Hitting the Target
Priming the Pump
by Miranda Hughes (Reprinted from Issue Number 6 of the SNOBCI Journal)
When Erin was three, she began studying the violin formally. We kick-started our routine of daily practising by attending the summer institute in Penticton. It worked terrifically at first. For about a month afterwards we managed enthusiastic, consistent, diligent practising. But then, as the afterglow of all the insistute excitement began to fade, so did Erin's motivation. I tried everything that fall, short of buying her cooperation, but no matter what I did her enthusiasm dwindled. There are no doubt many reasons for this: she had no peer group of other young students, scant exposure to group lessons, no teacher other than her mother, and the first flush of joy at putting bow to string had long since faded. But no matter the reasons; we were in serious trouble by Christmas-time. Tangible progress was but a memory and our three or four practise sessions a week were turning into exercises in passive resistence.
In the New Year, when Erin turned four, we turned over a new leaf. I took a deep breath and proposed a system of rewards: seven days of practising, then a token financial reward (money, especially coinage, was a fascinating new concept for her). I took this step with reluctance. I had believed that since my child was steeped in music in general, and Suzuki music in particular, from birth, that she would of course be burning with desire to play the violin. And I had thought that by starting at the impressionable age of three, daily practising would seem as natural to Erin as brushing her teeth. Alas, it was not to be, and I found myself in the position of needing to do something drastic in order to get a routine established.
For about a month, we had great fun making a weekly calendar on the chalkboard, checking off the days as we practised, and distributing the reward each Sunday. During that month Erin learned the days of the week, that four quarters equal a dollar, and managed to put together her first complete Twinkle variation.
The next month we kept track of her "Twinkles", and she was rewarded with a chocolate for every ten. The first ten took over a week to complete. But soon she could play through ten in a day. We ran out of chocolates and we lost track of our Twinkle count somewhere around 130. One day we were out shopping and I mentioned to Erin that we needed to buy more chocolates. She then made the statement that put my mind at ease about our use of rewards: she said "I don't need those any more."
Over the following few months she continued to practise zealously without the need for extrinsic incentives. The daily practice habit was established and it was resulting in impressive progress. This progress, which was finally evident to her, had become an intrinsic motivator.
What Erin had wanted to do was play the violin. She hadn't particularly bargained on all the hard work necessary to learn to play the violin. At her tender pre-school age, she had no way of truly understanding that consistent daily effort adds up to magnificent long-term accomplishment. Our use of rewards was a way of "priming the pump". We used rewards to form the connection between consistent good work and exciting progress. But once the good work was producing good results, the pump could chug along merrily of its own accord without ongoing "priming".
If and when our practising-pump stalls in the future, we may have to resort to priming it a little again. But the next time around, I will feel more confident and comfortable with the role rewards serve in our musical relationship. I'll know that we need not become slaves to our rewards. I'll know that rewards need not undermine intrinsic sources of motivation. And I'll know that even a four-year-old can recognize that satisfying progress makes external rewards unecessary.
Post-script, July 2002
A lot has changed in my educational philosophy since I first wrote this article and I no longer agree with what I wrote. Four years has passed, Erin is now playing in Book 5, and I am now guiding my third child through the pre-Twinkle phase. I never again, since I wrote the article, made use of extrinsic rewards.
What changed? I did a lot of reading, and made a lot of observations about motivation problems in my own children and my students. Some of what I read cast a new light upon situations that had confused me in the past. I began to believe that the use of rewards was always fraught with risks, even though some of us are sometimes able to pull the trick off without getting burnt. I decided that for the most part, when rewards had appeared to work well, they hadn't acted chiefly as rewards: they'd worked mainly as tangible symbols of good work done. When they hadn't worked well, they'd done many of the things Alfie Kohn described in "Punished by Rewards", especially distracting the student from the intrinsic rewards of hard work done well. And the more I attempted to avoid rewards, the more I discovered they, and their concommitant risks, were unnecessary.
Guiding a child without the use of rewards requires a shift in mindset. Rather than trying to elicit a specific desired behaviour with a specific act, one must do something considerably more abstract and less tangible. Motivation is no longer an "A elicits B" proposition. Now it's about "A and X and Y and Z creating an environment where B and C and D and E are more likely to occur". There's a much less direct relationship between A and B, but that's the reality of the human psyche. We're not simple machines, and to teach on the presumption that we are is misguided, I think.
Although the latter approach, of creating the conditions where self-motivation might arise, is less tangible, it's longer-lasting and more pervasive. I now find myself in the enviable position of having kids who really understand why hard work is necessary and why it is rewarding in its own right. We can all fall back on that when we hit a bump in the road, rather than needing to rely on a neverending stream of motivational gimmicks to solve each difficulty as it arises. I think we got to this place more quickly because we swore off the distractions of extrinsic "motivators".