Teachers Need Incentives, Too!

Chapter 14 discusses the concept and evolution of human performance improvement. Several sections of chapter 14 present a variety of non-instructional solutions to performance problems. Identify a performance problem in your area of work and identify non-instructional solutions that may help solve the problem.

As the school year progresses, teacher motivation is waning (mine included).  This prompt motivated me to revisit incentive pay for teachers and how it could positively impact teacher performance.  On page 137 of our text, it states that “a system that rewards people for their behavior without accounting for accomplishment encourages incompetence” (Gilbert 2007).  At my campus, we are occasionally verbally rewarded for completing tasks, like getting grades turned in on time, perfect attendance, etc., but our administration is limited in the fiscal incentives they can offer us and still comply with district and state policies.  Although “new incentive systems” are listed on page 140 as one of the interventions at the disposal of human resource development professionals, for some reason, it almost seems that society expects teachers to be “above” requiring incentives to encourage performance and that our reward should come from shaping lives.  However, both Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model and the HPT model of the International Society for Performance Improvement list “adequate financial incentives contingent upon performance” and “compensation” respectively as intervention and incentives.  In his article “Most Likely to Succeed” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1) , published in The New Yorker in December 2008, Malcolm Gladwell argues that incentive pay for highly effective teachers would benefit the education system just as it does the world of investment bankers.