The year I became an educator, a close friend bought me a book titled, 1001 Pearls of Teachers’ Wisdom. And every weekday morning, while I am having my tea and eating oatmeal, I randomly flip through a few of the pages and read a couple quotes. Truth be told, I flip through the quotes just long enough to find one that seems “tweetable” – and then I tweet it, followed by a few hashtags about motivation, all in the hopes of getting a few more followers. I would be lying if I said the quotes I read every morning were my inspiration for the day. But every now and then I read a quote like the one that opens this blog, a quote that lingers in my psyche throughout the morning only to be revisited by my mind at some point hours after the school day is complete. “Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way”. It is a saying so simple yet complex; so direct yet completely metaphoric. Every year, we teach a group of students and every year, we face our challenges with just how to get through to every single last one of them. And in their 10 months with us, we fail a lot.

But it is the way we fail that is most interesting to me. That is because uncovering the ways in which educators fail to help all students learn may be arguably more important than analyzing the ways that select teachers succeed in their classrooms and with many of their students. I say “many” and refrain from using the term “all” because outside of the movies, I have never seen, heard, or read about a real teacher who got all of her students to learn everything she wanted to teach them. In reality, we rarely work in totalities.

But because we are comfortable in acknowledging that we never do quite work in totalities, we take a quote like, “Every student can learn, just not on the same day…” and pass the buck. We either chalk up a student’s lack of engagement to their maturity that given year, the classroom dynamic, or the child’s “inabilities”. We rarely slide the notion that perhaps that child isn’t engaged and subsequently isn’t “learning” to our side of the table. Even when we hold that child who isn’t learning in high regard, we still tend to, in an omnibenevolent gesture, “hope” that they will “figure it out” and wish them luck on their next 10 month stint with education the following year. I know that I have done this. I am not convinced that even doing this is enough.

I’m not convinced because the students who spend those 10 months with us are real people, like actual human beings with hopes, desires, and goals. 99.9% of them will, at least, live into their 40s – the question is, what will they be doing at that time? And more importantly, who does the burden really lay upon? That teenage kid who you “taught” and perhaps gave up on because you looked at their life in 10 month stints, or you, the adult who gets paid to teach every student on your attendance roll?

In the 10 months with us, I have witnessed students who would come to school without binders and pencils eventually become A and B level students who eventually came prepared to class on the daily. Sadly, I have also witnessed the reverse. Yes, we are only with these children for 10 months, but that amount of time begets a certain amount of power that we solely hold. So, remember that yes, you are only with your students for 10 months and every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way – but, 10 months is also plenty of time to get all of your students on a page that leads them to writing their own story where the main character triumphs.

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All, okay not all…many teachers use encouragement to foster academic excellence. It starts early with stickers. Elementary children love getting stickers on an assignment or test. Candy and extra gym time also work in fostering student excellence at an early age, despite the psychological “detriments” said methods purportedly raise. Let’s pause for a second to throw those wrong assumptions out the window: who doesn’t feel good about being acknowledged and getting tangibly rewarded for their efforts? Every single person on earth makes every single move they make for something that results in their personal benefit. (That’s not my personal opinion, that’s 100 years of psychological and sociological analysis vetted and confirmed by other smart people). But beyond what all the experts say, the most influential strategy any teacher can use for motivation is creating an atmosphere that validates young, impressionable minds through positive affirmations about their current state and potential future.

The students that comprise my class may not be the smartest cohort of students as a collective. But they damn sure act like it. There isn’t any academic challenge that they are unwilling to attempt. That is because throughout the year I have alluringly “put them on” to the idea that academic excellence is the archetypal way to earning my congratulatory acknowledgement. No, my yacht was not pre-modeled with a savior complex. I am not saying that all these kids want to earn my validation. Rather, I am suggesting that I have provided the allusion that academic excellence is the most honorable trait one could earn in the classroom by providing this notion in a nonchalant way. When you hail upon a student who doesn’t typically answer questions and then proceed to call him a genius after his answer, he becomes unfixed from his static state. When you do this over a period of time, he starts to feel like he is actually a genius. He starts to put his hand up to answer more questions and work more diligently on his tasks. Then, when you start to call him by the nickname “Professor” or “Doctor Last Name” he starts to feel validated in his potential to be that.

