Month: January 2021

Too much of teaching is based in the carrot vs. the stick mentality: reward vs. punishment, neither of which is an effective tool for motivation and both of which are extrinsic, or external.

For example, if you’re sitting in your room or apartment and it’s messy, you might decide on your own to clean it up. Maybe you’re tired of living in a messy environment, or maybe you just want to do something to get going. You spend several hours cleaning and organizing and when you’re done it feels great. Just the internal satisfaction of doing a difficult task and then enjoying a clean room gives you a hit of dopamine, which makes you more likely to engage in this behavior in the future.

However, if you are compelled to clean your room by somebody else, either through punishment (a threat: clean your room or else…) or a reward (i.e. money), you may complete the task, but rather than experiencing internal satisfaction, you are more like to experience either resentment (if you’re doing it to avoid punishment), or entitlement (if you’re doing it for an extrinsic reward). Neither of these feelings will change your habits for the better. In fact, research shows that people who are paid to complete a task often perform more poorly than those who are not (see Daniel Pink’s Drive).

For teachers, we have to find a way to build up our students sense of intrinsic satisfaction for completing a task. In future blog posts I’ll explore ways of doing this, but for now know that threatening punishment, or offering a reward (for teachers this is often candy or a class party) are not effective incentives or motivators over the long term.