm really saying is that bad stuff will return if it isn't rejected for being bad... and this is bad.

#edchat summary: March 23

Tuesday, March 23rd's #edchat focused on discussing how we can attract and retain more great teachers - leaders in education. The discussion touched a number of different topics such as merit pay, teacher preparation programs, job satisfaction, quality administration, standardized testing and accountability. Here is but a taste of the many comments that were made.

@web20classroom: @evmaiden: We need to examine what drives great teachers out of the profession -probably not just $ #Edchat

@jasonflom: Part of the challenge with merit pay is defining "Merit". Test scores alone are too simplistic and subject to too many variables. #edchat

@aldtucker: But merit pay can eventually de-motivate. If it leads to an if-then thing. If you do this... then you get that..@olafelch #edchat

@olafelch: @wmchamberlain It's a chicken and egg situation: with prestige you get good applicants. Without good applicants, no prestige. #edchat

@VanessaSCassie: People are trying to measure teaching with a formula when it should be approached as an art #edchat

I am very interested in this topic because some see the problem here as not a teacher shortage problem, but as a teacher leakage problem. And it might be even worse than we first expected. Not only do half of teachers quit inside of their first 5 years on the job, but we will never know how many great people choose to never even enter the teacher profession in the first place.

It is inevitable for this discussion to focus on teacher pay. Salary is an issue, but some people like Dan Pink (author of Drive) might say we need to pay people very well with a base salary, and then do everything we can to get money out of their faces. Pink's message may only confirm what some have known for 123 years - merit pay is a really bad idea. Abandoning merit pay may might make sense, especially if the Harvard Business Review is correct when they say that money or recognition for good work does not rank very high on employees' motivation levels. Instead, employees list progress as their number one on-the-job motivator.

Finland's education system is built upon a number of paradoxes that have helped promote a lot of trust and respect for the teaching profession - only 10% of the 5000 applicants are accepted to attend faculties of education in Finnish Universities. A lot of people in Finland want to be teachers; it might be important for us to figure out why that is. Would you agree that most North Americans have a ho-hum view on the teaching profession? How many of you mothers and fathers dream of your child becoming a teacher? Something is wrong here.

Unfortunatley, when we talk about teacher accountability, we innevitably end up talking about firing the bad ones. While it is true that some teachers should probably be let go, it may also be true that if we talked about how we can make good teachers even half as much as we talk about firing the bad ones, we might actually improve our education system.

You can check out the entire transcript here. If you want to participate in a future #edchat conversation, please join us on Twitter every Tuesday at 12 p.m. EST/6 p.m CET or at 7 p.m. EST/1 a.m CET.

A forever home for motivation

I consider this to be one of the most powerful anecdotes that I have ever heard that shows how important motivation truly is:

A foster child loads his hockey equipment and himself into the minivan with his foster mom. 6:00 am hockey practices come early.

Just as the foster-mom puts the car into drive to pull out of the drive way, the foster-child turns and says, "I think this will be my forever home." (In Foster-child lingo, a forever home would be the foster home they would never leave - their foster-parents would become their 'forever' parents)

The mom, being surprised by such a huge statement, turns and asks, "why do you say that?"

"Because you are the first foster-mom to take me to my hockey practices without bringing your mileage book."

Do you think it mattered to the kid why his foster-mom was taking him to the rink?