KIC S4E6 “What Really Motivates Students? Shifting from Rewards to Conditions” Featuring Dr. Bryan Harris

In this episode of KIC Karten’s Inclusion Conversations, Toby explores the multifaceted concept of student motivation in education through a discussion with Dr. Brian Harris. The conversation highlights motivation as the force that moves students toward goals and distinguishes between intrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (external) motivation. Dr. Harris emphasizes that while extrinsic strategies like rewards and behavior systems may produce short-term compliance, they are often ineffective for long-term growth, particularly among diverse learners. A key theme is the need to differentiate not only instruction but also behavioral supports, recognizing that students are motivated by different factors. The discussion also critiques common practices such as clip charts and misapplied PBIS systems, advocating instead for recognition over rewards and for creating conditions—such as autonomy, competence, relatedness, relevance, and curiosity—that naturally foster motivation. 

Websites shared in this episode:

https://www.bryan-harris.com/ 

https://www.practicaledpd.com/dr-bryan-harris.html 

https://www.apa.org/members/content/intrinsic-motivation 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374735098_Using_Behavior-Specific_Praise_to_Support_Intrinsic_Motivation 

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/16/09/intrinsically-motivated 

https://www.apa.org/ed/schools/teaching-learning/top-twenty/disabilities/motivation 

#TobyKarten  #Karten’sInclusionConversations #KIC #Inclusion #Dr.BryanHarris #EducationPodcast #TeachersOfInstagram #EdLeadership #TeachBetter #K12Education #TeacherLife #StudentMotivation #IntrinsicMotivation #ExtrinsicMotivation #MotivationMatters #LearningScience #MindsetMatters #InclusiveEducation #SpecialEducation #Differentiation #EquityInEducation #AllMeansAll #ClassroomManagement #PBIS #StudentEngagement #TeachingStrategies #EdTips #PodcastForTeachers #EdPodcast #NowListening #ProfessionalLearning 

