Punished by Rewards - (Book) - Alfie Kohn

Punished by Rewards - (Book) - Alfie Kohn

Punished by Rewards

The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes

Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you’ll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train the family pet.

In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm.  Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.

Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people’s behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.

Step by step, Kohn marshals research and logic to prove that  pay-for-performance plans cannot work; the more an organization relies on incentives, the worse things get. Parents and teachers who care about helping students to learn, meanwhile, should be doing everything possible to help them forget that grades exist. Even praise can become a verbal bribe that gets kids hooked on our approval.

Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin — and the coin doesn’t buy very much. What is needed, Kohn explains, is an alternative to both ways of controlling people. The final chapters offer a practical set of strategies for parents, teachers,  and managers that move beyond the use of carrots or sticks.

Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished by Rewards presents an argument that is unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes: Kohn, Alfie: 9780618001811: AmazonSmile: Books - https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0618001816?tag=amz-mkt-chr-us-20&ascsubtag=1ba00-01000-s1100-win10-other-smile-us000-pcomp-feature-scomp&ref=aa_scomp

Punished by Rewards - (Book) - Alfie Kohn

Table of Contents

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Preface
PART ONE – The Case Against Rewards
1	Skinner-Boxed:  The Legacy of Behaviorism
2	Is It Right to Reward?
3	Is It Effective to Reward?
4	The Trouble with Carrots:  Four Reasons Rewards Fail
5	Cutting the Interest Rate:  The Fifth Reason Rewards Fail
6	The Praise Problem
PART TWO – Rewards in Practice
7	Pay for Performance: Why Behaviorism Doesn’t Work in the Workplace
8	Lures for Learning: Why Behaviorism Doesn’t Work in the Classroom
9	Bribes for Behaving:  Why Behaviorism Doesn’t Help Children Become Good People
PART THREE – Beyond Rewards
10	Thank God It’s Monday: The Roots of Motivation in the Workplace
11	Hooked on Learning:  The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
12	Good Kids Without Goodies
	Afterword 1999
	Afterword 2018
Appendix A:  A Conversation with B.F. Skinner
Appendix B:  What Is Intrinsic Motivation?
Appendix C:  The Behaviorists Talk Back

Punished by Rewards - (Book) - Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn: The Progressive Teacher’s Role in the Classroom: What Active Adult Involvement Does and Doesn’t Entail | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: The Progressive Teacher’s Role in the Classroom: What Active Adult Involvement Does and Doesn’t Entail | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: The Progressive Teacher’s Role in the Classroom: What Active Adult Involvement Does and Doesn’t Entail

According to Michael Harrington and many other scholars, a careful reading of Marx’s work makes it clear that he “regarded democracy as the essence of socialism.” Soviet-style Communism, by contrast, corrupted socialism “by equating it with a totalitarian denial of freedom.”¹ But, as Noam Chomsky has often pointed out, it served the interests of both the U.S.S.R. and the United States to pretend otherwise — that is, to equate the Soviet system with socialism, as if it represented the very apotheosis of Marx’s vision rather than a cynical misuse of it. The Soviets wanted to bask in the glory of Marx’s vision of bottom-up control and liberation from oppression, while the Americans wanted to make capitalism seem more appealing by linking the alternative of socialism to the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin.

I was fascinated by this paradox when I first encountered it — the idea that two diametrically opposed belief systems might embrace the same (faulty) conclusion for entirely different reasons. And I recognized it again years later when I saw something similar playing out in the field of education.

Traditionalists believe that teachers should have absolute control over a classroom: Adults know more than children do and therefore ought to make all the important decisions — setting and enforcing the rules, managing students’ behavior, planning the curriculum, dispensing knowledge, and so on. Groovy alternative educators, meanwhile, believe that children can be trusted to learn and grow and solve their problems essentially on their own, without outside interference.

