Rewards Systems - Square pegs and round holes

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I'm trying to fit a couple of square pegs into round holes at the moment. Rewards systems have been occupying my thinking for the last couple of days. The reason for this procrastination has been two separate conversations. One was with my seven year old son, and the other with my wife.

I picked the children up from their childminder at the end of the day, and went through the usual run of questions (did you have a good day? What did you do at school? Did you learn anything exciting? etc. etc. etc.) when he said something about the rewards system in school. Now, I thought I understood the school's rewards system, which is basically positive rewards with an indicator of how well the pupils had done during the day through a sliding scale which the children's names were pegged to. The system has been in use for a couple of years, and it motivates my son. My son's biggest fear has been that he would ever be placed on the 2 places on the scale that indicate that behaviour and performance was not good. As we had our conversation, my son (7 years old) talked about the lucky child that had pulled the raffle ticket out of the jar. The raffle tickets are the new reward for doing something good.

The second conversation was with my wife, who is a Deputy Headteacher in an urban primary school. One of the staff at her school had been to a conference hosted by Shirley Clarke at the end of last term. I have read several of Shirley Clarke's books about Assessment for Learning and I have been quite heavily influenced by much of what I have read. The link to rewards is that at the conference Shirely Clarke talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how assessment and rewards systems can reinforce the process of extrinsic motivation and that this can actually close down aspirations for learners. Therefore, as well as marking without grades, rewards systems should not be used to influence extrinsic behaviours.

So, square pegs and round holes. My son is motivated by rewards. He is, depsite all our best efforts, extrinsically motivated. Praise is enough. He needs to know that what he is doing is a) right and b) pleasing you. Therefore we use rewards regularly at home when something has to be done! I believe in Shirley Clarke's messages about assessment without grading and that we should encourage the development of intrinsic motivation. These two don't go together!

Another square peg and round hole. I have used positive reward systems in my class and in the school that I was Headteacher of. They worked. They showed pupils that we valued their contributions and they showed the parents that we valued their contributions. I am going to write a separate post to explain the system we used in our school. However, I really have a passionate objection to raffles. To me they reduce a reward to pure chance with no relationship between the effort put in and the reward received. A child only has to get one raffle ticket to be in with a chance of winning. The child who gets ten tickets has a better mathematical chance of being drawn, but how many times have you bought lots of raffle tickets and left the room without a prize. Here's the square peg bit. When I talked to my son, he was very motivated by the raffle system - and actually said that it was better than what they did before. Ouch. (It might be that he got seven tickets in his first week, and sometimes went a whole week last year without moving his peg - different teachers, and I rated last years teacher highly by the way!)

I would be really interested to know your views, and to collect some examples of reward systems that are in place. I would be even more interested to hear from schools that are successfully developing intrinsic motivation methods. Please do add your comments.