In Soviet Russia there was a cutting one-liner that indicated the attitude of the citizenry: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." This summarizes the attitude of a workforce demoralized by the long hierarchy of bureaucrats whose edicts separated the common worker from his own appreciation of the value of his work.

Our schools are filled with students who have no vision of the value of their work. In our obsession with the assessment of student progress and measurable goals, we have assigned a point total to every activity, inadvertently shifting the emphasis in the students' minds from the intrinsic value of the activity at hand to the inherently meaningless quest for "points".

What motivates students strongly correlates with what we see in the teachers' lounge: The teachers with a vision for what they can accomplish in students' lives are planning, grading, discussing, or perhaps venting frustration. Those others are reading the paper, chatting, or sighing about the ten long years until retirement. What makes the difference between these two groups of teachers?

The conscientious teachers are working because of the intrinsic value of the job, deriving satisfaction from the work itself. The others are working for external rewards, and as such have learned the human art of doing the least amount of work to receive the desired compensation.

Students are the same way. It's not hard to get kids to pretend they're working. We pay them with points that we all pretend have value. But most students know exactly what they have to do to get by with the minimum amount of thought for the minimum amount of points to satisfy a minimum criteria (imposed by their parents, or by their own sense of what is acceptable).

Research has shown that when rewards are used to motivate, subjects are distracted from the inherent value of their work by their focus on the reward. Teachers who rely primarily upon extrinsic motivation are allowing--even rewarding--students to go through the motions. Such a teacher is going through the motions as well.

It is indisputable that evaluation, assessment, measurement--whatever you want to call the means by which we quantify student performance--are necessary. In their proper perspective, they are indispensable. But we must not forget that grades are not primarily motivators, but indicators. Grades should measure mastery on a holistic basis. If we want students to finish each unit, each semester, each year with useful knowledge, they must receive high grades only for demonstration of this knowledge.

To assess how students are motivated, look at what drives you and your colleagues. Teachers in traditional school systems do not improve because of ever-increasing perks from the administration, but because they attain a clearer vision of the importance of the choices they make in the classroom.

I recommend the following steps to decrease reliance on extrinsic motivation:

1. Refuse to go through the motions. Teach your students to do things that are important and useful. Focus clearly on what your students can be reasonably expected to accomplish. Focus your students' attention on what they are expected to achieve, and on its inherent value. As for you, if an activity doesn't work this year, don't use it next year! (The ruthless rejection of activities that do not work will be the topic of a future Note of the Week) I'll paraphrase B.F. Skinner (who would disagree with this essay), who said something like: "Education is what you have left after you have forgotten everything else." We must teach with a view to long-term retention of knowledge worth retaining. If students are going through the motions of learning to satisfy you or their parents, what you teach them will be forgotten as soon as you assign a grade.

2. Do not give completion grades. If it is too much work to grade every homework assignment, don't do it! Students need to understand that homework is a means to an end, or they don't really learn from it anyway. They must learn that homework an important way to learn material so that it can be reinforced and applied in class. If you reward them just for completing it, how will they learn that lesson? If you really need a large number of homework grades to decide how well a student has mastered material, your culminating activities need to be rethought.

3. Make your activities intrinsically motivating. Making activities fun can increase intrinsic motivation, but this is only valuable if the fun does not distract from the focus of the activity. Do not, however, overlook the intrinsic motivation involved in intellectual challenge. Imagine the satisfaction (or remember the last time you experienced it) of watching a class work diligently on a challenging activity even though it will not be graded. If you plan such formative activities, and you have a legitimate means of evaluating the students' overall achievement at a later time, you accomplish two things: 1. You allow students to focus on the learning, without distracting them with rewards, and; 2. You have just saved yourself some grading!

These comments are based upon my experience. If you would like some authoritatively-researched information about intrinsic motivation, check out Alfie Kohn's 1993 book, Punished by Rewards. I have not read the book, but it has received excellent reviews.