The Power and Peril of Positive Reinforcement

At the end of the now classic Wes Anderson film Rushmore, a movie about an idiosyncratic young man coming of age in a private school setting, there is a beautiful acoustic number that reminds me of the prompt for this week's post:

"I wish that I knew what I know now" Rod Stewart croons in the 1973 folk-rock ballad by The Faces.


Music permeates my life and the lessons I've learned along the way. So when I was invited to reflect on this theme as part of the #CCCWrite Reflective Writing Club, this song started playing on my internal soundtrack and has been on repeat ever since. (Now I share it with you, dear reader).

There are SO MANY THINGS that I wish I'd learned earlier in life and still I recognize that, as much as I've learned, there's still SO MUCH TO LEARN. Just as my former boss and mentor Dr. Joe Birman used to say: If you ever stop learning, it's time to die (which is close kin lyrically to another great song by Blind Melon).

Sadly, I know he passed on to the next life with an inexhaustible hunger for new knowledge. On his behalf, I gladly carry the torch onward, to continue the learning journey with the hope of inspiring others along the way. And a big part of my quest is to find effective ways to help others learn. Whether motivational, inspirational or merely practical, anything I can use to this end is pure gold.

Of the many hats I wear, one of the most cherished is that of mother to my almost-5-year-old daughter. We are learning to play the piano together following the Suzuki method. The main goal of the Suzuki method is to raise excellent young men and women who happen to be very good piano players. Mr. Suzuki emphasizes that the best way to do this is through good role-modeling and positively reinforcing desirable behavior. We are very fortunate to have an excellent teacher who does an excellent job modeling, not only proper piano technique, but effective strategies for positive reinforcement. She always looks for the good and brings our attention to it (sometimes with praise, sometimes without).

And it is such a powerful reminder. Look for the good.

You see, like so many people I tend to be overly self-critical. But it is possible to have high expectations without being so hard on myself. I also have high expectations of my daughter and of my students - though I am not nearly so hard on them, but I have not had a clear strategy for how to best help them meet (or exceed) those expectations - until now.

Just like Fatboy Slim says in "That Old Pair of Jeans "now I found the good and I emphasize it"

And it helps in SO many ways. 

First, the personal. I can more easily recognize my successes and forgive myself on those occasions when I can't quite keep all the balls in the air.  It builds my self-confidence and motivates me to keep going, whatever obstacles may obscure my path. It makes me a more loving and effective mother.

Then there are the professional boons, those that benefit my students (and also helps fulfill my personal quest of being the best teacher I can be). It builds their confidence. It helps them develop a sense of what are important skills in the discipline. When I acknowledge their effort with analytical thinking, they experience the satisfaction of success and are motivated to become more effective learners. And yet still... I have questions

* How much praise is too much? The last thing I want is for my words of encouragement to ring hollow, but if I shower too much praise that is exactly what happens. The law of supply and demand dictates that a large supply of goods fetches a cheap price. So I have to be careful how I apportion it. 

* Am I effectively distributing praise equitably and in meaningful ways to encourage the kind of learning that is valued in science? This one is a doozy.  First of all, as someone who has struggled with insecurities most of my life, I know all too well the sting of jealousy when someone else gets all the praise and I am left in the shadows. Whenever I offer positive reinforcement to a student or group of students, I wonder: who feels left out? And more importantly, how can I bring them back in so that they don't (continue to) feel marginalized? I want all of my students to recognize their value - and the amazing thing is that we all bring value with both our strengths AND our weaknesses. 

For example, someone who is not very outspoken is likely to be a very good listener. This receptive quality is definitely something that should be encouraged as it is truly a gift to be heard.  Good listening also has its own intrinsic rewards - it is often a very effective way to acquire new knowledge. Plus it models excellent behavior for others in the class. And yet, am I praising this quality enough or am I still criticizing those who hold outside conversations in class at inappropriate times?