The key point to positive projections inside a classroom is that there is no premium or scarcity to the positive affirmations and labels you can provide as a teacher. Everyone can become the professor. Everyone in the class can be excellent. There are many things we face in our modern times that are mere illusions, be it race, gender or class. But perception is reality. When I tell my class they are the, “smartest bunch of 7^th graders I’ve ever taught” they believe it. And they should, because positive projections always have the potential to become realities.

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I guess my sentiment would be a little different if these boys were actually proud of their banner. When I go to congratulate them, I am received with looks of sarcasm. I am actually trying to congratulate them, but they don’t believe me; they don’t even want to be congratulated. I guess my point here is that in certain contexts, not everyone needs to be awarded for just showing up. The whole “everybody wins” movement has little impact on what it is really trying to establish, and that is self-esteem.

What about competition in the classroom? Is there ever an instance where competition can be utilized in the learning environment in a way that elevates the standards of academics without taking away from a student’s self esteem? To me, the answer is quite simple: Yes. Competition, when occasionally used in a learning context provides students an opportunity to engage in stale curriculum in a fun and engaging manner. In that sense, competition in the classroom is not about a win/lose situation – it is about community building.

The contrarians to competition in the classroom suggest that utilizing such a means through learning opportunities provides the wrong kind of motivation and reward system. If the learning environment becomes saturated with competition, students will learn that learning is solely for the sake of extrinsic rewards. Thus, it is distracting and detrimental to learning.

This is completely true in many cases. However, this notion silences the fact that a classroom is a site where a variety of different people, personalities, and ultimately learners come to engage in school. If competition is so detrimental to learning that must mean that other modes of learning have profound salience and thus, can be detrimental as well. What about the learners who use competition to excel?(Usually, boys). Learning through exploration is beneficial to some and not others. Rigid rules, worksheets, and rote learning impact some learners more effectively than others. A learning environment is empathetic to the idea that while not all motivation is utopian, we nevertheless need to motivate and engage our students. And motivation through means of an external reward isn’t the end of the world. In my five years of teaching, I still have not found one framework for creating a learning environment that motivates every single one of my students. I shouldn’t look to close the door on motivation through competition just because culture is bent on childhood praise at all costs. Our students are indeed a part of the “participation trophy” generation, but in class, there are a few positives to having a platform that creates a few MVPs, playoff bound students, and “Consolation Champions”.

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The “carrot or the stick” method of motivation falls into the category of “if/then” rewards. This type of motivation works for mundane tasks. For tasks that require a recollection and regurgitation of basic, almost robotic, skills, black and white incentive works just fine. For example, I use incentives as a means to manage my classroom. My students are organized in groups. I award “group points” to those groups who enter the classroom, sit down, and get ready to learn the fastest. They can also earn points by cleaning up the fastest during “clean up” time at the end of the day. It is rewards based on simple compliance. It works and it’s made my classroom management super easy for the last two years and running!

But learning, production and creativity has nothing to do with compliance. You do not want to teach your students the notion that in order to get ahead in life all you have to do is comply. This is where the carrot and the stick fail. When it comes to productivity, rewards based on performance actually stifle productivity. The science behind this fact has been backed for the last four decades now.

Performance depends more on intrinsic motivation than extrinsic. Sorry to burst the bubble, but those students who do well when you ask them to memorize a bunch of terms and then spit them back out on a test are not doing well because of your teaching style. These students are “succeeding” because something inside of them is driving them to perform. Barring any circumstances that may alter a child’s outlook on life, the kid that does well in school in the fourth grade is going to do well in the tenth grade. This is not because of the teaching. It’s basically because of that child’s intrinsic motivation (as well as a few other major factors that have nothing to do with the teacher and everything to do with schooling – Perhaps I will delve into this in another blog).

Instead of constantly tapping into external motivation, education needs to look at the things that intrinsically drive human creativity and production. Google’s 20% time is an example of allotting people the opportunity to explore their own passions. Cutting edge institutions for creativity and production have realized that “if/then” models of motivation do nothing for productivity and actually destroy creativity. When we understand that helping the student who doesn’t want to be helped is not about reward vs. punishment but rather about rooting out what drives said student, we will not only create more creative, passionate and engaged learners, but we will ultimately strengthen education and the ways we facilitate learning.

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