Authentic rather than artificial

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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.