For more information please visit https://inclusionworkshops.com/ 

Transcript

0:00

hi everybody welcome to KIC Karten's Inclusion Conversations and I have the honor of speaking With Brian Harris, Dr Brian Harris has been an educator for over 25 years and he first served as a classroom teacher an elementary school principal and a district-level director we have a man here who we're going to speak to about motivation that has been working full time as an author speaker consultant and he's trained over 18 000 educators in very effective strategies and powerful ones that increase student engagement and achievement and he has given some engaging trainings and presentations that i've had the honor of co-presenting with him at a few and he's also the author of five books including battling boredom that's a great one i need to add that to my list so Welcome, Dr Brian Harris to KIC Conversation you want to tell our audience today maybe something i left out that they should know about you well thanks to Toby. This is going to be a fun conversation I'm looking forward to it something the audience might not know well right now for about the last five years i've been serving in higher education i work currently as a associate professor of education at Arizona Christian University so over the last 30 or so years the bio that you're reading said 25 but i'm in now closer to 30 years in the profession, I've had the opportunity to be everything from a classroom teacher to now in higher ed and absolutely love it i love our profession i love figuring out ways we can support students and teachers motivation is a good topic a good segue into what we're going to talk about well you already got me motivated this sounds great and a lot of people think about the lesson what you're going to teach and then they say well what's the buy-in right how how are the kids going to do that so i think what you're saying and what we're going to do for this podcast starts with the big picture some of our audience they've had five years experience they've had five minutes and they've had five decades of experience but if we had to give just a basic definition of motivation how would you define it that word an important question is an important place to start first the motivation this whole topic it can be a bit of a thorny issue if we are honest a lot of strong opinions on both sides when we dig into the finer points here in just a moment you'll see strong opinions on both sides but it's a it's a really essential topic that every teacher needs to address every teacher already does address it if you think about it every teacher asks and tries to answer the question how do i motivate kids or if you've been in the profession for a while you might have seen a change in motivation maybe that changes post-covid maybe it has to do with devices and electronics and social media but it's a really good question how do we motivate kids it's one that every teacher needs to address whether like you said they've been in the profession five minutes or five decades so at the basic level we can think of motivation just as movement in fact that's the latin root of the word is to move so you can think along the lines of what gets you moving what what gets you going towards a goal now sometimes those goals are intrinsic from within sometimes they're extrinsic from without and we can talk about those differences here in just a moment when you're ready but motivation just what gets you moving what gets you going in fact the word motive what's your motive right comes from motivation as well i love that take on it that's wonderful i think a lot of lawyers begin their cases with motivation and thinking about that and teachers i think beyond the instruction motivation is such a central part of it as you outlined and and the ideology of the word it is interesting as well so that you've mentioned two other adjectives referring to motivation and we can go with those prefixes like inside for intrinsic or extrinsic for x outside and it's a little more involved in that and the differences between the two of those and this podcast is about inclusion but we were just talking about that inclusion itself has a broad definition as well as motivation does as well as the broad definition of who's seated in that classroom there could be kids with ieps there could be kids who are twice exceptional there could be kids who are sensory learners there could be students who are more advanced or those who need remediation so extrinsic versus intrinsic how does it affect these different populations you think if you want to hone in on one or or just generally yeah that's an important question let's briefly define terms just a little bit intrinsic motivation is what most of us think we want to develop in our students and we're right we want students to be internally motivated intrinsic you already mentioned it from within we want students to work hard to attend a task to take risks because it's within them they they want to try hard they want to achieve they want to behave they want to give back to their community because it's from within it's what internally drives them that's the way to think about intrinsic motivation and we've all got it we all have things that we want to learn or we want to master or we want to develop because it's interesting to us even if nobody ever recognizes it even if nobody ever pays us there are things we want for example part of my background is brain stuff brain based learning mind brain education been in that world for about 20 years i love learning about the brain in fact right over there on my credenza is actually a real human brain i actually own a real human brain it's pretty cool i love learning about the brain if nobody ever asked me once ever again in my entire life about the brain i'd still be learning about it because it's just something that naturally drives me wanting to learn so you're motivated to learn about the brain intrinsically motivated right and our students are all intrinsically motivated by something as well so you contrast this with that we all have some well of intrinsic motivation something that drives us that that we want to know or learn whether it's learning how to play a musical instrument even though you'll never end up playing in a band whether you want to learn an artistic technique even though you'll never sell a painting even maybe you want to develop expertise in something even though you'll never give a speech on it we all have that contrast that with extrinsic motivation and that's achieving a goal or working towards something because of some external factor in schools those external factors are points or rewards or grades there's another factor influencing the desire to go there not all extrinsic motivators are bad but most of us know that extrinsic motivators are extremely limiting in long-term change in behavior most of the time long-term change in behavior comes from how i'm internally motivated to change or think or grow the challenge especially for classrooms with diverse learners or high levels of special needs as teachers if we're totally honest we're all family right we can speak honestly we default to