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 ways to sabotage learning

Want to sabotage learning? Here are three ways:

1. Judge the learner. Whenever the learner does something, make sure to marinate the learner with judgement which includes both praise and punishment. Because grading can only ever be experienced as a reward and punishment, make sure to grade everything. You need not be worried about balancing praise and punishment -- because they are two sides of the same manipulative coin, they will both equally contribute to stifling the learner.

2. Rush the learner. On the macro level, make the purpose of learning a race to the finish. Convince people that the only reason you go to school is to get a better job than your neighbour in a globally competitive economy. Keep everyone frantically compliant by constantly reminding/threatening them that they might be falling behind. On the micro level, make classroom activities about finishing first. Time everything. In math, be sure to do Mad Minutes! and in all classes be sure to place a great deal of emphasis on due dates and late penalties.

3. Control the learner. Make sure the school schedule is designed with minimal input from the learner. Allow the learner to think they have a say in their leaning by letting them pick a couple optional courses but otherwise be sure to keep their input on what they learn and how they learn to a minimum. Learning should be fractured and compartmentalized so that subjects appear isolated, unrelated and irrelevant. Course outlines and curricula should be published by distant authorities and mailed to the schools. Lesson plans should be standardized by a PLC and laminated.

If, however, you wish to nurture and encourage learning, then consider all this as the anti-model.

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.

Withholding Learning

If a kid forgot his book, would we refuse to let him read?

If a kid forgot his pencil, would we refuse to let him write?

If a kid forgot his gym change, would we refuse to let him participate?

At what point is using learning as a reward or withholding the opportunity to learn as a punishment malpractice?

Why the why matters

If I told you that a student returned a lost wallet to the office or a foster mom drove her foster child to his 6:00 am hockey practice, what would think of these acts?

Your first reaction may be something that reflects approval. These sound like people who are doing good things for others; however, do any of these statements provide the people’s motivation for doing what they are doing?

And do you care?

What if I told you the student only returned the wallet because he figured out the reward was worth more than the contents of the wallet, or that the foster mom was only driving the foster child to hockey practice because she got paid mileage?

When you are privy to these individual’s motivations, does this change your impression of their actions? In each situation, these people are doing what seems like good things; however, we all know that people can do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

If we prescribe to use extrinsic motivators to gain compliance from students, we are really saying that we don’t care why people are doing things; we are willing to manipulate children with rewards, control through seduction, or punishment, control through fear. Despite this argument, some teachers and parents may suggest starting with the extrinsic, and then simply remove it. The idea being that the extrinsic is needed in order to initiate an interest in the student. But this doesn’t translate into anything but the ol’ bait-and-switch, and I think we can all envision the greasy, used-car-salesmen who probably invented this innately disrespectful tactic.

As a professional, I am convinced that the use of extrinsic motivators is morally objectionable, dehumanizing and a form of educational malpractice.

Education and Sports Analogies

Education can rarely be made analogous of other institutions or industries, because I believe education to be neither an institution or an industry. Education is life, or life is education. Take your pick. And yet I find myself hearing about and reading about how some creative (and some not so creative) people have come to reduce education to a sports analogy.

For example, I occassionally referee basketball on evenings and weekends. Tonight one of the players found himself in a bad defensive position, and rather than allow his opponent to score an easy two points, he decided to take the foul. I found none of this particularly thought provoking. If you watch sports (or play them) then you know that many sports such as hockey and football have similar instances. So we lined up for two foul shots. The foul shooter promptly missed his first shot, and one of the defending player's teammates turned to him and said 'good foul'.

Stop.

Think about that for a second.

Why did he say that? And why did he wait to say it then?

For those unfamiliar with basketball, let me explain: by taking the foul, and not allowing the player to score two points, the fouled player gets two free throws - each one counting for one point each. If the shooter misses one or both shots, they will have scored less than the original two points - had they been left unfouled.

Honestly, I am not okay with any analogy that comes from a sport that's rules openly encourages players to sabotage others to personally gain. Seriously, can you think of one instance in a child's learning where you would propose that it would be morally comprehensible to teach a student to sabotage another student's learning so they may gain personally? I would hope that we would encourage students to see their peers as caring allies in a collaborative endeavour, rather than competators who are forced to play a zero-sum game where there must be a loser fo every winner.

This is also a fantastic example of how Behaviourism can poison our interactions with others. The issue isn't whether it is right to foul another player - rather it is about the risk of punishment versus the risk if reward. How many of the important rules in life can you think of where you would feel comfortable with your child doing this kind of risk analysis? I would hope we aspire to a more reliable moral compass than that.


I'll admit that some sports analogies are good. For example, David Berliner does a fine job here, but for the most part sports analogies for education are typically baseless, too subjective, overly simplistic and misleading.

more to come,

Joe Bower