How you can tell?

The absolute last thing any teacher wants to do is bribe their students. It would be professional malpractice if a teacher knowingly bribed their students to achieve, which is this topic generates so much "heat" from teachers, parents and administrators.

The question is how do you know if you are bribing students or not? Is there an easy test you can do? Can you fill out a form and by the end, the answer is clear, "yes or no?"

Over the past few weeks, I have been seeing more and more posts on social media telling educators to stop using PBS and PBIS systems in class because they don't work or they promote a negative classroom culture.

I'm here to tell you please don't listen to these pseudo-educators, people who just want to get famous on social media and do not care about your students, you or your ethical integrity. What's been shocking to me is that some of these posters, are social workers and counselors, which makes me question how they got a degree in the first place? But alas, let's focus on what you need to know, in order to avoid bribing your students.

Of course, if I'm saying "not" to listen to someone else, you are going to ask the same question to me. Why should I listen to you? Why should I trust what you have to say over those "pseudo-educators"? How do I know you're not the same thing?

That's a great question and one that I'm glad you are thinking. In fact, I wish more people on the internet and social media asked this question all the time. Who is putting out content, why should you listen to them? You might be surprised that half the people you follow would not meet the Standards of these questions.

Who am I? First, let me tell you about my credentials. I am a certified principal, superintendent and school business administrator. I started my career in education as a teaching assistant and worked my way up the educator ladder until I finally reached the top spot, superintendent of schools. It was a long and arduous road, but I made it to the top. Once there, I did not like what I saw.

Which leads me into my expertise. What 20 years of experience in education and schools has taught me is that you cannot force anyone to learn. Learning is an individual journey and the student must want to take that first step, and then the next step and so on and so forth until every day is just a new adventure.

Thankfully, I don't have to convince teachers to become learners. You already are. There is not a teacher in America who is not a life-long learner. Why else would you have jumped into a K12 system that forces you to learn something new every single day? So, thankfully we are starting from a place of "you love to learn."

That leaves the most important question, why learn from me?

I don't know if you noticed, but this is a very meta article. What I'm doing with you, my reader is exactly what you have to do with your students. Your students are asking these same questions. If you work in an urban school or with students from low socio-economic communities, these questions are heightened. There is an elevated level of skepticism in these schools. Who is my teacher? Why should I trust them? Why should I believe what they tell me?

Now that we are on the same page, and we are starting from the same perspective, you can begin to see the big picture. I want you to follow me, to allow me into your world and let me reshape the way you see school, teaching and learning and student performance.

I'm asking for a lot. The only way you are going to let me be your teacher is if you get something just as valuable back. And this is where the gray area of bribing comes into play. What do you get back?

Learning is an exchange. The teacher has information that they know the students need to grow and learn, but the student is unclear why that information is important or valuable to them. Sound familiar?

I'm sure you have never done this, but you have heard stories of teachers telling students "because you need to know this for your future" as the answer to the question, "why do I need to study this?"

But that's a huge mistake. The answer to that question is different for every teacher and for every topic or unit you are studying. If you are studying math and order of operations, the answer is "you need to understand order of operations, otherwise if you become an executive and you are faced with a financial problem, you can calculate the true answer and not lose billions of dollars."

If you are en English teacher and you are studying Shakespeare, the answer is because William Shakespeare was the most famous playwright in the history of the world, and if you want to be a content creator on YouTube or social media, it would be important to know how he became more influential than anyone else.

Notice the difference in the answers to that age-old student question. Why do I need to learn this? But really the students are asking this underlying question, "why should I trust you?"

Let me give you some background context. You don't know me or what I have seen, learned and experienced inside schools for the last 20 years. For all you know, I sat behind a big mahogany desk and read the newspaper all day. I'm not sure how anyone in education could justify doing that, but I'm sure there are lazy people in every industry.

Instead, I have worked tirelessly on answering the question, how do you push students to achieve their maximum performance level. And I wasn't working with AP and Honors level students, who don't need a lot of convincing. Those students are driven internally, they have intrinsic motivation that can sometimes border on obsession. I was looking to answer that question with the students every forgets about. The students who fall through the cracks, the students who seem to always earn Ds and Fs on tests, the students who dropout of high school or the students who never go to college.

How do we reach the unreachable? Isn't that what this article is all about?

When you have a class of AP or Honors students are you even worried about bribing students? Not really. The question only comes up when you encounter a student who does not fit the mold. They are outside the box from the first day of school. They don't trust you, the system, anyone in authority.

They tend to quit and give up before they even understand the lesson activity. It's as if they back up before you begin to speak. These are the students that you want to cajole into learning. These are the students that you wrack your brain for an answer, "how can I get this student to do their homework or study for a test or try harder?"

You aren't alone because their parent is asking the same question. They are looking to you to be the expert. They feel, you're a certified teacher, you're supposed to know how to teach kids? And that pressure and that unrealistic expectation and assumption about teaching and learning leads some teachers into unknowingly bribe students to get work done.

