Virtual Teacher

In our last blog, Should Teachers Give Rewards to Students for Good Behavior? A Psycho-Educational Perspective , we discussed the importance of linking rewards with behavioral goals to maximize the efficiency of our behavior management plan. Now, I want to elaborate on the technique of goal setting to regulate students’ motivation, but first, a brief description of the concept of goals: The concept of goals is at the heart of most theories of motivation. Goals are internal (within the individual), as opposed to rewards that are externally regulated, and represent something that we want to accomplish; simply put, the goal is the result or outcome that we are trying to reach. We call this mental representation or goal our aim , purpose , or objective . The concept of goal is a motivational concept that influences behavior in several ways: Goals narrow our attention to goal-relevant activities and away from what we perceive is irrelevant to the goal.   Goals guide our behavior ...

Rewarding students for good behavior is a popular classroom discipline procedure. Teachers of habitually disruptive students like using rewards because, in a well-structured reward system, they have the potential of winning students’ compliance fast. Advocates of using rewards to discipline students with habitually disruptive behaviors claim that rewards promote compliance and stop misbehavior. Opponents of rewards state that rewarding students, an externally oriented procedure (the teacher regularly administers the rewards, not the student) are a way of controlling and manipulating children’s behavior that does little to change permanently the disruptive behavior. In other words, the short-term effect of stopping misbehavior does not translate into a long-term effect of helping children grow and develop better-adjusted ways of behaving. Alfie Kohn, the author of Punished by Rewards states that rewards can be seen as punishment in the sense that rewards both manipulate behav...