Teaching Expected Behavior Is Good — Rewarding It in the Name of PBIS Is a Terrible Idea
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder distinguishes between teaching behavioral expectations, which is valuable, and rewarding students for meeting basic expectations, which undermines intrinsic motivation.
Key Takeaways
- Teaching expectations is the right foundation - Students need to know what's expected before they can be held accountable
- Rewarding the expected lowers the bar - When students get prizes for basic compliance, the message is that following rules is above and beyond
- PBIS has been corrupted - The original framework didn't center rewards; that emphasis was added by schools looking for an easy solution
Transcript
PBIS has gone wrong since it became all about rewarding expected behaviors rather than teaching and reinforcing and modeling expected behaviors, which is what it was about when I was a principal.
We implemented PBIS schoolwide about 12 years ago and it was great.
It was terrific to be able to model and really think through as a staff exactly what we wanted our students to do, how we wanted them to act in the hallways and so forth.
But what I see happening now with PBIS in a lot of places is a heavy, heavy emphasis on rewards that is not backed up by the original PBIS research.
So if you have like a school store and you give out points or you give out bucks or some sort of certificate and students are constantly clamoring to be given this kind of currency so that they can cash it in for rewards or if they're given, you know, candy and things like that directly, this is not what PBIS is supposed to be about.
And when you trade the...
intrinsic motivation that comes from doing what you're expected to do and being kind of reinforced for that, for the extrinsic motivation of prizes and treats and candy and things like that, it really destroys the intrinsic motivation.
That I think is the fundamental problem here.
It's not just that rewards for expected behavior are kind of annoying.
Like as adults, we don't want to give rewards for expected behavior.
It's when we do that, we are actually undermining intrinsic motivation.
That's one of the things we know most clearly from the research about extrinsic rewards is like, they work for shaping behavior in the short term, but long term, kids just get dependent on them and they undermine intrinsic motivation.
So we have all these kids who are doing the right thing already, doing the expected behavior and intrinsically motivated to do so.
And now they are demanding and expecting an external reward for those same things.
And to make it even worse, what tends to happen is that we try to catch the kids who struggle most doing Right.
You know, we try to catch them doing right.
And as a result, kids notice only the bad kids get the rewards.
I've heard that from so many people that like kids will say to adults, oh, yeah, only the bad kids get the rewards.
And it's like, are we really helping anybody develop intrinsic motivation here?
Are we really helping anybody?
develop lasting changes to their behavior, or are we just bribing kids in a way that's short-sighted and kind of destructive?
And I get that we want to get away from consequences, but I don't think we can.
I mean, you've heard me say this multiple times probably, that consequences are a good thing and rewards are a bad thing, not the other way around.
Like we have this directly backwards.
There should be consequences for bad behavior, and I'm not afraid to call bad behavior bad, and we don't need rewards for good behavior because good behavior is intrinsically rewarding.
Now we do need to emphasize it, teach it, practice it, reinforce it, celebrate it, but we don't need to pay kids with treats for good behavior.
And if that's how your school is doing PBIS, they're doing it wrong.
Let me know what you think.