Notice I said "unknowingly". It's important to hear me out on this. I started this article stating no teacher purposes bribes their students. So here's why I know what I'm talking about. Why you should trust me? Why I hope you follow me on the journey to simplify the overly complex K12 system.

Because I was dedicated to answering that question, "how do you push students to reach maximum performance?" I did more research than most administrators. And I also listened more than most administrators. Who was I listening to? The answer will shock you, teachers. Yes, I listened to teachers tell me about their students and classroom situations. I was doing a walking tour of K12 schools and listening to teachers tell me the problems they faced inside their classrooms.

All told, I have done over 10,000 classroom observations, including formal teacher observations and so after doing that many and listening to that many teachers speak to me, you begin to see patterns and also to see "the big picture".

This is why I hope you will trust me and follow me.

My goal is not to tell teachers what to do, because I can't. For one, no one can be fully prepared for every situation that happens inside a classroom. Just when I thought I had seen it all, I had the opportunity to work with a student who had suffered neurological impairment due to undiagnosed Lyme Disease. This was not an easy case, the doctors and the psychiatrists could not give me the normal paperwork on the student because of his myriad of issues. The child study team that normally has a well-written IEP with diagnostics and charts could only provide with their best guesses. No one knew what was wrong with him or why he was behaving the way he was. Their goal was just to help him get better and want to go back to school to learn. That was going to be a long road, since the day I met him was through the backseat window of his parents Honda Civic in the parking lot of my school in 40 degree weather in the middle of October.

That's a story for another article, but I bring this student case up to say, if I could get this student to go to school and to learn without bribing him, you can do the same for a student that's far less severe on the behavioral scale.

Sometimes video can help address misconceptions better than the written word, so I posted a clip from a webinar that I ran on the topic of "Setting Up a Positive Classroom" for teachers back in 2020. Watch this and let me know your thoughts.

One of the larger missions I have is to Simplify the Complex K12 system. Part of that mission is to help teachers become experts. Granted, it's not a small mission, but I feel it's a worthwhile ambition because I believe in my heart that Teachers are the backbone of democracy.

You could say that I have spent 20 years in education, that's why I care about this. But the truth is that both my parents were teachers. They were both not given the respect they deserved inside the K12 system. My parents only were respected and thanked for their service by the parents and students they taught. The K12 system did not care one iota that they were teachers and that's a fundamental problem for me.

When we talk about bribery in class, we are talking about reaching students that don't want to be reached or two, students who are more difficult to reach. One strategy that helps has nothing to do with social and emotional learning, it has to do with teaching practice.

I like to demonstrate as a tool for learning, so hopefully you've seen that I like to say this is "meta" so you can recognize WHAT I'm doing as I'm doing it, so you can use the same techniques in your classroom. So far, I have been giving you information in two modes. First is the written word, which means visual learning. I then gave you a video to watch, which addresses two modes at the same time, visual and auditory. But I have one more mode of learning that I need to address. For those educators and readers that are kinesthetic learners, this hopefully helps you come to the same conclusion that everyone else has at this point.

If you face a situation in class where a student refuses to do work, refuses to listen to you, refuses to follow the class rules, what should you do? If you watched the video, setting up a PBS system in class is a great way to encourage and support students to follow the structure of your classroom, but some kids need so much that it "seems" like those PBS efforts do not work.

But they do work, the issue isn't the PBS system, the issue is that you need to close the backdoor. What do I mean by that?

We have to agree that some students really do not trust people. Some students do not trust teachers at all. And if there is that level of distrust in the classroom, then it's going to be very hard to work with them or to help them grow as a person. That's the underlying issue, it has nothing to do with your authority, your skin color or anything else. The student simply does not trust you. Therefore anything you say, they dismiss as "unimportant."

If that makes you feel marginalized, good! You need to feel what the student feels. You need to sit in their seat and understand where they are coming from. But more importantly, when you take a moment and sit in their seat, maybe you can figure out what they "NEED" from you.

So for the kinesthetic learners, this is what I want you to do. Sit in the student's seat that is giving you the most problems. (Note: After school when the class is empty). Sit in the seat and look at the classroom from their perspective. Look around the room and see what they see at the level they see it at. And think about these questions, "why should I trust this teacher?"

If you think about that question, you might uncover that the only reason a student will start to trust you is if they believe you are on their side. The student does not want bribes. The student does not want prizes or anything tangible. What the student ultimately wants is to "FEEL" better. They want to feel good for the first time in their life. They are carrying around bags and bags of trauma and pain. They want to put them down for the 40 minutes that you teach. The question is "will you help them put the bags down?"

To Recap:

A) We don't want to bribe students.

B) PBS Class Systems consist of 3 Components:

1. Positive Verbal Praise
2. Immediate Tangible Reinforcement (Stickers, Stars, Check Marks, Smiley Faces, Tickets, Points)
3. Long Range Tangible Reinforcement (Privileges, Monthly Prizes, Raffles)

C) Students who defy you and refuse to do work do it out of mistrust, not out of disrespect.