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April and May are filled with those
end-of-the-year awards nights and those award nights are a great opportunity to
recognize top performers. However, year-end award nights are
not enough. Providing reward and recognition along the learning journey is far
more important.
Reinforcing effort and providing recognition is among Robert
Marzano’s top nine strategies, yielding a 29 percentile gain. This
strategy is not just for that year-end awards night. Reinforcing effort and
providing recognition are authentic acknowledgements along the way that provide
incentive for learners.
Unfortunately, too many students think success is
linked to natural ability or luck. By reinforcing effort, educators can dispel this myth and learners can recognize their
own connection between effort and success.
Marzano suggests using symbolic recognition
rather than tangible rewards. Symbolic recognition does NOT include gold stars
or stickers—these are tangible rewards. One of the best examples of symbolic recognition
is a progress chart. The chart is even more effective when the learner keeps it
for him or herself. Learners can chart both their own effort and their own
results. Self-charting has a big Return On Investment in two ways: it shows
learners how much they are improving and even more importantly, it shows the
connections between effort and improvement and/or success. Some great examples of progress charts have been pinned on Pinterest.
Providing rewards is NOT a new idea by a long
stretch and neither is offering caution regarding artificial awards. In his
1993 book, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, IncentivePlans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes, Alfie Kohn writes, “…S. Neill put it, promising a reward
for an activity is ‘tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth
doing for its own sake.’ Thus, a parent who says to a child, ‘If you finish
your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV’ is teaching the child to think
of math as something that isn’t much fun.” (p.76)
Let me be clear, recognition and rewards are an
important part of learning. It is just that the rewards need to be authentic rather than
artificial. For the educator this means providing frequent opportunity for intrinsic
rewards along the way. For the learner this means frequently charting self-progress
along the way. No need to wait for the instructor to provide the chart.
How realistic is all of this? How does it fit
into today’s learning environments? Your thoughts?
In the next post we’ll discuss the sister of
recognition, feedback.
