Article Incentivized Rewards For All: Why Are We Still Doing That?
David Hutchison When my grandson was in second grade the teacher, as is typical, spent time over the first few days working to establish classroom norms for the year. But she did not begin by tacking a list of rules to the wall. Instead, she asked her students what they thought the rules should be. What they came up with was pretty much what you would expect: no running in class. no pushing, take turns. With a little guidance, these 8-year-olds came up with pretty much the same rules as the teacher would have. As a result, there would be no ‘stars’ for good behavior, no names on the wall chart (good or bad); instead, there would be the pride of ownership. This is our class: our rules. By the way, this seems to me to be a pretty good definition of a democratic society: citizens working together to establish the rules and norms that will govern their interactions. We’ll come back to that. But tragically (from my perspective, anyway) there was no follow through in 3rd or 4th grade. Fast forward to 5th grade—a pandemic year, with all those masking protocols. The teacher, of course, set the rules, and the students, by 28
