Learning for Pizza's Sake

What does it look like to learn for Pizza's Sake?

This level of classroom culture is the way to move from beginner to intermediate. Please don't be offended if you're a twenty-year, veteran teacher who likes using rewards like this. By placing a rewards-based classroom as Phase 1 of classroom culture, it's because there are better facets of a classroom to emphasize, not because offering students treats is inherently wrong.

​Before debriefing, lets take a look into a pizza-based classroom:

Strengths:

1. Short-term, immediately noticeable results in the classroom culture.
2. Emphasis on basic, daily data that will come in very handy to practice when you're moving to Phase 3.
3. Novelty will get students to look forward to your class in the short term, which you can build into the more successful long-term culture methods of the more advanced stages.

Weaknesses:

1. Students quickly [on a 40-week scale] lose interest in the rewards.
2. Develops the mentality: "why learn if I'm not being rewarded?"
3. Thinking about, collecting data for, and buying and organizing rewards takes time away from reflecting on more important teaching and learning practices.

Real Students Say:

• ​"Is this good enough to get my name in the jar?"
• "Did I get the reward yet?"
• "When do we get the [pizza, candy, free day, etc.]
• "I think if we do X, you should give us Y."

Teacher Says:

• "If you can make it through the next two paragraphs, your name will go into the jar and you might win an object, so it's worth doing the work!"
• "I'll help you to finish the last three questions so that you earn the reward for today."
• "If you do what you're supposed to, you get this ticket."
• "What kinds of rewards would you guys work for?"

Learning for Pizza's Sake Debrief:

The problem with learning for pizza's sake is the fact that the learning itself is commonly accepted by the teacher and the students as something that no one wants to do. You hear teachers in these classrooms saying things like "well I don't want to be here correcting your papers either, but I'm here because they pay me!"

Now, it's possible that you're thinking that offering rewards for learning doesn't inherently mean that learning is accepted as bad, but I promise, that is the message you're sending students. If you offer students stickers to place next to questions they don't need to answer, or homework passes so that they don't need to do an assignment, what you're saying to them, and what they're hearing loud and clear, is that a lot of the questions you ask, and work you assign, is extra, and it will not negatively affect their learning if they don't do it. You're breeding a culture of dissent, and encouraging the question: "why do we have to do this?"

The worst part of the classroom in which learning occurs for pizza's sake is that the answer the teacher is offering to the question "why do we have to do this?" is "because if you do the work, you get the pizza."

You'll also notice that what teachers and students say in a pizza-driven culture always emphasizes the prize, not the work itself. I've used rewards-based methodology early in my career, and the most common question I got is "is this enough to get the reward," as opposed to "does this answer the question?" or "is this the best word to use in this sentence?"

It's also important to note that rewards-based systems offer immediate gratification (the ticket earned today) and generally short-term gratification (the weekly or monthly pizza.) Extended to a forty-week school year, or a forty-year teaching career, keeping up with constantly making new and interesting rewards and challenges to make sure to maintain enough novelty to keep students' attention is tedious at best.

The teachers I've known to have success with rewards-based systems keep them simple, and use them as part of a classroom culture that emphasizes one of the three other phases: teacher, students, or learning. ​

Recommendations for Creating a successful, Rewards-based Culture: 

Emphasize

1. The longest-term rewards possible.
2. Data points that you have to take anyway:
   1. You're already going to grade students' work, build the rewards into the quarterly grades or weekly class averages.
3. High-impact behaviors and learning output.
4. Specific, actionable behavior and learning feedback: teach students what successful behavior looks like, and then reward them for the successful behavior.

Avoid

1. Short-term, daily, in-class candy, tickets, stickers etc.
2. Complex tally systems, self-reflection systems, or any data point that requires more work than you would normally do: adding more work will not lead to a sustainable system.
3. Don't reward things like "filling in the boxes" or "raising your hand." Reward things like insightful answers or careful, well-written work [realizing that for some students, moving towards careful, well-written work will be a process that takes some time.
4. If you are going to use a rewards-based classroom culture, avoid referring to the rewards all the time at the expense of the people or learning happening in the classroom.

Next Steps: How do I move towards Learning for Teacher's Sake

1. Slowly refer to rewards less, and refer to people more. Celebrate the amazing learning that you see and compliment the students based on the quality of their output as the reward in and of itself.
2. Slowly move any immediate-gratification, ticket-style rewards to weekly, then monthly, and then quarterly rewards until you realize that students are learning because you're their teacher, not because you're their source of candy.
3. Ask students questions about their learning, work, and lives. Make connections between the former and latter, and share any similarities between how you learn, work, and live and how they do.