Workin’ Hard for the Money
Incentivizing Student Learning
My high school students are really hard-working. No, seriously: I bet that if you are a high school teacher and you brought your students to have a hard-work-off with my students, my students would win. Like, easily. They’re harder-working than I am, even.
Before you decide that I’m full of it, let me be very clear: my students are hard-working at their jobs. At fast-food restaurants, at Walmart, at nursing homes around the area, my students are showing up on time, staying late to close, picking up hours no one else wants, and working 40 hour weeks. They put up with low hourly wages, managers on power trips, less than ideal conditions, and rude customers. And when they recount the stressful stories about their work lives and you ask them why they put up with all of it and keep working so hard, they will all answer the very same answer: for the paycheck.
After all of this bragging about my industrious students, you might be thinking that my job as their teacher must be a piece of cake. With a work ethic like that, they must all have high GPAs and be begging for extra assignments, right? Nope. Not even close. As soon as they walk into our school building, it seems that the desire to push themselves and the willingness to do things that they may not want to do evaporates. Their impressive ability to do hard things disappears, and sometimes it feels like I have to beg them to do even the most basic of tasks. It takes the promise of academic credit to talk them into doing anything, really — even something that should be organic, like a group discussion, often won’t start until the statement is made that “this earns you credit.” Even then, students often opt out of or don’t finish the activities and assignments offered to them, simply because they “don’t feel like it.” It’s not personal, they assure us, they just don’t want to do the work.
This reluctance to engage and the lack of academic grit is distressing and confusing, frustrating our staff as we try to help our students master skills and move towards graduation. It’s literally our job to help our often credit-deficient students graduate, and when they can’t or won’t do the work being offered, we’ve found ourselves struggling to know what to do. Students won’t respond to truly high-interest activities (field trips, community partnerships, even cooking workshops), so we’ve found ourselves offering simple worksheets that take less time and energy to create; if students aren’t going to do anything anyway, why kill ourselves planning the fun stuff? Students won’t even consider attempting an assignment or activity that appears difficult to them, so we’ve found ourselves offering what feels like dumbed-down versions of work just to see if we can get students to bite. We’ve felt discouraged and upset, granting credit for work that doesn’t meet grade-level expectations, and have ultimately been left wondering to one another if we’re graduating students who really don’t have the academic skills to advance in the workforce or find success in post-high school academics.
It’s become a cycle that has plagued my school, impacting students and staff alike, for as long as I’ve taught there: teachers increase rigor, students balk and opt out of most assignments and activities, teachers feel desperate for any kind of engagement and learning so they lower standards and decrease rigor, students settle for lowest hanging fruit, teachers worry that students aren’t learning at the level they should be…and the cycle begins again.
As we begin a new academic year, one where we know we might be able to make changes that could break this ongoing cycle, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way my students choose to work hard sometimes, but not other times. Clearly, the paycheck they earn at their places of employment is incentive enough for them to buckle down and do work. At school, the “paycheck” of academic credit just hasn’t been cutting it — it’s not enough for them to push through when things are hard. Up until now, getting to that magic number of 25 credits and graduating has been the incentive we’ve been highlighting, but it hasn’t led to students feeling incentivized enough. And honestly, even if it were enough, what does that mean for learning once a student reaches graduation?
When it comes down to it, the real “paycheck” for doing school is learning — gaining academic skills that one can apply and build on after the graduation ceremony is over. Teachers know this, of course, but can we convince students that it’s true, that learning itself is enough payout to do some real work? If we help students shift their focus away from simply checking credits off a list and begin to highlight the long-term benefits of truly mastering academic skills, will that be the incentive students need to really engage, and to persevere when things don’t come easily? I’m honestly not sure.
The bottom-line is that the paycheck we’re offering right now simply isn’t enough. If we want our students to dig in and do hard things, we’re going to have to make it worth their while in a different way. I know they can work hard; now, I want to find out if changing the incentive is enough to get them to work hard at school.
