Well I have been pretty negligent with my blog posting these days! So sorry to those of you who have been following and waiting for the next entry!
I am glad to be back to it and hope my next few entries will be well worth reading.
Because I have had difficulty trying to sift through the ideas of what to write about, I have gotten myself a Writer’s Notebook. Funny thing is, I have always wanted one! but never really had a use for one before. I have never been, at least in my opinion, much of a writer yet here we are.
Now, About Incentives! Sometimes we are intrinsically motivated to do things. Perhaps you really enjoy a clean house, so you are motivated from within yourself to spend a few hours each week scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets, etc. I happen to love the look of a clean kitchen so cleaning up after supper rarely feels like a chore. Perhaps you love the look of a perfectly, freshly mowed lawn, so you take time to manicure it just so. Luckily, there is a lot in life that brings us enough joy that no one needs to motivate us to do those things.
Then there are other things! The things we don’t like to do, or find more difficult to do, whatever that happens to be! Some of mine are cleaning the floors, mowing the grass, and dusting. We need to really get up a head of steam to get motivated to do some of that. There are some jobs in life, often like the work you do, where although you may feel fulfilled and enjoy it, you would stop doing it if someone stopped delivering your paycheck. External motivators are necessary!
Which brings me to the dogs at our school and incentives. I have often heard an adult (or teacher) lament of a child, “Why won’t he or she just ______”, be that do her homework, pick up his jacket, finish her math, write more than a couple of words during journal time, etc. It IS frustrating when something we think should be so matter of fact is such a sticking point for a child. To find yourself in some sort of a power struggle over something that seems so small to us, such as writing three sentences in a twenty minute writing block, is hard. As the adults in the situation, we have to assume the task is hard for the child, for whatever reason, be it skill level or the ability to comply in that moment. We may not understand it but we do have to find a way to navigate it and a win-win scenario can be the best possible outcome.
Most of the dog training we do at school is about win-win. We want the dog to do a particular behavior, such as sit, before getting a treat. Now, we CAN push the dog physically into the sit and the dog may sit, may even stay sitting, AND MAY even learn to sit on command that way, but it is not really what I would call a win-win. The dog gets physically manipulated into compliance. What we do when we work with the dogs is to think about how we can lay out the task clearly enough, in easy enough chunks, so the dog can be successful, and earn the reward. The reward, usually a treat, tastes good and is motivating, making it more likely the dog will sit again soon.
At Prince Street School, we find it necessary to use a lot of external motivators. By the time we are adults, we have learned how to use a lot of our own strategies to get motivated, stay motivated, and push through hard spots and difficult tasks. Children need to learn that and one way we can help them is to use external motivators. Parents use this all the time when they promise a treat for good behavior, give an allowance for chores, a special present for good grades, etc. Most of the time, we are working on some sort of token economy- you get some sort of a “paycheck” for a particular behavior or set of behaviors.
In this picture, you see one of our students enjoying time with Kannon. Kannon is his paycheck for doing his jobs. We were having difficulty getting this student to do a couple of the most important start-up routines and needed to figure out something for motivation. We met with his mom and his school team and created a list of four things he needed to do and added in a couple of strategies to help maximize success by making some of it easier. I won’t go into more specifics here as it may give away too much and reveal who the student is. IF all four things are done by a particular time deadline in the morning, he gets Kannon all to himself for ten minutes. This picture is of the first day he was successful!!!
Now, do we have to still do several reminders? Yes, but we are patterning new behavior. How often do you rewire your habits in a couple of days? Ever try to change your eating habits? Get in more exercise? It can take us several months to pattern behaviors and the ones we ask children to learn are no different EXCEPT that they have less experience than us with how to be successful at it. We have to help them.
For this student, we decided an immediate reward was necessary for maximum motivation. Instant gratification is one of the strongest rewards you can give- do the behavior and get the reward immediately! I hope you found some food for thought in these musings!?!
Stay tuned for more to come About Incentives!!!
