Drive

Reading this book has helped me to see that schools today are too Type X.  At my own school, we rely heavily on extrinsic rewards for students.  At the Elementary level we have recently given rewards to students for showing growth on their standardized tests.  There are several students that I can think of right off the top of my head that have behavior plans that include students getting things for having good behavior.  I myself have been extremely guilty of providing rewards to a student with a behavior problem.  He came to me with that type of plan in place and I did resist doing it at the beginning of the year.  However a few months into the year his behavior was so disruptive and difficult that I felt that I needed to resort to using that plan of incentives.  His behavior did improve and I tried to gradually extend the time between rewards with the intention to wean him off them.  The number of incentives and the length of time between them was reduced by the end of the year, but he was still receiving some.  After reading this book I now realize that this is not a good solution to the problem, but I still don’t know what is.  It bothers me now to think that I might have contributed to him having addictive behaviors later in life.  I do think that we should stop offering rewards for standardized testing scores but I don’t know how schools and classrooms could be reconfigured to stop emphasizing extrinsic rewards for problematic students.