Will Rewards for Practice Keep it From Becoming a Habit?

Rewards can be powerful motivation! There are a lot of opinions about whether rewards really help or hurt motivation and that has gotten me thinking lately about how I use rewards with my students.

As a music teacher I’d like my students to be motivated by making great music. While I think that’s a reasonable goal for older students, very young students may need some additional outside motivation to keep them going (at least that’s what I’ve found).

I’ve gone through many phases as a teacher – some where I give out a lot of stickers and little prizes to students & some where I give ideas to parents and let them implement what they think will work with their children at home. Other times I haven’t really done much at all.

Lately I’ve been doing a few practice challenges in my studio and have been re-thinking how much rewards are helping vs hurting students. I read an interesting perspective on this from Gretchen Rubin who studies how people make and keep habits & her research has helped me clarify how I want to go about reward giving going forward. . .

This is my third post in a series based off of Gretchen Rubin’s Book Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits–to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life.

Here’s what I learned from her book: while rewards might be good for some things in life (especially short term goals) , Rubin’s research shows that they are not very effective for helping us form habits. In fact they can actually sabotage our efforts.

“I eventually concluded, rewards can actually be dangerous for habit formation. If I want to make a habit, I must use rewards in a very careful, limited way.”

~ Gretchen Rubin Better than Before

 

Giving rewards to help form a habit like practice can backfire because people tend to focus on the habit until the reward is reached and then they are actually less likely to keep doing whatever it was (rather than maintaining the habit they were trying to form). Why practice when there is no more promise of ice cream if that is what kept you going before?

As a teacher I want my students to form a practice habit – so I’ve decided that when I give out little rewards in the studio this year it will be for accomplishing things that are milestones (graduations, learning all the major 3 octave scales etc) and not for things that we want to make into automatic habits.

There are times when an exception seems necessary – maybe a young child does need outside motivation to get the habit going –  for this Rubin does say that there is one exception: “The reward for a good habit is the habit itself”

In other words the reward for forming the habit should be something that is related to (and that will help keep going) the habit you are forming.

If you’re trying to make a habit of eating healthy you might reward yourself with some kind of new kitchen gadget for prepping healthy food or a great new healthy cookbook.

What about for music students?  I was a little stumped for good ideas so I emailed Gretchen Rubin to ask what some of her ideas might be.  Here is her response:

Interesting challenge! I’ve never taken music lessons myself so am not sure…a nice notebook for taking notes or keeping lists? A book about a favorite composer or musical subject? A CD?

Her response got me thinking of a few other ideas:

• new stickers for the practice chart
• new rosin
• a family trip to see a live musical performance
• a new bag for carrying music to and from lessons

I would love to come up with some more  . . .  What ideas do you have?

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