Awards in Education (and why we shouldn't)

AWARDS IN EDUCATION (and why we shouldn't)

If education is about improving humanity’s capacity for rational thinking in in complex world, the simplification of value systems and fuzzy thinking that are inevitably associated with school awards work against this goal. Schools do more damage to their learning communities by granting awards than they do good.

Awards in schools span the range from those tied to easy measurements of performance (like the award for jumping the highest) to those that involve judgement on behalf of the awarders (I think she deserves the award for most improved…). In all cases, the recognizing of excellence through the use of awards is either anti-social, anti-rational thinking, or both.

In the case where a simple metric is being applied, an award says that we value that simple metric even when we know it doesn’t say much about a whole person. Running fast, spelling perfectly, or scoring highest on a standardized test may be an expression of learning excellence but it is just as likely to arise because of access to resources or propitious biology/personal context and giving awards for those elements of a personage doesn’t make sense unless we wish to compound these advantages.

Where judgement is required, consideration can be given to more complex behaviours and here, it is certainly useful to acknowledge effort, excellence, endurance etc. but there is a hidden cost when we use awards for this.

As an educational community, we rely upon the fact that our members are diverse in their skills and strengths, intellectual investments, efforts etc. and even that we have some divergence in our motivating values. These differences that can be found across faculty and across the student body are a source of a community’s strength. There is no one particular set of characteristics we would want all students or faculty to have for ‘optimal’ community or optimal learning. (This is not true about corporations or the military where cloning of traits is ideal and the source of infinite muse for dystopian imaginations.) Pick your favorite student or teacher: would you actually want a class full of them? A staff room?

Awards take the complexity of a learning community and attempt to distill desirable traits from it. They tell the community that we are all agreed on what ‘good’ looks like and they communicate that we are all headed in some unified direction toward it. This is a confusing message to students who are regularly told they are being taught how to think, not what, and that diversity in perspective or in values is a primary societal goal.

But how do we recognize excellence if not through awards?

Educators have it very high on their priority list to recognize, acknowledge, and develop excellence in students and are doing this as a matter of course (no pun intended) all the time. ‘Excellence’ in learning means you are ready for the next stage of development by virtue of your efforts so far. Student learning is reported upon regularly and we should see this as an opportunity to recognize excellence in a way that is nuanced and meaningful to individuals without attempting to define what good work looks like for everyone at the same time.

Across a group of educators, it is difficult to agree on what excellence is. It is likely that we consider excellence as those behaviours that appeal to our individual biases. If we force ourselves to agree on a particular kind of excellence — associated with a particular kind of award, for instance — what we are really doing is expressing a vague feeling about an individual student relating to a trait that is also vague.

The granting of awards is just an expression of our irrational desire to be among winners and part of a tribe. A winning tribe.

When we produce winners in this way, we produce many more losers and students who do not receive awards are left with a sense that for some reason, they are worth less than the award winners. Why would we want to send that message to the bulk of the learning community?

Schools have report card comments to recognize excellence. They have emails to students and parents to record and clarify their value in the moment. Teachers can write letters of reference to articulate high-definition descriptions of students to the outside world.

Schools have the means to recognize excellence at their disposal without cheapening the idea through simplification and homogenization of values or by using as it as a means by which we can feel good about ourselves and our tribe.

Submitted April 23, 2023 at 09:44AM by cashbaugh11 https://ift.tt/lxBXZeh