Their prescriptions are utterly opposed. But both sides — direct-instruction behaviorists and Our Lady of the Fiercely Snapping Ruler, on the one hand; unschoolers and proponents of “free” CONTINUE READING: Alfie Kohn: The Progressive Teacher’s Role in the Classroom: What Active Adult Involvement Does and Doesn’t Entail | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats

In case you are not familiar with the cereal called Shredded Wheat, it is basically hay. Many of us who are members of the species Homo sapiens, rather than, say, Equus ferus, do not find hay appetizing, even when it is pressed into small packets and sold in a brightly colored box. This may explain why, in 1969, Kellogg’s introduced a variant called Frosted Mini Wheats, which made the hay somewhat more palatable by coating it with 11 grams of sugar per serving. (For purposes of comparison, Shredded Wheat has -5 grams of sugar per serving. Attempting to chew it actually extracts sugar from your body.) More than 70 million boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats are sold every year.

I would argue, however, that the relevant contrast to Frosted Mini Wheats is not Shredded Wheat but Cheerios. I love Cheerios. For many years I have patiently endured teasing — from my children and, before them, a series of roommates — about my prodigious consumption of, enthusiasm for, and loyalty to Cheerios.¹ Cheerios are simple, nutritious, and extremely tasty without the need to add anything other than milk, and even that isn’t entirely necessary.

I mention all of this because it recently occurred to me that the adjective “sugarcoated” appears in not one but two important books about education. Moral Classrooms, Moral Children was written by Rheta DeVries (who studied with Jean Piaget and, along with Constance Kamii and Eleanor Duckworth, was one of the key thinkers who worked out the educational implications of his theories) and Betty Zan. The book draws from Piaget’s distinction between “autonomous” relationships between adults and children, which are defined by mutual respect and cooperation in order to promote children’s independent thinking and moral growth, on the one hand, and CONTINUE READING: Alfie Kohn: Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats | National Education Policy Center

Anxiety over Pandemic Learning Loss (Alfie Kohn) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Anxiety over Pandemic Learning Loss (Alfie Kohn) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Anxiety over Pandemic Learning Loss (Alfie Kohn)

Alfie Kohn has been writing and speaking about education, human behavior and parenting for more than two decades. His most recent book was “Schooling Beyond Measure and Other Unorthodox Essays About Education,”

Anguish and even anger are entirely appropriate reactions to the fact that coronavirus infection rates are still too high in most areas to permit the safe reopening of schools. Not only do many of our kids miss their friends and the chance to make new ones, but school attendance also is a prerequisite for millions of parents to go to work. Also, schools provide healthy meals, which matters in a country with appalling levels of poverty and hunger.

The shutdown is bad enough. Must we also deal with the fear that children who are spending less, or even no, time in classrooms are destined to fall behind academically?

Not necessarily. The research that fuels dire warnings, which largely extrapolates from claims about “summer learning loss” (SLL), is much less persuasive than most people realize. For example, Paul T. von Hippel at the University of Texas at Austin looked carefully last year at a foundational study on SLL in low-income students and discovered he was unable to replicate its findings, partly because of problems with its methodology, such as a failure to adjust for the difficulty level CONTINUE READING: Anxiety over Pandemic Learning Loss (Alfie Kohn) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Alfie Kohn: The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful? | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful? | National Education Policy Center

Alfie Kohn: The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful?

Way before Waze, I listened to traffic reports on my car radio whenever I had to drive to the airport. Over time I came to realize that the information they broadcast was frequently wrong: I’d be caught in a jam on a highway that the radio had just told me was in good shape or, conversely, I’d be speeding along on a road I’d been warned about. So why did I find myself tuning in again on my next trip? Similarly, why do I keep checking weather forecasts to help me decide when to take a walk with a friend…even though I’ve learned that these forecasts, too, are not very reliable¹?

In short, am I really so addicted to data that I prefer misleading information to none at all?

This mea culpa is my way of reminding myself not to be judgmental about the following story, which I have told during lectures: It seems a group of teachers at a school in Florida were sitting in the faculty lounge, exchanging tales of woe about the state’s standardized testing regimen, grimly reviewing the ways it demoralized their students and impeded learning. As they were commiserating, the P.A. speaker suddenly crackled to life with an announcement from the principal: The school’s official test results from last year had just been released and they were much better than the prior year’s.

Can you guess what the teachers did then? They burst into applause.

I emitted a deep guttural groan when I first heard that story. After all, these teachers CONTINUE READING: Alfie Kohn: The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful? | National Education Policy Center