Should There Be Awards for Teachers?

I saw a Facebook post recently where a teacher got the “Teacher of the Month” at their school. Which made me wonder, should there be awards for teachers?

What is an award? Well, it’s public recognition that somebody (or an institution) has done something exceptionally, according to a defined set of criteria, and it often comes with one or more of the following: a ceremony, a prize of some kind, special benefits for the recipient, and public acknowledgment of the recipient.

What is the point of an award? All awards basically say, what this person did and how they did it are worthwhile, and what everybody should do. They are norms, and institutional commands. When Johnny gets a star on his spelling test for getting 9/10– and the rest of the class can see that he got the star–the teacher is saying to the class, what Johnny did was good, and everybody should try to do the same thing. When a teacher gets an award, much the same is true.

Now awards, as Alfie Kohn has spent an entire career pointing out, are absolutely toxic for students. Why?
1. They remove intrinsic motivation, ie, they make students work for An Object, not because they find the work interesting.
2. When The Object is no longer offered, why do the work?
3. They automatically make most students not care, because everybody knows who the egg-head/super-jock is, and knows they can’t compete, so why bother trying?
4. While awards may make sense in some adult situations (eg the Superb Owl, the Word Series), the implicit point of awards– compete, so you can be better than the other people, and then be recognised for it– has nothing to do with what we know about how education (and most of life) best works. Ideally, in education, people do work because they like it and they find it personally rewarding.

So…should teachers get– or accept– awards? I would say, generally, absolutely not. To explain why, let’s see what teachers say about this, from C.I. Fight Club.

POV: when you’re the last one to get the award:

You think there’s politics involved in who wins Teacher of the Year or other awards? Hmmmm…

Ah yes the public B.S. of “who will win?” and the ridiculous amount of work required. While this is fair criticism, awards here are a choice.

You mean, teaching awards are sometimes mere popularity contests?

And finally, this sums it all up:

I don’t think teachers should compete for awards, or accept them if offered. Education isn’t sportsball, and schools should not be about competition. The question should always be, how can the energy, resources and time we devotes to awards be used to make the system as a whole better?