The Carrot, The Stick and The Mirror
My Teach for India stint started with 5 weeks of the residential induction. Extremely detailed and exhaustive, those 5 weeks were nothing but a deeply immersive experience.
One of the large focus areas during the induction was to learn how to manage classroom behaviour of students. In a very special TFI way, we were introduced to many TFI alumni fellows who handled difficult classrooms who shared their journey with difficult kids, we visited many classrooms and observed how different BMS (Behaviour management systems) worked and were even given opportunities to practice the same in our own classrooms in summer school.
BMS essentially works on three parameters:
- Have a classroom theme which is not just about décor but more about learning goals
- Have classroom rules of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours
- Have rewards or consequences announced, displayed and consistently followed respectively for acceptable and unacceptable behaviours
My mind was blown with what I saw. Many examples of BMS were rich with creativity, classic stories and induced a great element of fun and joy into the classroom and the concepts were smartly woven into the curriculum. I would take an example and explain what I mean:
One of the Fellows had a ‘Harry Potter’ theme for her class. It was a classroom of 4th graders. And this is how BMS in her classroom looked (in parts):
- As a co-curricular reading, her class was reading Harry Potter 1 and 2 that year making it a very relevant theme for her class.
- She had created groups of kids based on the houses in Hogwarts
- The class had rules explained in HP language — for example ‘No unforgivable curses’ (which meant not to use bad language)
- She would move kids from one group to another based on the behaviours they exhibited. For e.g. A kid in Gryffindor might be moved to Ravenclaw if the kid scores good marks in the weekly exam
- She had an award system in line with Harry potter artifacts. For e.g. ‘student-of-the-day’ would be given a hat to wear the entire next day as a token of appreciation.
- She had a chair called ‘Forbidden Forest’ which was kept in the far end of the classroom which was reserved for someone who breaks the discipline; to be kept away but had to be allowed some reflection time. A mis-behaving kid would be sent to sit on that chair and they would write a letter to Didi (the TFI fellow) discussing and owning the mistakes
- I have only highlighted what I recollect but there were few more things which made this theme come alive in the classroom.
There were few more themes that I even remember after all these years — Alice in Wonderland, Transformers, Star Trek. Every Fellow brought in their own passion in their classroom and connected it to the behaviour management system of their own class. And this is how carrot and stick worked (just a few examples)
Carrot (Rewards) would look like:
- Special allowances such as taking favourite book home or extra time on laptop, wearing a red ribbon (or a hat or a special spot in the class) which was quite a thing of pride
- Handwritten note of appreciation by Didi / Bhaiyya
- Solving sums of higher degree of complexity
Stick (concequences) would look like:
- Share food with someone whom you have had a fight with
- Writing a note of apology
- Find 10 new words and learn what they mean, use them in a sentence
________
As our induction neared the end, I was consumed with creative ideas and my mind was working at a crazy speed. There is so much I could do, and I was spoilt for choices such as International football (wanted them to introduce to something else besides Cricket), Dr. Seuss, Malory Towers, Toy Story and what not. I was constantly going back and forth about what would my theme be and how would I put it in execution.
After 5 weeks, I returned home and was greeted by my 8-year-old daughter. She has this magical power on me to bring me closer to my own reality. Meeting her after such a long break and slowly slipping back into my role of a parent, something phenomenal happened.
As a parent, I have never practiced ‘Carrot and Stick’ approach. We (me and the husband) have been ardent believers that carrot and stick has very little shelf-life. Something that excites as a carrot today is going to lose all the charm in just a little time or will be taken for granted in some days. Something that scares as a stick today is going to be a matter of habit and a child will adapt him/herself to it. Only thing that has worked is:
- Consciously (For us, may be subconsciously for our girl) create a framework of ‘choices’
- Allow her to make choices with a clear understanding of the consequences (good or bad)
- Create enough trust where in we can make choices on her behalf, and she doesn’t feel small/ threatened
When this came back to me, I was extremely unsure of what am I to do in my classroom. The entire class of 8 years old, 49 kids (with first time TFI intervention) were waiting for me on coming Monday and I was walking into my classroom without absolutely any thoughts on how I will manage my classroom culture.
The first few days culminating into weeks went by in a blur. Every day was a cruel fight between me and my ideals. My beautiful charts were being shredded into pieces. The kids were getting badly beaten up by their school teaching staff for their misbehaviours. The kids were very low on academic progress and their unruly behaviour in the class was making it very difficult for me to even teach anything constructively. To define, my classroom culture was unsafe, inconsistent, apathetic and disengaged.
