Rethinking Awards Ceremonies and Honour Rolls

St. Basil Elementary and Junior High School in Calgary has decided to end their year-end awards ceremony. Unfortunately, when stories about schools that are trying to make changes like this hit the media, the public can have a hard time suspending judgement long enough to find out what is really going on. (If you need proof of this, take a moment and read some of the explosive comments here.)

If it sounds like I'm in favour of the move away from awards ceremonies that's because I am. In 2007, I worked with my middle school to move away from awards for a few to recognizing all students.

While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that we should abolish awards ceremonies and honour rolls, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. Alfie Kohn reminds us that "There is a world of difference between getting kids to focus on their performance or achievement and getting them to focus on their learning."

Some people have a hard time grasping the rationale behind removing awards ceremonies, so let's take a moment and address some of the most common myths about moving away from awards.

Myth 1: Awards ceremonies and grades serve a purpose: they act as incentive and motivation for children to learn.

Many people believe that we need to bribe and reward students with grades and honour rolls to motivate them, in my book De-Testing and De-Grading Schools, I write about why this is folly:

Conventional wisdom tells us we grade students to artificially induce their extrinsic motivation to strive for the reward of a high grade, or to avoid the punishment of a low grade. Either way, it is the carrot or the stick that is the driving force. 

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 with high grades or threatening them with low grades, you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Grades can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement. If we give grades and our students are uninterested or disengaged, might it be because they are searching for a more intrinsically motivating reason to learn? I suppose we could use grades to artificially induce children to learn, but I would hope we could help them find a real reason to do so. Needless to say, playing on children’s extrinsic motivation to learn is, at best, a questionable practice.

The problem is not that too few students achieve As -- rather, the real problem is that too many students have come to see collecting As as the purpose of school. Things go very wrong when testsandgrades, awards ceremonies and honour rolls become the primary goal of education.

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do. Too often what we admire and aspire to does not align with our actions. If we really want children to become life-long learners then it makes little sense to distract them with artificial bribes and awards. 

Myth 2: Removing awards de-values academics

Replacing awards for a few with recognition for all is not about devaluing anything. In fact, it is about broadening our current narrow vision of what is important by valuing more than just grades in academics. Many honour rolls place an arbitrary premium on core academic subjects while placing less importance on classes that we call options (art, foods & fashion, wood working, etc.) This is about shifting away from valuing only student achievement (read: grades) and moving towards valuing a wide range of students' achievements.

For years, I organized and ran my school's awards ceremony and for years I found a disturbing trend: The same children who received accolades all year for their grades were being marched across the stage multiple times during the year-end ceremony. When you really think about it, grades are rewards and awards ceremonies are awards for getting rewards.

When we used to hand out traditional honour certificates to students, I would grow disheartened to find so many of the certificates left behind on the floor or even in the trash. Many students and parents did not value the certificates. However, when we handed out a personalized recognition poster that celebrated a wide range of students' achievements, including a personal message from their teacher, the students and parents showed far more appreciation. I never found any of these posters on the floor or in the trash. Sometimes I wonder if all students valued these posters because we chose to value all students in a personal way.

Myth 3: Removing awards celebrates mediocrity

What if an entire school's population made the honour roll? What would be the public's reaction? Would this be seen as good news? It's highly unlikely that the school would be given admiration and credit for this. It is far more likely that people would say that the school was being too easy on the kids. 

On the surface, it appears like awards ceremonies and honour rolls are about excellence -- but that's only if excellence is defined as raising standards until failures are created.

Honour rolls and awards ceremonies make success artificially scarce. The allure of winning an award or making the honour roll comes in large part because others will not be allowed to win or make it. If we aspire to making school a great school for all children, then we need to stop making success artificially scarce and exclusive.

When I ran my school's traditional awards ceremony, less than a third of the students were ever invited -- the other two-thirds were left out. When we moved to recognizing all students for their wide variety of successes and strengths, all students and their families were invited to the event. Some of the most thankful parents are those who have children who would never be invited to be recognized by their school's awards ceremonies -- in some cases that's three-quarters of the school.

