The EdSurge podcast is one of my favorites. In the episode Can Kids Grow Up If They’re Constantly Tracked and Monitored? host Jeff Young talks with Devorah Heitner about the degree to which we track and monitor kids. My biggest takeaway? The way we track and monitor matters … a lot. Like the Hippocratic Oath for physicians, teachers need first and foremost to be sure that they do no harm.

The podcast is available here.

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Jeff Young and Devorah Heitner discuss ClassDojo at length. Heitner is careful to state that no one at ClassDojo is out to do harm, but … Well yes, but.

My first encounter with ClassDojo was quite a while ago. I’m sure it has evolved a lot since the day I watched a teacher give (and take away?) points for student behavior. So-and-so is sitting quietly, here are some points. So-and-so raised their hand before speaking, please have these points, good job.

I regularly discuss this sort of classroom engineering with my students at Moreland University. Many of them use ClassDojo. Some of them have felt that my cautions about creating classroom culture through points was misplaced. I’m pretty adamant that it should not be our default for classroom management, perhaps that it should not be any part of our classroom management. When one of my daughter’s elementary teachers started using it during Covid, I watched over her shoulders as a quite skeptical parent. My daughter doesn’t need points for being well behaved and liking learning. Giving her points for what she is already might start to erode her curiosity and joy at school. I took a leap and explained to her what I thought of ClassDojo, and why. She told me that the other kids didn’t like it. (Whew.) I suppose even at a young age we don’t like to be manipulated.

Although she is a techno-optimist, Heitner voices concerns, too.

Though teachers might call it a classroom management system, ClassDojo is, in her words, a “behavior monitoring app.” One feature of the app allows teachers to give children – their avatars anyway – points for good behavior, for sitting quietly and raising your hand, as mentioned above. It’s a carrot and stick system that, on its surface, may not seem terribly harmful, but I’m as uneasy as Heitner about this. As she said, even if there aren’t negative points given to students (and I sure hope that isn’t going on), the lack of getting points, especially while one’s peers are getting points, is another way of losing points. One of the children in our own community where I live experienced exactly this sort of stick, but academically. The rate of progress for all students was posted in the classroom for everyone to see. Her progress was slower than everyone else in the class. Even though there were no negative points, she found it very difficult to earn positive points, not nearly as fast as her peers anyway. Eventually she had chronic stomach aches and couldn’t go to school. Eventually her parents put her in a different school. The teacher was well intentioned, but this is nothing short of an embarrassing fail.

But back to using points to manage behavior. Heitner says:

“What we see with these apps, they kinda just tell us what we already know. Like if you have this child struggling to self-regulate, they’re going to have a hard time getting points in the app, or not losing points. And if you have a kid who is good at self-regulating, they’re going to keep getting the ‘quiet table’ points or whatever …”

The problem is, such compliance systems do bring about short term, well, compliance, which is helpful in managing a classroom of students. In that way they are successful. But is this the success we are looking for? Compliance? And these apps, and the teacher practices they reinforce, may be less likely to bring about lasting change while more likely to cause harm.

For example, it’s not a great strategy to shame children. Shaming heightens anxiety for children, and now with apps that quickly relay classroom information to parents, it can raise parent anxiety, too – anxiety that may well be passed back to the child at home. In the end, the use of such apps are “problematic for neuro diverse kids, it’s problematic for kids who may have other things going on.” I would add, based on my daughter’s situation, it’s just plain problematic for everyone. Why?

A compliance system is likely to work only when continuous compliance is demanded and continuous threats and rewards are present. An educational system built on threats and rewards seems less likely, at least to me, to create lifelong learners. Once students are conditioned to learn because of threats, it’s easy to imagine learning stopping as soon as the threat is removed. It is also possible to imagine, and I thank Alfie Kohn for his writing in this area, that when a child conditioned to learn for an award loses that award, the child won’t be motivated to learn. See Kohn’s book: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes.

Put simply, a student might think that if there are no points to get, what is the point? Well, learning was the point … but we’ve unwittingly conditioned our students away from the thrill of learning to a search for points. Later in their schooling, their drive might well become the search for a higher GPA, for rating systems instead of learning, in general, for the approval of others. 

So, caution is warranted not only with apps like ClassDojo, but any similar orientations to learning and school. Take grading. While the intended outcome of school is learning, grades can very quickly become the desired outcome, even to the detriment of learning. A sane person isn’t going to be too experimental if they are striving for top grades. Experimenting more often than not leads to setbacks and false paths, which we (perhaps mistakenly) call mistakes, and take off points accordingly. Experimenting should actually be supported in school. And experimenting here I mean both little and big risks. The little risks that one can take in a class discussion, on a worksheet, on a quiz, the classroom-based things. And I also mean bigger missed experiments like when students select easy courses in order to get a top grade while avoiding interesting classes that might challenge them more. 

ClassDojo, at least the behavior management functions, is all about getting students to do what we want. It’s about compliance. It creates a tone, as Young says. I’d call it creating a culture – a culture of compliance. Compare that with what ClassDojo advertises on its web page: Where classrooms become communities. Yes, but what kind of communities? Inclusive ones? Ones that understand not all students find it easy to follow someone else’s rules? That not all students are going to react the same to compliance? That the very nature of compliance can be harmful to further learning?

Also according to their landing page, the app is Loved by more than 50 million students and parents. I know it’s advertising, and I’m not sure how they came up with those numbers, but let’s say an awful lot of people are using this app. Not all of them use the behavior compliance structure, I’m sure, but I think we can still say that an awful lot of people do.

Is that what we want? Couldn’t we do better?