Bullying Policies - Changing the Motivation To Do The Right Thing

“Children need to be noticed not rewarded” is one of my firmly held beliefs, and it ties into my passion for community building in classrooms. On the flip side, I don’t like band-aid approaches to solving problems. That is when policies or rules are set in place because a few people/groups/etc. are not doing the right thing. If you’ve read any of my blog posts, you know that I am also passionate about teaching children about bullying, but I worry that the new Harassment, Bullying, and Intimidation policy will not only be ineffective but may also be damaging to the good things that schools are doing now. The process to investigate and follow through on reports of bullying is tedious and time consuming.

Through my Twitter PLN, I was recently introduced to the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. According to Pink, “The most motivated people – not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied – hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves” (121). I like to think that teachers are drawn to the profession because they want to help children grow intellectually, socially, and emotionally. The new bullying policy seems to be working against the purpose of teachers. I’ll explain this idea through Pink’s quote by Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor:

               Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then give them a fairly weak set of ethical standards to meet. Now, instead of asking them to “do it because it’s the right thing to do,” you’ve essentially given them an alternative set of standards – do this so you can check off all these boxes.

               Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action – one that wants to make the world a better place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the organization must meet to show that it isn’t discriminating.

               Now the organization isn’t focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won’t get sued). Before, its workers had an intrinsic motivation to do the right thing, but now they have an extrinsic motivation to make sure that the company doesn’t get sued or fine” (139).

I hope that teachers and schools continue to do the right thing in regards to bullying and teaching children to be compassionate citizens even if it is reduced to a checklist. And if the new policy helps to motivate some schools to do the right thing I won’t be upset. After all, the true purpose of education is helping students to be the best that they can be intellectually, socially, and emotionally.