Another example, of a weakness that can also be a strength, is a student who may be under-prepared - maybe his math skills are not as strong as they should be or maybe her English skills still need to develop more. This may at first seem like liabilities in the classroom, but they don't have to be. I frequently have my students do pair-and-share activities that include analytical tasks (yes,even those that involve math). Of course such small group work necessitates decent skills with oral communication, so how does the ESL student bring strength? Likely in myriad ways that have nothing to do with her English-language abilities, but even her struggle to communicate is a boon as it requires that other students become better listeners. Together they will struggle to translate complex ideas into simple terms and in so doing develop a deeper understanding of a particular concept or skill. 

What about the student with weak quantitative reasoning skills? Such students can be difficult to motivate because being "bad" at math has its own special stigma. Really, no one is "bad" at math, rather some have had more practice with it than others. Math is the language of numbers, so you might think that there's just one way to "speak" or "translate" it, but nope. 

People learn to "speak" math in many different ways, that is, they have different problem-solving strategies. Often these people who think they are "bad" at math just look at numbers a little differently than it has been formally taught in many classrooms and so these students lack confidence in their skills. If through praise or empathy, we can invite these students to engage with the problems, they may demonstrate a novel way to approach it that leads to an effective solution that helps the group to think about it from a whole new perspective. I have seen this happen on many occasions. 

At other times, the challenge with such students is to encourage grit or persistence. They are often all too ready to give up, wielding the convenient, but completely invalid excuse that they are "bad" at math. It's easy to encourage persistence in those that demonstrate it, but here's the challenge - how do we make sure others know we are praising effort and stick-to-it-iveness, not ability? You see, from the outside - if you're the student who thinks he's "bad" at math - when I praise the student who found a way to solve the problem and arrive at the correct solution, it looks like I'm praising their ability. Even, if I'm very careful with what I say, it can come off that way. 

So ingrained is the story we tell that we're "bad" at math, that we fail to recognize it as a skill we can grow and develop. And so, when it comes to positively reinforcing the development of quantitative skill, I often get stuck in the worry that I have not "saved" enough students from this defeatist thought pattern. Don't get me wrong, I do reach some of them and help them find the path toward a growth mindset regarding math, but I know that idea is so prevalent in our society. I feel like it is my personal mission in life to uproot that weed wherever I find it, so I keep looking for the most effective strategies to weed and re-seed.... anybody know of the best "herbicide" to kill of the "I'm-bad-at-math weed"?

And so we come to the most difficult doozy of the question posed - is my praise encouraging the kind of thinking and learning that is valued in science? Each semester I teach my students about the scientific method and the characteristics of science, one of which is that science makes no value judgements. You see where I'm going with this one? That's right science does not set out to say whether something is good or bad. It's not the right system of knowledge to make such assessments. And yet... every time I offer praise or encouragement, I am making a judgement. Does that mean I am failing to model the thinking patterns of a good scientist (or am I just trying to be a good mentor)?

As the little green man says "Do or do not. There is no try."

Which leads me to my last question: Is there a meaningful difference between offering praise or encouragement and giving positive reinforcement? With my daughter, positive reinforcement sometimes comes in the form of stickers or fruity o's. Not all parents believe in such rewards systems, but we use them to good effect (and I would kindly ask you to please withhold your judgement if you disapprove - we parents are all doing the best we can with what we have). Can I bring such trifling rewards to my class? Perhaps some kind of candy? It is different than praise (though it still requires a value judgement, it is less obviously demonstrated and perhaps encourages some sort of Pavlovian response). And it's funny, but as I am reflecting on this, I cringe a little bit when I think about bringing this kind of positive reinforcement into my classroom. (Why? Why on Earth would I be comfortable using this strategy with my daughter but not my students?) In my mind, praise is a lot like encouragement, but they are not necessarily the same thing. Praise typically takes the form of "Good job!" or "I like the way that you did ...." or (making it less personal) "That was a very effective approach to solving the problem..." or "I  saw you working together really well..." etc... Such praise can be encouraging, but pure encouragement is more like what you shout from the sidelines of a sports match: "You can do it!" "Keep going!" "You've got this!" 

Perhaps all of these are important ways to look for and acknowledge the good, so we can grow the kind of garden that produces quality fruit. All I know is that, while I wish I had learned this skill sooner, I'm grateful to have it in my toolkit today. And, like all good discoveries, it leads to more questions than answers. Journey on learners, we shall find what we seek.