Sticker politics

When I first started as a student teacher, the first responsibility my mentor teacher gave me came in the form of a sheet of stickers. “They get a sticker when they’re seated, silent, and quickly taking out their notebooks to start the Do-Now,” she told me.

As she handed me the sticker sheet, I saw 30 pairs of tiny eyes turn to it. Not to me, the new adult in the room, but to it — the sheet of stickers. I circled the room as the kids trickled in and noticed that before students were even seated, certainly before they were writing in their notebooks, they were pulling out their sticker sheets. They collected stickers on these papers and then traded them in for school currency that they could use to purchase toys and candy at the school store.

My job was to assess whether students were “seated, silent, and quickly taking out their notebooks” — the requirements for earning a sticker. As I walked through the classroom, I observed that my presence, or rather the presence of the stickers, was causing ripples.

When the stickers reached within 3 feet of the student, their notebook would be out, and they’d have a pencil in their hand. But their eyes were not on the board. And they’d written nothing on their paper beyond the date. Instead, their eyes were on me and my stickers as they waited for their reward.

On the other hand, I saw some students with backpacks still on their backs, seated, talking to themselves, trying to decipher the Do-Now and their potential response. These students did not work as silently and quickly as the sticker standards required. I could tell that these students were taking the time to understand their work, but they didn’t get a reward. I could see that stickers were effective in motivating students to take out their notebooks, but were they effective in motivating them to learn?

What stickers can — and can’t — do

What the stickers were meant to do was motivate students to follow the established classroom norms and complete their assigned work. What the stickers really did was introduce motivation based on external reward (extrinsic motivation) rather than internal desire and satisfaction from completing the task (intrinsic motivation). While intrinsically motivated students experience joy from the activity at hand, extrinsically motivated students can become reliant on rewards for success. The removal or lack of these rewards hinders the students’ success at completing the assigned task (Chen, 2023). When there are stickers in the picture, “children don’t perceive themselves in control of learning” (Baranek, 1996, p. 3). What teachers are doing with stickers in the classroom seems to be what Pavlov did to his dog. We have created an association between an adhesive star-shaped piece of paper and academic success.

While my experience with the sticker-sheet on that first day did feel rather dystopian, as the school year went on, I also saw the sticker sheet perform miracles. During an 8th-period independent reading lesson on a Friday, chaos broke loose. Students were up, screaming, chatting, doing a lot that had nothing to do with reading. But soon my mentor teacher said the magic words: “Miss Lucía is going to come around and give double stickers to whoever is quietly and independently reading.” Soon enough, the students settled in their seats with their books in their hands, and I circled around, picking out two stickers per student.

While I’m sure every teacher wishes that their students’ classroom participation could stem from pure joy, sometimes a 6th grader needs an extra push. Studies show that reward systems can indeed “establish a positive learning atmosphere, increase students’ participation, and realize learning goals” (Chen, 2023, p. 1824). Reward systems like these can offer guidance for students receiving poor grades on how to improve (Chen, 2023).

A case for chaos

With stickers seeming like a godsend to teachers and perhaps students alike, it is hard to imagine a world without them. Stickers create routine and order in the classroom that might be hard to accomplish otherwise. So what would happen if we remove the stickers?

While we might see an uptick in chaos, I believe we’d also see whether students are truly engaged with their work. We could see which lessons, books, units, and discussions are sparking joy and curiosity in students and which ones are not.

There would be a learning curve. If students are truly addicted to rewards, then the withdrawal would be hard for both the students and the teacher. But if we want schools to be a place to create critical and creative thinkers who are ready to participate democratically in the world outside school, we must think of how our practices within the school connect to life beyond school.

Outside school, stickers are nothing more than fun, festive decorations for your water bottle. While extrinsic motivation may be a powerful tool in the classroom, intrinsic motivation is what is really required for success beyond the classroom. As hard as it may seem to run a 6th-grade classroom with no stickers, I would argue that anything worth doing is a challenge. Setting students up for long-term, sticker-free success is worth it.

References

Baranek, L.K. (1996). The effect of rewards and motivation on student achievement [Master’s thesis, Grand Valley State University]. ScholarWorks@GVSU.

Chen, Z. (2023). The influence of school’s reward systems on students’ development. Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, 8, 1822-1827.

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 1, p. 50-51.