Counterproductive Behaviorism
In schools, we are too willing to sell out kids’ long term intellectual and moral growth in order to get short term compliance
For my last several years of teaching in FCCPS, I spent a lot of time and energy outside of my teaching and coaching duties attempting to advocate for a change in the mission of the school. Every year, when the school year started, we always began the first full faculty meeting with a slide show of data - consisting almost exclusively of test results from SOLs (the state Standards of Learning tests) and results from IB: number of students taking each course and average IB scores. Nowhere in the school’s mission statement did I see anything about test scores or grades, yet the summing up of the previous year’s results (and discussion of what needed improving) made it clear that in reality, improving these numbers was our actual mission.
What inspired me to try to change this was a summer set of meetings with several other IB teachers which started out to be about assessment, and also alignment of our courses with those preceding ours. But when we did a little exercise to get us to look at what we actually valued as success for our students, we found that our most cherished goals (things such as helping our students become better thinkers, writers, citizens, caring human beings, etc.) had little to do with test scores or grades. In fact, it was pointed out to us by the consultant (a Canadian former TOK teacher and administrator) that the IB Learner Profile embodied very well the goals that all of us shared for our students. All of us in the room that day (I think in 2010 or 2011 - we evacuated for a while due to the minor earthquake that did some damage to the National Cathedral and some other local structures that summer) decided we had to try to make the IB learner profile the goal for our entire school and all its students, rather than just some nice rhetoric hidden away in IB curriculum guides.
So I should be happy - I now see that the entire school system appears to be using the IB learner profile as something of a guide. But instead of being happy, I am extremely frustrated, because the way it is being inculcated and taught is through the PBIS system. This is a system of behavior management. It encourages using rewards and punishments to improve student behavior. The research on using this type of system has been clear for decades: it can bring about short term changes in behavior, but does so at a cost. It undermines intrinsic interest in whatever is being rewarded or punished (i.e. rewarding kids for reading gets them to read more while the rewards are being offered, but lowers interest in and enjoyment of reading for the long term). Also, rewarding for complex types of tasks does not improve performance on such tasks (as those rewarded get distracted from the task by the promised reward), it only increases simple behaviors that require no thought or attention. It should be easy, therefore, to see why offering rewards for getting students to be caring, or thinkers, or principled would be a terrible idea, one that would only be done if the real goal was to control behavior short term and destroy the chances of students becoming more caring or thoughtful long term.
Yet this is exactly what FCCPS schools are doing: using rewards in order to “teach” students to embody the IB learner profile.
I would like to think that no one doing this is purposely trying to undermine these traits in students long term, just so they can manipulate them to look as if they have such traits in the short term. But PBIS, the behavior management system being used in the city’s schools, is simply contradictory to all the values embodied in the learner profile. It would be easier to understand using such a program if the school system were on the edge of chaos without it. But this certainly can’t be the case with FCCPS, so my only thought is that it’s just simple and superficially appealing and helps with short term behavior management. It’s also far easier to do to than attempt the long term (and fairly radical) change in culture required to really embody the values in the learner profile. We’re so used to school being about compliance, obedience, and control (but without really acknowledging it) that this seems to be the default. So it looks as if my years of advocating for getting the learner profile to become the goal of GMHS was successful in a bizarro world kind of way - it is now one of the stated goals of the entire system. Unfortunately, the actual goals, as shown by what gets done and how, still seem to be the same as they ever were. Not all that different from what happened when students decided to institute an honor code to change the culture of the school and we ended up with some new words on the wall (and required pledge to be written on every paper) and no real change of values or culture.
Thanks for this Jamie; very thought-provoking. In thinking about this from my perspective as the parent of a 2-year-old, I experience how difficult it is after having gone through public education to shed the vestiges of achievementism; after our recent parent-teacher conference, it was difficult to accept the seemingly pedantic (yet, totally developmentally appropriate!) goals the teacher had - "shouldn't they be challenging him to learn/do something MORE?" (of course, the answer is "no"). Additionally, speaking from the perspective of a mental health counselor, it makes me think about the dialectic of acceptance vs. judgment on merits, and how so many interventions fall flat unless I as a counselor first engender the feeling of being accepted for who one is (think of how Mr. Rogers made you feel when watching him; those of you reading who grew up with him!). The message is "you are good as you are, and here is something you could try" versus "you need to do this to be better". I wonder if this is part of the flawed nature of this rewards system; yes, the kids act a certain way when you are rewarding them, but what happens when the rewards go away? Do they just feel like they, personally, are lacking because their rewards are now lacking? Parallels with capitalism in economics abound, of course. A helpful framework for parenting - permissive, authoritative, authoritarian) may also apply here - perhaps the rewards system verges too much towards the authoritarian side, whereas a more authoritative approach (stating values, modeling the values, engendering an atmosphere of acceptance within boundaries) would be more beneficial. Just a few initial musings!