Everything works

Punish a child to teach him a lesson and he'll learn that you can use power over those weaker than you to get what you want.

Reward students for high testsandgrades or punish them for low testsandgrades and you teach children that testsandgrades, not learning, are the point of school.

Use multiple choice tests as your primary form of assessment and you teach children that in the real world you don't have to generate your own response to solve problems.

Frame learning as a competition and you force children to see their peers as obstacles to their own success.

Assign boatloads of nightly homework to children and you encourage them to see learning as this thing they just need to get done before they can return to their regularly scheduled lives.

Praise administrators for their district or school's standardized test scores and you push them to place pressure on their teachers to attain higher scores by whatever means available.

Mandate teachers to attend one-size-fits-all, "drive-by" professional development sessions and you teach them that professional development is something done to them rather than by them.

Catch children being good and you encourage them to be good so they get caught.

Everything "works". The question is: works to do what?

Adding to 10

Here is a game I use to help students with adding to 10.

I introduced this game to Jonothon, who I knew was a weaker student with some underdeveloped math skills.

The moment I said that I had a math game for him to play, his face turned white and I could see his anxiety level immediately skyrocket. Math for Jonothon is not something he would associate with a game.

But with some encouragement, he agreed to give it a go.

However, once he saw the game had a timed element to it, panic struck again. So I calmed him down and said that winning or losing the game meant nothing, and that I had lost this game more times than I had ever won. He took great comfort in my failure but was still hesitant.

With some further encouragement, he decided to give it a try; however, I could quickly see why he was likely so hesitant - adding to ten was not something Jonothon was very comfortable doing. So after watching him randomly shoot numbered balls all over the place, I got him to stop playing and grabbed a piece of paper. Together, we wrote down all the combinations for adding to 10:

1 + 9 = 10

2 + 8 = 10

3 + 7 = 10

We got this far when he stopped me in disgust, "No, no. I don't want to write it this way."

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't like how the numbers count down from 9 to 8 to 7. I want them to count up."

So he wrote:

9 + 1 =10

8 + 2 = 10

7 + 3 = 10

He got this far when he stopped and said, "Hey, wait a minute - these all add up to 10."

If someone could have taken a picture right then and there, you would have seen a giant lightbulb over Jonothon's head and a smile from ear-to-ear on my face.

Jonothon then went back to the adding to 10 game, where I watched him check his piece of paper (that he created) before ever shooting a ball.

But then something happened.

All of a sudden I watched him take a 2-ball and shoot it at an 8-ball without looking at his paper. Both balls disappeared. He turned to me, smiled and said, "Did you see that?"

I smiled back and said, "yes, yes I did."

I didn't need to praise him - my presence was enough. I didn't need to marinate him in "good jobs", he just wanted to know that I was watching, and I was.

It is precisely these kinds of observations - these aha moments - that teachers make while the children are still learning that are so important, because to be honest, there is no substitute for actually being there for these moments. This is the most authentic and direct kind of assessment educators do everyday.

What's really kind of weird is that more we try and quantify these kinds of aha moments, the more we squash them.

Lunch time came, and Jonothan was disappointed that he had to stop playing. Before charging his laptop to scamper off for lunch, he turned and asked, "Can I play more math games after lunch?"

To which I gave the only appropriate reply, "yes, of course."

If I don't praise children, what can I do?

My class went for our afternoon walk to the local park when upon our way back, we came across an elderly woman who was struggling with her purse when she dropped her cell phone.

When the phone dropped, I was walking next to Amber, who I've taken it upon myself to teach and model some rather desperately needed social skills. Once the phone hit the ground, I subtly turned to Amber to see if she noticed. She casually walked towards the phone, picked it up and handed to the lady.

The lady smiled back and said thank you. 

Amber replied with you're welcome.

I then had to make a decision - I really wanted to say something to help Amber recognize the virtue of her kindness. I wanted to encourage Amber to see how her act of good-will benefited not herself but the elderly lady.

You see, that's the rub. 

If I praise Amber by saying "good job", it's the equivalent of patting her on the head and throwing a mirror inches in front of her face - like the praise, the mirror would encourage Amber to focus on how her good-will benefited her. After all, praise from an authority figure such as a teacher is something that can feel awfully nice to receive, but I'll be honest with you, Amber is as narcissistic as she needs to be. She certainly does not require anything, such as praise, that would encourage her to think of herself anymore than she already does.