Too often when schools get around to recognizing things like citizenship, these awards are artificially scarce which means that many students who exhibit good citizenship are arbitrarily ignored.

Why do we devalue something simply because everyone can achieve it? Do we wear dropout rates as a badge of honour? I would hope not. So why do we scoff at schools that celebrate every student? Recognizing every student is no more an exercise in mediocrity than believing all children should graduate from high school. It might be more accurate to say that mediocre schools give awards to only a few students -- great schools recognize all their students.

Myth 4: The real world is a cruel and unjust place where some people win and some people lose -- kids need to learn that the real world doesn't care about them.

I did not become a teacher so that I could merely prepare children to live in a cruel and unjust world. I became a teacher so that I could help children grow up and make the world a better place. Yes, the real world is full of competition that makes winners and losers out of everyone, but we don't need to immerse children in competition to learn this. When we teach children about racism, we don't immerse them in racism. I refuse to subscribe to the notion that because children will one day grow up and have bad things done to them that means we need to do bad things to them in school to get them ready for it.

The real world is not a fixed and known place -- the real world can be made and unmade by the people who live there. Too often, the real world is an excuse to do nothing about the inequities that rob children of their futures. I think there is some truth to what Sydney Harris said, "Anyone who begins to call himself a realist is prepared to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing." I refuse to live in a world that doesn't care about how children feel. And if the real world is that cruel and unjust then I'm going to fight like mad to make the real world a better place and I'm going to take my students with me.

***

Changing schools so that we promote high achievement among all students is not easy. Sometimes the greatest obstacle to changing and improving school is our memory. When some people say they understand what school should look like, they are really saying that they recognize what school was like for them. Too many people are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence.

That's why when we hear schools trying to make changes to what they've always done, we need to suspend judgement long enough to find out what is really going on, and in the case of abolishing honour rolls and awards ceremonies, the research and rationale are (maybe surprisingly) sound.

For more on rethinking awards ceremonies, I suggest you check out Chris Wejr's blog.

Here's my interview with Doug Dirks on The Homestretch:



Here's my interview on the Simi Sara radio show:



Here's my interview with Jim Brown on CBC radio The 180:

The folly of artificial and arbitrary recognition

I used to teach at a school that had a tradition around Thanksgiving. Every kid in the school was encouraged to run or walk around the school yard perimeter with their peers. We called it the Turkey Trot.

In the early years, we would record the times of the students as they crossed the finish line. It was deemed by someone that every student who finished the race inside of 10 minutes would receive 10% bonus on their physical education report card grade. The student who finished under 10 minutes were eligible to have their name placed in a draw for all sorts of prizes, ranging from free turkeys, movie passes, frisbees and assorted gift cards. The top three boys and three girls from each grade level were also identified and paraded in front of the entire population of the school.

All this was done, following the run, in an awards ceremony in the school's gymnasium for the entire school to see.

As I developed professionally and gained a more sophisticated understanding for the damaging effects of pitting children against each other in an attempt to win artificially scarce awards, I engaged in conversations with my peers about how we could improve the Turkey Trot.

If you were to ask any staff member why we were doing the Turkey Trot, most would have said something like this:

It's healthy to get outside and be active.

Over the years, I started to see a disturbing trend. Some students were very excited to participate while others were very turned off by the whole affair. Some of the keeners couldn't wait to run, while others were willing to risk skipping school, pretending to be ill, or even begged to do their homework in the library. "Just don't make me do the Turkey Trot," they would plead.

Upon closer inspection, I was able to categorize these two kinds of students:

The excited students thought they had a chance at winning. The avoiders thought they had no chance.

Through many conversations, I was able to convince my colleagues to allow all children who participated in the Turkey Trot to be eligible for the prizes and drop the 10% bonus. In short, I was able to convince them that these extrinsic motivators and manipulators were not why we wanted to encourage children to participate in an outdoor, fun run.

When we made these changes, it became a lot easier to honestly say to kids:

This isn't about winning or losing. It's about trying your best, whatever that looks like.