extrinsic motivators we default to this idea that i have to extrinsically motivate my kids or they won't do it that's a deeper discussion we can get into when you're ready absolutely as you were speaking and i'm thinking about social academic objectives for students and especially kids with special needs whether they use something like i always had the prize box and half the time it didn't even matter what was inside that prize box but it was just the fact that they earned it and in a way would you say that sometimes i don't know how you feel about this would extrinsic sometimes for some kids who are more concrete learners would it lead to intrinsic have you found in your experiences and research yeah so the research on extrinsic leading to intrinsic there is some out there it's limited primarily done by richard ryan you might have heard the names richard ryan and edward dc they are the ones going all the way back to the 70s who did a lot of research on self-determination theory and we can dig into that if you're interested but let's talk about the prize box that's a really interesting strategy that a lot of teachers use and then we can jump off on some other topics the deeper question is can they be good under what situations might a prize box be appropriate if we tell our kids that for example if you have perfect attendance next week you get to pick out of a prize box that's clearly extrinsic motivation it's clearly a reward because it has the word if it's conditional right there are certain things in life that are conditional we all know that there's an if if you don't have perfect attendance you don't get the prize box part of the challenge is assuming that kids are going to be motivated by the little thing in the prize box not all kids are equally motivated by the thing by the the little toy by the dollar store item that we bought i would contrast that with considering the concept of recognition versus a reward i'm not anti-rewards by the way i'm not anti-stuff i like giving people stuff one of my joys in life is giving stuff away i i love to give things but an extrinsic motivator always has a condition attached to it if i care about the condition i might work towards it if i really really really want that toy then i'm really really really going to work hard to have perfect attendance but if i don't care about that toy why should i have perfect attendance contrast that with this idea of a recognition a recognition comes after the fact i might pull a child aside and say i saw that you worked really hard this week and you had perfect attendance and a beautiful attitude because you work so hard feel free to get something out of the out of the prize box it's an after the fast fact recognition that i think can actually then support the idea of the intrinsic but it's an after the fact it's a because it's a recognition rather than a reward huh it's kind of like dominoes like a connection there i was also visualizing going to the prize box i would say now pat yourself on the shoulder you did a good job so sometimes i have that special ed in my blood and sometimes i want to have it mean something to a student and if a tap does it or just even holding a little squishy toy or a pen that's a stylus that might also have a function not all prizes and work for for students but even adults are motivated by the higher salary if they work x number or sales commission in the private force and and motivation is something that is involved in every single part of our lives we don't even realize how much it goes beyond the classroom but i think your topic is so vital because it begins in the classroom it begins by not quote-unquote total training but conditioning in a way that students feel good about themselves with their achievements rather than what you're saying is holding a physical object and internalizing that i love that conversation do you want to expand more about that sure yeah so let's make a connection to students with special needs most of us would say that we believe in differentiation at some level that if a student has a unique special need we differentiate for them whether that needs be glasses we allow them to wear their glasses at the basic that's at the most basic level definition of differentiation to we differentiate some aspect of instruction content process product all the comments and helped us understand well most of us from an instructional perspective would say absolutely we should differentiate when students have unique needs but then we forget that very concept or that mindset when it comes to behavior we then assume we start the school year with a clip chart system i'm going to talk about clip charts because it's one of the things i feel really passionate about right and why are we assuming that yes i should differentiate instruction but no i don't have to differentiate feedback or behavioral support they just don't go together so we might start the school year with those red yellow green clip chart system assuming every student is going to be equally motivated by that chart or we start with marbles in the jar or table points or the prize box we're assuming that all students are going to be equally motivated by the system but that doesn't mesh with the mindset that we should differentiate instruction we should differentiate our behavioral supports as much as we should differentiate anything else but i do want to get into clip charts because it's so interesting here's a little bit of the background the story behind clip chart they actually it goes all the way back to lee canter in the 1970s if you remember lee and marlene canter i sure do many of us were trained there right yes yes yes wrote a very influential discipline yes it's assertive discipline yeah positive discipline was a different program yes thank you thank you no that's okay really influential and he's the one who gave this idea and he was well-meaning by the way i'm not picking on lee canter he's still out there still doing good work but the idea that we want to as teachers we want to maintain control and reinforce good behavior so if you're up in front of the classroom giving instruction modeling a lesson telling students ideas and a student is off task or misbehaving you simply turn around and write their name on the board that public display was meant to tell that child hey get your act together this is a warning if the child continues to misbehave we put a check mark a check mark means five minutes attention or it means something there's a consequence then we keep going to check marks right his initial idea was to maintain levels of control maintain focus on instruction don't call the student out don't waste instructional time just give an indicator to the student that hey you're off task you need to get yourself back under control the names on the board with the check marks primarily a secondary thing elementary teachers took the same idea and created clip charts right you read yellow and green you start off the day on green if you need a warning go to yellow if you need a consequence you go to red here's part of the story that most people have never heard lee canter as early as the 90s late 80s early 90s started seeing his program being what he would call misuse that it was primarily a shame based system a teacher gets really upset at a kid and puts the name on the board in kind of a frustrated manner it's meant to shame you into behavior he later said in an interview stop putting names on the boards especially for young children lee cancer the guy who said to put names on the board later said yeah let's i don't think that's good for kids he also said be careful about marbles in a jar in fact one of his articles he wrote in the early 90s was his concern about the idea that the legacy of assertive discipline is just names on the board and marbles in the jar because the strategies aren't the system it's not the philosophy the reason i share that with you is the names on the board then became clip charts and some of the clip charts are pretty and creative and fun and they look nice and you can buy them online through teacher pays teacher all those kind of systems it's the same system it's meant to publicly shame a child into better behavior and you can tell i feel passionate about this one i'm feeling your passion here and i'm i hear you thank you not all kids respond equally to those systems right if it's march in the school year and you're still using a clip chart system it's probably the same kids who always get their charts clipped up or down depending on the system it's the same kids in march that it was in october probably the the idea is i've got to use things that actually are going to have an impact on kids yes now will will some kids if they get their chart clipped down or up again depending on which way the system goes will they temporarily change their behavior perhaps but are we teaching them long-term changes in behavior so here's an alternative many teachers will say i like the clip charts because it helps me track student behavior say tracking student behavior is amazing we should be doing that take that same information put it on a clipboard and keep it private don't make it this public display that becomes everybody's business yeah and i think a big thing with canto is also about accountability and student accountability that was an excellent way to put that and that's for long term and we have different prompts sometimes it could be with a smile and then the student internalizes that good feeling of accomplishment in some way and they smile for themselves and i think that's great that's so important it comes back to the idea of recognition so if i could briefly i picked on clip charts so i've offended people i might as well no no no no no because i envision so many classrooms where they where they have those creative beautiful you know character related clip charts and kids are excited but is it accomplishing what they need to accomplish for that school year in terms of not just academic but as you said behavioral goals yeah so since i've offended some with with clip charts let me keep going you asked the most the most important question is are we teaching this child the skills they need to be successful by the systems and often over and especially with students with special needs it's just failing so pbis is a program that many people of many schools have adopted and i've worked with lots of schools on helping them refine their pbis programs here's one of the mistakes that it's in the implementation of pbis programs pbis is built on this idea of recognition that you should recognize good behavior you've already mentioned it sometimes for some kids it's a smile it's a pat on the back it's knuckles it's hey i noticed it doesn't have to be this thing but many schools have made rewards synonymous with recognition and they're not i can recognize by giving a reward i bias towards doing it after the fact to because rather than an if but recognition and rewards aren't the same thing and that's one of the reasons i think some pbis programs have gone off the rails and in fact i was working with one school recently their entire pbis program was the school store yeah so you you get points and then you get to redeem the points for something in the school store that was the entire pbis program and so we had to back up and and go back and to some of the basics i've seen some schools successfully use pbis programs with no school store with no external recognition extrinsic stuff at all right and and then there's another topic we probably need a whole another podcast for like compliance versus automaticity and things so autonomy things like we gotta have that internal buy-in that i and keep saying and the fact with kids with special needs that people need to realize that maybe there isn't something on the shelf like you said in that school store for that kid and maybe that child just needs the recognition self recognition and to develop that self-efficacy and self-awareness and i love pbis but like with any program and even you know that you mentioned through the years it's sometimes even with differentiation people don't realize like they'll differentiate instruction and assessment is everyone's getting the same one no i know there's standardized assessments kids need to take but we need to prepare them to be independent and motivation is such a huge huge part of that to develop that autonomy in our learners and to think about that so maybe you want to talk a little bit we have a couple of minutes not much but some of the methods or techniques that teachers can use aside from maybe not the clipboards so that's that's thank you that's perhaps the most important discussion of our of our entire time so the way i phrase it so if a teacher comes to me and asks the question how do i motivate kids i say that's a really good question at least they're in the game right when we ask the question how do i motivate a kid the conversation most often goes to the extrinsic stuff the points the rewards the stuff i rephrase it just a little bit and i say a way to think about it is under what conditions is a student motivated let me repeat that it's a subtle difference but a really important one instead of how can i motivate because that's the extrinsic thing the the better question is under what conditions is a child motivated in other words instead of me trying to try to pull the best out of you i'm my job as an educator is to put you in the conditions in which you pull the best out of yourself and this goes all the way back to a couple of names i referenced earlier richard ryan and edward dc self-determination theory all the way back in the 70s and they built on you know research before them and there's been great research after they came up with three big ones autonomy competence and relatedness but i would add some other things to that but if if we go back to theirs autonomy is my ability to have some choice and control over my life over some aspect of my learning so if i increase a sense of autonomy i then motivation tends to come along with it if the motivation is the trailing aspect the trailing characteristic of a condition i'm in so they actually i think they refer to those as psychological nutrients that's a great phrase isn't it in other words the nutrients are the things we need to thrive so i have autonomy i have competence my ability to get better at something i have relatedness and that's my the social aspect i would add things like another condition would be relevance if i see relevance in what the teacher is asking me to think about or do or learn then it's important to me so then the motivation comes along because the relevance has kicked in or i'm curious about something the teacher has put a really interesting problem in front of me or a really interesting scenario or a really interesting statistic that i can see that well that's i'm kind of curious about that i'm kind of why does that happen how did that happen then the motivation is following the emotional response of curiosity or if i'm excited about something or if even if i'm slightly confused about something then i could be motivated to figure out the thing that i'm confused about so to wrap it up what what i guess i'm suggesting is asking how can i motivate a kid good question better question under what conditions is someone naturally motivated and there's a lot of those kind of conditions uh conditions out there i like that connecting it to the learner and we will put in the when this is posted we'll put in the research that you mentioned from is it ryan and d-e-c-i correct yeah yeah unfortunately i believe edward dc uh they're both from new york i think the rochester area i think he just recently passed away oh he well they they're pioneers in this field of self-determination and there's tons of information out there youtube videos and they've written hundreds and hundreds of articles yeah and it goes back to logistics and i love the way you set that up with what conditions because my mind went to special ed that's one of the questions you ask when you're writing an iep goal and it's specific for students under what conditions and we need to frame the motivation as that part of it because we know that a lot of our students with or without special needs do experience things that they didn't in their short lives whether it be trauma or they were having certain learning challenges that are not famed brain research you're involved with it certain parts of the brain of a child with adhd is and wired the same way and what motivates one student will not motivate so we need to ask them and get those learner profiles and can i can i briefly add just one thing because i want to wrap it up yes i know we're pushing the time so i apologize good but the question will always come up and i don't want to seem too extreme on the one end so sometimes they ask dr harris should we never use extrinsic motivators and i don't go there but two things to think about one is i don't start the year assuming every child needs an extrinsic motivator i don't start the year with the system but if i've tried everything else i've tried the conditions i've tried the relationships i've tried making it super engaging and i use a technology appropriate and we have physical movement and it's still not working motivations the extrinsic motivators are the last thing i'm going to try not the first that's a key idea so there are times i think when we have to default to it but i've tried everything else first the other thing to think about is i might use an extrinsic motivator to push a child slightly beyond their comfort level but it's always temporary so let's say i have a kid who only wants to read comic books they only want to read the the illustrated manga manga whatever those kind of books are i might say you know what if you try reading this genre of book which i know you're going to like tell you what just read the first chapter i'll tell you what read the first chapter and i'll give you five minutes of extra time on the on the computer so that's the the carrot out there to slightly push a kid to do something i know they're going to naturally like i just want to kind of motivate them to get into it i might consider something like that extrinsic motivators might work with things that don't really require much depth they just they require more just putting a little bit of effort you know for example if i want my kids to clean up the classroom really really fast then you might use an extrinsic motivator it just becomes messy when we add the extrinsic motivators to learning and to behavior and to critical thinking and to risk taking and and all of the really higher order thinking skills we want our students to develop i love that and motivation is wonderful but what my takeaway and correct me if you want to add something else is sometimes we dilute the potential of a student by giving them more than what they can provide for themselves i don't know is that maybe this is a yeah maybe this is a discussion for part two but you're absolutely right yes every teacher out there gets irritated when a kid comes to them and says okay but what do i get right you're starting a unit and a kid immediately raises their hand and says okay teacher i'll do the i'll do the experiment but what do i get we get really irritated when kids ask us that question but it's the i don't want to say smart i don't know what smart and dumb means but it's a smart kid who asks the question because they've been trained since they were in preschool to expect a thing or a reward or an extrinsic for doing the work but sometimes the work is the reward the learning we want the learning the depth the critical thinking to be in and of itself meaningful so when a kid asks us that question what do i get we get irritated but then we have to realize well i've trained that kid the parents have trained that kid since they were in school to expect an extrinsic thing whether it's in the form of a recognition or a gold star or a grade so we just have to come to that understanding there's a contradiction there's a tension here well i thank you so much dr harris for this wealth of information because i don't want to make a pun on our topic but you've motivated me to re-examine a few other things in my coaching with teachers and we want to motivate students but we want to motivate teachers at the same time to do the best practices that will develop independent learners and there is sometimes like you were talking about we need to just put it a little bit more than what we know like that guy vagotsky that zone of proximal development a little bit ahead of what we know but then at the same time motivating students to learn and what's the reward the reward is knowledge always always we're educators we always feel that way but we want students and and and all professionals to feel that way to embrace this kind of knowledge even though it might not have been something that we looked at through this lens which you helped me to do as well and i know our listening audience will gain so many insights from this topic and be motivated to learn more Dr Harris, thank you so very much for your time and your expertise you are welcome this was fun thanks, Toby absolutely he can feel the stairs and hear the words unspoken not so unaware of a world that thinks he's broken and who never even knew a kid with a different point of view Copyright 2026 Karten's Inclusion Conversations. Thank you for listening. Check out other episodes on all major platforms