I have been wanting to review this book for a long time! “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn is the best book I have read in a long while, and it completely changed my views on teaching, classroom management, and motivation in general. The reason it took me so long to review this book is that I literally read every word of it – every endnote, every appendix – I even went through the bibliography and read some of the articles referenced in this book. I renewed it from the library 3 times so I could fully digest everything. I know that’s silly and I should definitely just purchase this book, because I will undoubtedly reference it in the future.
Throughout my teaching career, I have been encouraged to constantly praise students, offer rewards for good behavior, and “catch them being good”. Behaviorism has been pushed in all areas of education, parenting, and even corporate management. Especially in special education, Applied Behavior Analysis is often stressed as the only method for getting students with disabilities to behave in productive ways. I know that I relied heavily on token boards, sticker charts, and my classroom “treasure box”. However, there have been times that these strategies just didn’t sit right with me. Sometimes I felt like the students were being treated like trained seals. At other times, it felt like they were only working for the reward and not putting forth their best effort on the academic task. In addition, I discovered that many members of the Autism community openly shunned the use of Applied Behavior Analysis and other behaviorist techniques. The discovery of this book by Alfie Kohn was a major eye-opener for me. Kohn outlines five major reasons for why rewards are actually harmful. I created an infographic in Canva to illustrate these reasons:
Summarized, the main harms caused by the use of rewards is the fact that they are inherently controlling, they create power imbalances which damage relationships, they ignore the reasons behind behavior, they diminish creativity and risk-taking, and they decrease intrinsic motivation. For people who disagree with these assertions, keep in mind that Kohn’s arguments are based on a wealth of research. His bibliography spans the length of 35 pages in the book, and I encourage skeptics to dive deeper into the source of his claims. Kohn includes several references to Edward Deci, whom I had not heard of prior to reading this book, but have definitely become a fan of since. Deci’s research informs best practices in corporate and adult learning settings. I will definitely be diving deeper into his work after this!
Many critics of Kohn will ask – “what’s the alternative?” The thing is, this question does not have an easy answer, because we need to consider the nature of this question. When we are asking for an alternative to behaviorism, we have to consider our motives as managers, teachers, and parents. When it comes down to it, the goal of behaviorism is to control and to force compliance. When we are striving to control others, we are ignoring aims to understand individuals in order to help them develop and grow as human beings. That being said, Kohn offers the alternatives of collaboration, content, and choice to replace behaviorist strategies. When we invite individuals to collaborate regarding their behavior, performance, or development, we are giving them agency to actively participate in their learning and growth. When we provide interesting content, whether in work, at school, or at home, individuals will be intrinsically motivated and will not need external reinforcement to continue activities. When we provide choice, we are not forcing compliance. Individuals will be more likely to continue in a certain direction if they believe they have some choice in the matter.
Kohn also addresses the harmful effects that praise can have in work, school, and home environments. I know that as teachers, we are encouraged to constantly praise students. But what if this incessant praise actually harms students? On the one hand, according to Kohn, praise is often a control tactic. Imagine a classroom in which several students are off task. Many teachers (myself included) have resorted to the following: “I love how [pause…looks around the room] Brian is working so quietly!” and have watched as seral students in the class scramble to sit still and stop talking. This has always felt to me like a passive aggressive method for achieving behavior results, but it is so popular, and so easy. But is this praise genuine? Would it embarrass Brian or cause his peers to feel some form of animosity toward him? It is manipulative? Aside from being a control tactic, praise can also lead students (and people in general) to become oriented toward working for approval rather than being invested in the work itself. Additionally, praise passes a value judgment which can feel condescending or disrespectful to some, and diminish intrinsic motivation for many. Instead of praise, Kohn recommends providing specific feedback that can be informative to a person but that does not include a value judgment.
Kohn’s book is not only a guide for teachers and parents for child-rearing practices, but it is also a useful resource for managers in the workplace. Kohn provides a helpful critique of employee evaluations – when we evaluate an employee, we are learning more about the evaluator than the person who is being evaluated. Specifically, we are learning about the evaluator’s personal standards as well as the relationship between the evaluator and the employee being appraised. To some extent, we are even learning about the organization’s values and the extent to which that employee has been supported. Kohn suggests that employee evaluations are not only not informative in the intended areas, but they are harmful to the extent that they should be discontinued altogether. He also provides a compelling argument against the use of pay-for-performance incentives.
At this point, I run the risk of giving away all the important details found in this book, so I will let readers decide at this point if they would like to read the book for themselves. I cannot recommend another book more than “Punished by Rewards” for managers, teachers, and parents. This has certainly been an eye-opening experience for me, and I look forward to reading many of the articles referenced by Kohn. I especially look forward to learning more about promoting collaborative environments at work and in the classroom, and about encouraging intrinsic motivation in learners.
While “Punished by Rewards” does give me inspiration to change everything I’ve previously done in terms of classroom management – at this time, I feel inspired to throw away the clip charts, the gold stars, the token boards, and the treasure box – I have to wonder how this change will be received. Kohn points out that behaviorist systems are deeply ingrained in our society from the workplace to the classroom to the home. Many individuals and institutions are strongly attached to these systems and do not react well to the criticisms addressed in this book. After reading the research, however, I don’t see how anyone could continue to adhere to these practices that have been proven to not only not work, but also to have harmful effects. I think it will take a lot of mindset shifts before Kohn’s theories are truly embraced. Also, I don’t know the implications for teachers who try to live by his teachings in their own classrooms. I anticipate that there might be significant resistance to these changes across many settings. If you are an individual who has left behaviorism behind, I would love to hear from you to learn about the changes you have implemented and the results you have seen.
Ms. Dillard's Classroom 