So instead of dropping the "good job" like the verbal tick it has become, I said, "did you see the smile on that ladies face?"

Amber looked at me with an ear-to-ear grin and said, "yeah, I did."

And that was all I needed to say.

The trick here is that rather than simply lathering on the praise, I invited Amber to reflect on how her actions made someone else feel. You'll notice that I did not ask Amber how picking up the cell phone made her feel - rather I asked how this act of kindness made the lady feel. This is important because I believe our motivations matter - in other words, it's not enough that Amber was kind. I want her to be kind for the right reasons. I want her to be kind because of how it will affect others and not because being kind will land her in the teacher's good books.

The point here is teach a kind of character education that encourages Amber to serve others because it will help others and not simply as a means to an end to benefit her own status.

Here is an invaluable chart that Alfie Kohn offers from his book Unconditional Parenting:

If the idea of removing praise from your interactions with children bothers you, I invite you to think about two things.

Firstly cognitive dissonance, an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously, is never convenient.

Secondly, when asked to rethink some of your most cherished pedagogical practices, consider what Mark Twain was on to when he said:

It ain't what we don't know that get's us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

For a deeper understanding of the pitfalls of praise:

Pondering Praise

Five reasons to stop saying 'good job'

Kids need our presence not our praise

Reward and Punishment vs Information

Kids need our presence not our praise

My daughter Kayley just turned three, and she has recently discovered that she can say "Look at me, dad!" and I will always look.

This got me thinking about what she's not asking me. You know she's never said, "Praise me, dad!"

I talk about abolishing rewards and punishments all the time with parents, teachers and friends, and it is amazing how we can come to some agreement over abandoning tangible rewards like medals, bribes like cash, verbal threats and punishments like spanking or even grounding, but if there is a topic we can't agree on it's the use of praise.

There are some great people like Alfie Kohn and Carol Dweck who write about this stuff all the time. I wrote a bit of a summary on the topic called Pondering Praise.

In my experience, praise is less for the kids and more for the adults.

Praise is cheap; hence why it doesn't buy us very much.

But the less time a parent spends with their child the more likely they might try and buy back that lost presence with something like praise.

Our children need us to work with them. Play with them. Notice them. Be with them.

What the kids need is our presence not our praise.

Praising Effort vs Ability

Carol Dweck is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading researchers in the fields of personality, social psychology and developmental psychology. Her research has differentiated between two kinds of praise. Praising the child for their intelligence – “You must be smart at this” and praising the child for their effort – “You must have worked really hard”. In a study that Dweck conducted multiple times (because the results were almost unbelievable) two groups of students were given a task. One group was praised for their ability while the other was praised for their effort. Before being given any praise, the two groups were indistinguishable; however, after the praise was applied the two groups began to differ. When given another opportunity, the students who were praised for their ability seemed intimidated by a challenging task and overwhelmingly preferred an easier second task; whereas ninety percent of the students who were praised for their effort wanted the challenging, more difficult second task so they could advance their learning. “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck explained, “we tell them that’s the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
When given a third opportunity to perform a challenging task, the two groups showed some similarities and some differences. Both groups performed poorly at the challenging task, but their response to this setback differed greatly. The praised-for-effort group proved to be far more resilient in their attitude towards the challenge. Despite their lack of success and frustration with the task, they proved to be far more willing to try different solutions and give it a go. However, Dweck explained “But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren’t smart.”

As if the results from this experiment weren’t enough to make us question our use of praise, Dweck had both groups do a task similar to the difficulty level of the initial test. The praised-for-effort group showed a 30 percent improvement, while the praised-for-ability group’s score actually plunged 20 percent. When both groups were asked to share their scores with others, “almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores. And always in one direction.” Dweck concluded, “What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”

Dweck’s book Mindset goes on to show the difference between students who have a growth mindset versus those who are stuck in a fixed mindset. People who have a growth mindset see their intelligence as something that is always growing slowly over time, and mistakes are opportunities to grow one’s intelligence. However, people who have a fixed mindset see their intelligence as a prefixed quantity and if you are smart enough, mistakes and failures just shouldn’t happen.

For an extensive look at this research read Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

This is an excerpt from a larger article I wrote: