Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - Why External Rewards Undermine the Motivation They're Meant to Build — and What Actually Works Instead

In this delayed release episode, Kurt openly talks about that one student going unnoticed and the busy teacher trying to deliver her best within the system. He talks frankly about an uncomfortable teaching experience and student experience, which thankfully has a warm GLOW  ending. 

She wasn't defiant. She wasn't disengaged. She was sitting under a table, drawing animals, in a classroom that had spent two years rewarding her for sitting still — and had never once asked what she loved. This episode is about what happens when we design for control instead of connection. And what becomes possible when we stop. Connect with me and join the conversation by contacting me on 

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Transcript

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In today's episode, I want to start telling you a story about a student I didn't teach. She was in my hub in a colleague's class, and I watched what happened to her over the course of a year. Watched it with a particular kind of recognition. The kind that sits in your chest and doesn't leave. You see, this student, she had dyslexia, a low self-esteem, and a fierce, specific, completely untapped passion for animals and nature. She knew things about the natural world that most adults don't know. She cared about it in the way that some children care about Pokemon or books or I don't know, whatever things kids are into these days. And for a while the classroom she was in had no idea what to do with any of that. Not because her teacher didn't care. She did, genuinely and deeply, but the design responded to the dyslexia and the low self esteem and completely missed the passion for animals and nature. Simplified worksheets, visual timetables, colouring in as a reward, a PBL token for remaining still in her seat and completing her work, and a merit award if the compliance continued for a fortnight. This child she worked alone, not because anyone put her there, but because she had been in that routine since the early years. The separate desk, the modified task, the quiet management of a student who didn't quite fit the shape of the classroom. And I watched as her self esteem declined, week by week, quietly, visibly, and heartbreakingly. And then one day she stopped doing work altogether. She got under her table and she chose to stay there and just draw curled in a ball. She drew animals, intricate, detailed, beautiful drawings of animals, while the class continued around her, and the teacher tried everything she knew to bring her back. The tokens had become meaningless, not because she was defiant, because they had never been connected to anything she cared about. You cannot reward a person into engagement with something that has no relevance to who they are. You can reward them into compliance for a while, but compliance, well, it has a ceiling, and she had reached it. When I looked at her under the table, I saw something I recognised. I saw a student who had learned that the safest place in the room was the one where nobody expected anything from her. I saw year five, I saw the chalk line, and I saw myself. And I knew I had to do something. Enjoy. G'day, mate. Fancy bumping into you here on this podcast platform. Listen, before you head off and start listening to this episode, here's just a real quick one. If this episode sparks a thought, challenges an idea, or just gives you something useful for your practice, don't keep it to yourself. Please subscribe, share this podcast where you share all your good podcasts, share it with your colleagues, post it to your friends, stick it on your socials. Speaking of socials, you can contact me on LinkedIn and jump into the conversation. I'm keen to hear your theories, your perspectives, and I want to know what shapes you as an educator, because that's where my real learning continues. And if you want to help keep this work grow, and you'd like us to keep creating practical, meaningful content for educators, or if you just want to say thanks for the chat and the learning, you can buy us a coffee through the link in the show notes. Look, all I'm asking you to do is to take that next step, like, subscribe, review, share, and please connect on the LinkedIn and look, become part of the ongoing conversation. Three needs, one framework, and decades of evidence. In the 1970s, two researchers, Edward Deckey and Richard Ryan, began asking a question that sounds simple and turns out to be one of the most important questions in psychology. What conditions allow human beings to be genuinely motivated? Not because of what they'll receive and not because of what they'll avoid, but because the activity itself is worth doing. Decades of research across cultures, ages, and contexts produce what they called the self-determination theory. And at its core, three basic psychological needs that every human being carries, regardless of where they grow up or what school system shape them. Need number one is autonomy. Autonomy is the need to experience yourself as the author of your own behavior. Not to do whatever you want, but to feel that what you are doing reflects genuine choice and the personal values rather than external coercion. A student can be highly autonomous while following the teacher's instructions if they understand the purpose and feel genuine ownership over how they engage. A student can be completely dependent while appearing to work independently if they are executing someone else's design with no personal investment. The student I was talking about earlier, she was sitting at a separate desk working through a simplified worksheet in a classroom she hadn't chosen. The question autonomy asks is not whether there are rules, it is whether the student experiences themselves as a person or as a subject. So the student in our story, she had learned to become a subject, a quiet one, a compliant one, and then she couldn't anymore. Need number two is competence. Competence is the need to feel genuinely effective, to experience yourself as capable of meeting the challenges you face. This maps directly onto the challenge skill balance from flow theory. But the SDT adds something important. Competence is not just about the task, it's about the identity narrative underneath the task. A student can be objectively capable and still experience competence threat, because their internal story says I'm not the kind of person who succeeds here. She'd been sitting in reading and phonics lessons since kindergarten, all the same lessons and kept meeting the same gaps, the same evidence reinforced year after year that this was not her domain. Her identity as a learner had been written in those repeated failures, and no token for sitting still was ever going to rewrite it. Then there's need three, that's relatedness. Relatedness is the need to feel meaningfully connected to others, to experience yourself as cared for and caring, to belong to something larger than individual performance. This is where SDT and the philosophical tradition of the EYLF meet most directly. Belonging is not a pastoral aspiration, it is a basic psychological requirement for intrinsic motivation. You see, the student we talked about, she worked alone. She'd always worked alone. Not because anyone chose isolation for her, but because the design had never found a way to bring her in. And without genuine connection to the to the teacher, to the peers, to the community of learners in that room, neither autonomy or competence can function. Because both require an environment where you feel safe enough to try. She didn't feel safe enough to try, so she drew animals underneath the table instead. Three needs, and I felt as if none of them were met. And the design response was another token for sitting still. Let's look at the over-justification effect and what it looks like in practice. I want to describe something alongside the story of the young learner that hid under the table, because I think these two images belong together. Picture a Merit Award assembly. The students are sitting in rows, the music is playing, the students stand to sing the national anthem, names are called, students walk up, shake hands, feel nervous, they receive a certificate, and then there's applause. And somewhere in that hall, a student is holding a certificate, smiling for a photo, with absolutely no memory of what they did to earn it. I know this because I've been that student, standing at the front of an assembly, certificate in hand, genuinely trying to remember the neat workbook or the responsible behavior, or whatever the citation was, and drawing a complete blank. The moment of genuine achievement had happened weeks earlier, in the classroom, when it still mattered, and when I understood what I'd done and why it was significant. By the time the assembly arrived, that meaning had evaporated. What was left was just a performance, the walk to the front, the applause from people who also didn't know what I'd done, the awkwardness of being publicly recognized for something I could no longer connect to, and look, I was an anxious child, I hated it. And what I was experiencing, without having the language for it all at the time, is what Decky and Ryan called the over-justification effect. When you add an external reward to an activity a person was already intrinsically motivated to do, the intrinsic motivation decreases. The reward doesn't add to motivation, it replaces it. The student's internal answer to why am I doing this shifts from because it matters to me to because of what I receive. And when the rewards stop, the behavior stops with them. Now connect that to the student under the table. She hadn't been intrinsically motivated in the first place. The design had never found the door into her genuine motivation. So tokens weren't undermining intrinsic engagement. They were replacing the possibility of it. Every token for sitting still was teaching her that sitting still was the point, not the learning, not the thinking, not the connection to something that mattered. Just the compliance. And when compliance stopped producing tokens that felt worth having, she just stopped. Not because she was a bad kid, because she was rational. The system had told her what was valued, and she had decided it wasn't worth her energy. Schools must be careful that their merit systems are not designed as controlling rewards, tokens given to produce desired behaviour. They are not informational rewards that tell students something meaningful about their growth. And according to decades of research, controlling rewards systematically undermine the very motivation they are meant to build. Ah the student that drew animals. What a story. Let me tell you what happened next. During hub reading time, my colleague's class and my class, we came together for a teacher read aloud, and I was reading Tim Winton's Blueback. And Blue Back is a story set in Western Australian coast about a boy, his mother, and an extraordinary blue groperfish. It is a story about the relationship between human beings and the natural world, about what we protect and what we destroy, about what it means to love something wild. And both I and my colleague noticed that she was listening. She wasn't pretending to listen, not just tolerating the lesson until it ended, but genuinely visibly absorbed. The drawings had stopped and she was sitting upright, she was inside the story with us. We invited her to contribute, not called on her, just invited. And what came out of her mouth stopped us both. She understood the animals in ways that the other students simply couldn't. The inner city kids in the room, all bright, all capable, all engaged, they were responding to the story intellectually. She was responding to it from a more genuine knowledge. She knew about those fish, the only one in fact that knew what a gropal was before we explored and researched deeper. She cared about that coastline. She could emphasize with the creatures in the stories in a way that no worksheet had ever asked her to do. And in that moment I saw an entry point. Not the entry point to the curriculum, but an entry point into her. And so did my colleague. She needed to hear the text to access it. She was a listener, not a reader. Not because she lacked intelligence, but because the the decoding load of reading had always consumed the cognitive capacity she needed for comprehension. When someone else did the decoding for her, her comprehension was extraordinary. So me and my colleague offered her a different way-in. Instead of reading and responding to written questions, she would create an explainer video. She would try to illustrate the concepts, animals, ecosystems, the natural world in her own visual language. She filmed what she'd drawn and discussed and explained it. She then edited the footage and she built something the whole class could use to deepen their understanding. The illustrations came first, detailed, precise, genuinely beautiful images of creatures in her story. Then she filmed them. Then she edited the footage into short explainer clips. Her voice, her drawings, her knowledge, presented in a format that her peers could learn from. And here is what I watched happen. The class started using her videos, not as charity, not just to be kind, but because they were genuinely useful, because she knew things that they didn't know, and she had found a way to communicate those things that nobody else in the room could have produced. Students started asking her for advice on film editing, picking her brain for ideas on their own research tasks, and genuinely seeking her out, that student who had been alone at a desk for who knows how many years just because finally she had something worth having. She also learned to use voice to text technology, which meant she could engage with the same curriculum as her peers. Not the modified version designed to manage her limitations, but the actual learning alongside her peers as one of them. From a withdrawn student with a declining sense of self to a sought-after student whose expertise, well, they were valued by others. From a student who hid under the table to a student who people came to for advice. The curriculum didn't change, the expectations didn't lower. What changed was the questions the design was asking. Instead of how do we get her to comply with the existing structure, the question became what does she need? What does she know? And how do we build a pathway that honors both? That single shift from control to connection. Well, that's the difference between the student under the table and the student whose work the class wanted. Because she was not a bad teacher. She was an extremely good teacher. She was caring, dedicated, genuinely committed as a teacher, who was working within a design framework that pointed her in the wrong direction. The PBL token reward system told her reward compliance. Reward sitting still, completing work, maintaining behavior for a fortnight. And that framework, it gave her the tools it gave her. And she used them with genuine care. But you see, this framework had asked the wrong first question. It asks, how do we manage student behaviour? When the question that would have changed everything was, who is this student and what does she need to find her way in? The mistake was not a lack of care, not at all. It was rewarding for control rather than looking for an entry point to learning. And that distinction between managing a student and designing for a student is the whole argument of this series made visible in one classroom. When I looked at her under that table, I saw something I recognized. I saw the chalk line. I saw the maths mentals lessons that I absolutely detested. I saw the moment when the system stopped asking anything meaningful of me, and I stopped offering anything meaningful back. I was lucky. I found my way back to learning as an adult, and on my own terms and in my own time. Not every student gets that second chance. Some of them just stop. And the system marks that as a behavior problem rather than a design failure. She was lucky too. She had someone who noticed, who saw the drawings and recognized them as a signal rather than a symptom, who understood that under that table, drawing animals, this child wasn't giving up. She was telling us exactly who she was and what she needed. The drawings were not the problem. The drawings were the answer. The mistake was rewarding for control rather than looking for an entry point. The question that would have changed everything was not how do we manage her behavior, but who is she? What does she love? And how do we build her a door into this learning from here? And that question is what our Thrive framework is built to ask. Okay, hang on. So what have we talked about? The three traditions, that one student, and why Thrive is undeniable. That's right. Okay, I want to step back and show you what her story actually demonstrates. Because what happened in that hub is not just a nice story about a student finding her strengths, it's a complete illustration of every research tradition this series has been built on. There's the EYLF philosophical tradition of being, belonging, and becoming. Tells us that children develop. Identity through connection, through recognition, and through genuine belonging. She arrived in that class as a being who was not yet belonging. And because she wasn't belonging, she couldn't become. And when the design changed, well, when she became the person whose knowledge the class needed, she began to belong. And from inside that belonging, she began to become someone new. Now, flow theory, it tells us that genuine engagement requires challenge matched to skill. I can't believe how many times I've said that. It also needs clear purpose and a sense of personal control. So the explainer video it gave her all three. The challenge was real. The filming, the editing, the presenting matched to genuine capability. The purpose was visible. Her peers needed what she knew. The control was genuine. Her knowledge, her images, her voice. And then self-determination theory tells us that human beings need autonomy, competence, and relatedness. She experienced all things, all these three things for the first time in that project. She was the author of her own work, she felt genuinely capable, and she created something that was real. Nothing was modified, and she was connected to her teacher, to her peers, to a community of learners who valued exactly what she brought. Three independent research traditions, one student under a table, and one entry point. And all led to the same conclusion. EYLF, Faux Theory, and Self-Determination Theory each arrive at the same conditions from completely different directions. Belonging, competence, autonomy, purpose. When a design honors all of these simultaneously, not through a reward system, but through genuinely knowing a student and building a pathway from there, this is what becomes possible. I want to be very clear about something before we get to the close of today's episode. Thrive is not designed to replace frameworks that already exist in Australian schools. It's not PBL, not the ATL standards, and not the well-being frameworks. PBL creates predictability, consistent routines for behavior, shared language, and these matter. Schools that implement PBL well are better places to learn in. The research supports this. But PBL asks how do we get students to behave well enough that learning can happen. Thrive, I'm suggesting, asks how do we design learning that is worth behaving for? You see, PBL creates the room. Thrive, well it furnishes it. The token system in my colleagues' classroom was not the enemy at all. It was the floor, and let me be clear, it's a necessary floor. It provided structure, predictability, and clear expectations. But a floor is not the same as a home, and that student needed a home and not a floor. Thrive is the next question. After the structure is in place and after the routines are established, after the floor is solid, what are we building on top of it? What are we designing for? The students who can follow the rules and still be completely unreachable? Or the student that complies and disappears? Or the student who finds the one space where nobody expects anything and draws animals there interested in instead. That student deserves more than just management. She deserves powerful, engaging lesson design. I want to come back to her. Not the student under the table, the student who other students came to for advice. The same person, one year apart, the same dyslexia, the same history, the same school. The only thing that changed was the question the design was asking. Not how do we manage her, but who is she? Not how do we reward compliance? But what does she love? Not how do we get her to fit the classroom, but how do we build the classroom that makes room for her? Those are not soft questions. They are the hardest design questions in education, because they require the teacher to know the student genuinely, specifically, and not just diagnostically. To see the drawings as an answer rather than a symptom, and to look at what a student is doing when they've stopped complying and ask, man, what is she telling me? The award she should have received at the end of that year if she stayed compliant long enough to earn one, nobody would have remembered. Not her, not her teacher and not her classmates. But the videos she made, the knowledge she shared, the moment the class sought out her advice. Those she will carry for the rest of her life. The question I want to leave you with this week is think of a student in your class right now who has stopped complying, or has learned to comply so perfectly they have no idea who they actually are. What are they drawing under the table, metaphorically speaking? What is the thing they love that your current design hasn't yet found? And what would change if that thing became the entry point? Well, that's the end of our episode. In our next episode, it's the bridge. My son Jaden, who finished school last year, sits across from me and tells me what it feels like or what it felt like from the other side of everything that I've been arguing. It is the episode I have been most nervous about, and of course, I'm looking forward to it the most as well. But until then, I want you to keep growing your flow and your glow. Hey, and support those little guys in your room.