My program manager would often visit the classroom and keep on highlighting need for creating a BMS. He would give me ideas on what all I could do and how will it bring instant change in the class. I half-heartedly tried something. But it lacked conviction, it lacked consistency and hence it never succeeded. The first class assessment happened, and my 3rd graders were not even at the level of grade 1 mastery which meant I had to do something soon.
I didn’t want to do anything that promoted doing something either out of greed or fear. I wanted the change to come from within and which can sustain even without my presence. ‘Independence’ was one of my class values and having my kids dependent on some stickers and some hand-made notes was not going crack it. I needed a system that would be driven by the kids and not by me. I struggled to come up with anything.
And as it happens, a miracle did happen. I was preparing a lesson plan for ‘less than — greater than’ and was thinking what I can bring in my plan for the kinesthetic kids in my class (All my plans had the component for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners). I decided to use “तराजू” — a old style weighing scale to explain the concept of ‘less than — greater than’. I went to the old Pimpri market and bought myself one, calibrated it with the help of my engineer husband and got it fixed in my classroom
As a practice, I would always try and mix more than one learning goal into my lesson plan. Learning is always multi-dimensional, and one concept can throw open many aspects that kids can get benefitted from. For e.g., teaching grammar concepts though a maths word sum.
As I started executing my lesson plan of ‘less than — greater than’, a thought struck me. I realized how wonderfully I could utilize this small apparatus to create reflection for my kids. That day, I went home knowing for sure in my heart, that things will be different tomorrow onwards. I prepared a lesson plan that I wanted to execute to introduce my own BMS for my class — something that I had conviction in.
The concept of “तराजू” was already known to my kids. Some of their parents were vegetable vendors and had the same at their homes. I had carried 2 big bottles of marbles — one green and other yellow.
We named one side of scale as ‘Helpful behaviours’ and the other ‘Unhelpful behaviours’ (Why didn’t we call them good or bad behaviours?? More on that some other time). Completely listed down by the kids with minimal input from me. I knew that we can always keep adding to this list as we go on.
For e.g.:
Helpful behaviours could be:
- Bringing the right food in your lunch box (we already had a list prepared)
- Completing homework
- Attending school (yes, something as basic as that)
- Not running in the corridor
- Hygiene matters such as clipped nails, combed hair, clean uniform
- Many more
Unhelpful behaviour could be:
- Leaving food in the lunch box
- Abusive words (words that you don’t want to be said to yourself)
- Being beaten for having done a wrong thing
- Not attempting a question in the test
- Not taking good care of classroom property
- Many more
Here is how our BMS worked:
- For every helpful behaviour demonstrated, we would put green marble on the ‘Helpful’ side of the weighting scale.
- For every unhelpful behaviour demonstrated, we would put yellow marble on the ‘Unhelpful’ side of the weighting scale
- Kids were free to access the scale and put marbles based on what they experienced or exhibited when I am not around
- Kids were free to point out helpful/unhelpful behaviour displayed by others including mine. (Me coming late to school was penalized with a yellow marble)
- Kids were free to add more behaviours in either of the column or even debate if a particular act falls in a certain category (for e.g. we debated a lot over how should we respond if someone beats us unprovoked)
- At the end of every day, we would look at which side of the scale was over-weighed. There were some very bad days when we had just a handful of green marbles and many times more yellow ones. But largely there were days, when we were in the Green zone.
- This started working like a mirror for my kids. They didn’t need me or any other adult to tell them how they were doing. They had a scale right in front of them
- The biggest positive was — they started competing against themselves. They started rooting for the Green side as a collective. If there is a kid who would break a rule, run around, they would try (in their limited capacity) to convince the kid to do the ‘right’.
- Of course, it took us many days to get there. And we had to follow this for about 4 months until one day I realized that my kids don’t even need this mirror any longer. They have figured out their own BMS which can run without this weighing scale.
- After I removed the “तराजू” from my class, we moved to end-of- the-day ‘reflection journaling’. My kids had reached a good level of expression by this time, and we continued this habit until the end of my fellowship stint. Even today a couple of them have continued this and they do send me pics of their beautiful journals.
Sharing a few pics of what became possible for me to do with my class once we fixed the classroom culture.
Cut to: The work I do today
I deal with brilliant bunch of adults; Cognitively brilliant. Pit them against anyone in the industry and they will stand strong on their own merit. But these individuals have also challenged my theory of ‘Carrot and Stick vs. Mirror’. It has not worked for them, and I do reflect on ‘why’ very often. I refuse to make the easiest conclusion — “This is due to the difference between children and adults.” I believe this is only the surface level conclusion. I think things run deeper and I am still struggling to get a handle on them.
Do you have an experience with ‘Carrot-Stick-Mirror’ or ‘Carrot-Stick-Anything else’? Would love to hear what you think.
#motivation
#students
#parenting
#teacher
#reflection