All was well, until one year someone was cleaning out the storage areas of the school and came across a whole bunch of very old, very lame hats. They were like the 1980s gas station ball caps you can find at garage sales for a nickel. I think they even had a pom pom on the top. The school didn't want them, so someone decided to give them away to the boys and girls that finished in the top three for their grade level.

Sounds harmless, right?

Maybe not.

Imagine this. While the top three boys and girls for each grade level finished their run, they eagerly took their hats. While the entire population of the school sat down in the gymnasium for the prize draws, there were two categories of students: the hats and the hatless.

As fast as they could be handed out, the hats became valuable status symbols. Having a hat allowed the students to elevate and separate themselves from the crowd. They were the winners; everyone else was... well, just everyone else, but not quite as good.

As I looked on, I could see clearly what we had done. I leaned over to a colleague and asked them to look at the crowd and tell me what they saw. At first, they didn't notice anything but a gym full of our students, but after a moment they too could see that by passing out hats to only a select few, the students were able to rank and sort themselves.

Don't get me wrong. Those who passed out the hats had no malice intent. In fact, I would go so far as to say they had the best of intentions, but as the old saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." My point here is that we need to be acutely aware of the unintended consequences that accompany our simplest actions. In this context, passing out an artificially scarce number of hats to an arbitrary number of students creates a kind of caste system. Keep in mind that the latin root of caste is castus which means "pure, cut off, segregated"and is etymologically related to carere which means "to cut off".

If we can agree that public education is for everyone and that competition is for the strong, then we have no business creating learning environments that are built on exclusion.

It's important to note that when the students exited the gymnasium, almost every single one of the hats were either left on the floor or placed in the garbage. Because their purpose as a status symbol had expired, there was no reason to continue wearing the hats.

After all, they were awfully lame.

Unconditional Recognition

Three years ago, I was a part of a committee of teachers who decided to abolish our school's Awards Ceremony. Rather than inviting only the honors students, and openly excluding everyone else, we decided to unconditionally recognize all of our students.

After we poll the students to find out what friends, interests and strengths they want on their poster, the teachers create them and have them printed in colour on nice photo paper. We host a breakfast recognition event in our school gym where every single student walks across the stage to shake hands with their teachers and receive a personalized recognition poster. Parents and family members are invited to attend.

As a middle school, we have three grade levels (6, 7, 8), so have three different designs that ensure the students don't get the same poster from year to year. Here are the three recognition poster designs that we created: (click on them to view larger)







While the old honor's certificate would perhaps precipitate a "good job" or a pat on the back from the parents, there simply wasn't much more interaction created by the certificate. At our old Awards' Ceremonies, I would fine dozens of the traditional Honor's Certificates laying around the gym floor - many simply didn't care about the certificate. Other than their name and a proclamation that they had received honors, there just wasn't enough on the certificate for them to care about.

In contrast, these personalized recognition posters encouraged parents to ask about the content of the poster:

• "Who is this friend?"
• "I didn't know you were friends with them?"
• "Why did you choose that activity to go on your poster?"
• "When did you go to the Columbia Ice Fields?"
• "What was your favorite activity this year?
• "I played basketball in school, too."
• "Looks like you had a lot of fun this year."

This is not simply a change in semantics: awards to recognition. This change in practice reflects a change in pedagogy.

Instead of using Awards Night and Honors as a way to artificially entice students to learn, we understand that all students should be recognized unconditionally. Some of the most thankful parents are those who have children who would never be invited to be recognized by their school's honor ceremonies.

Critics of this might suggest that we are de-valuing academics - to this I say that these recognition posters are not about devaluing anything, rather it is about broadening our current narrow vision of what is important. While the old-fashioned Honors certificates are limited to only student achievement, these recognition posters are about a wide range of students' achievements.

Critics will also say that abolishing awards ceremonies will only smother children in a cloak of mediocrity. To this I ask the critics why they devalue something simply because everyone can acheive it? Do we wear dropout rates as a badge of honour? I would hope not. So why do we scoff at schools that celebrate every student?

Recognizing every student is no more an exercise in mediocrity than believing all children should graduate from high school.

Traditional Honor's certificates are more about control through seduction and exclusive elitism while these recognition posters are more about unconditional, inclusive acceptance and recognition for all students.