Jake most certainly isn’t avoiding the task, and neither is he avoiding the challenge. He might end up with a great essay, and he might learn a little bit about how to improve his writing. He might even bump up his grade, especially if his teacher rewards frequency of class participation or effort. But by asking for so much guidance, he’s avoiding the critical and creative process of choosing what and how to write, so he’s not growing much as a writer. When students ask for a lot of approval, or when they politely and obediently do as they’re told, undoubtedly they’re getting something out of following instructions. But they might also be avoiding the questioning, doubting, debating, and decision-making behaviors that involve more risk but that lead to deeper learning.
Whether students are avoiding the task itself, the challenges it might present, or the risk-taking and decision-making aspects of doing it, they’re all ultimately avoiding learning. When something elicits avoidance, behavior scientists call that something an aversive (Chance, 1998). We usually think of aversives as unpleasant situations like a bitter taste, loud noise, or rabid dog. What do people do when they encounter such situations? They spit out the bitter food, cover their ears to blot out the noise, run away from the dog—whatever it takes to escape. Eventually they learn to avoid it in the first place. Again, if students are avoiding school tasks, or at least some aspect of doing them, there must be something aversive about them.
When students act like their schoolwork is aversive, how do we respond? Sometimes we reward students for their avoidance behaviors by giving them the attention and good grades they’re after. Sometimes we don’t notice when students avoid learning or we accept the behaviors because they don’t hurt anyone. We can’t possibly call out every student for staring into space. If we ignore avoidance behaviors, the students get to escape engaging with difficult work and the learning that comes along with it. That consequence—escape—feels good for the students, so they continue the behavior (Geiger, Carr, & LeBlanc, 2010).
Sometimes we do respond to acts of avoidance—by altering the consequences. We give low grades, detentions, suspensions, and lectures. But punishing avoidance behaviors can easily backfire (Sidman, 1989). Let’s say you have a student who constantly talks to her classmate instead of doing her work. If you ask her to stop talking and threaten to call her mother, you might successfully decrease the talking, but now your class is more aversive for this student. She’ll find a new way to avoid engaging in class (or find a way to avoid getting caught talking), and she’ll probably keep talking in other classes. Punishing avoidance behaviors might reduce future instances in a specific context, but it also makes school more aversive and ultimately leads to more avoidance. Because there are so many different avoidance behaviors, students have no trouble finding new ones (Friman, Hayes, & Wilson, 1998).
The other way we try to limit avoidance behaviors is to make the learning environment appealing so these behaviors are less likely. We design active lessons, play learning games, give stretch breaks, create fun projects, use cool technology, smile, tell jokes, give inspirational speeches, and use any other tricks we’ve discovered. Of course we have the responsibility of engaging our students in class, but teachers aren’t always equipped to deliver engaging lessons. Some schools pressure us to drill for standardized tests. Some schools offer no funds for professional development, so those of us who lack know-how never learn. Some schools have no budget for the supplies we need to create more dynamic learning environments. And even a brilliant teacher in a well-funded school won’t be able to engage all students at all times, as different lesson formats appeal to different students; some skills are less fun to practice; and factors like time of day, social dynamics, and life stressors affect students. We can minimize the effects of these factors, but like any externality, they’re almost impossible to control completely.
However we respond to student avoidance behaviors—whether we reward them in students like Jake, ignore them in students like Andre, punish them in students like Riley, or try to make school less aversive in the first place—our responses don’t consistently work for everyone and sometimes make matters worse. What all of our unworkable solutions have in common is that they’re ours. Any time we do something to reduce student avoidance, we are doing something. The student him- or herself is not.
Avoidance is a natural response to an aversive. Instead of trying to change students’ avoidance behaviors, we could help them think of school as something else. We can empower them to transform what school means, from a series of demands they find aversive and do their best to avoid, into a series of opportunities to serve their values. If they can learn to see school as a context for serving their values, they’ll approach it differently.
Making Something Meaningful
How is it possible to transform something aversive into something meaningful? Say a student borrows your pen and discovers it’s out of ink. She returns it and says, “It doesn’t work.” You scribble to try to get ink to come out, but it’s no use. “This pen is garbage,” you say, and throw it out. If your goal is to write, a dry pen has no worth at all. But you might imagine situations where a pen with no ink has more worth than a pen with ink. A sculptor might think the dry pen is better because he can scrape clay out from under his fingernails without turning them blue. You can imagine times when it doesn’t matter if the pen has ink or not, like if you want to poke holes in the ground for planting seeds or use the cap as a whistle. We define the pen’s function and therefore give it worth. Decide something has a different function, and we change what it means to us—even though we haven’t changed the pen. When we change what something means, we relate to it differently. Students can change what school means and relate to it differently, too.
Let’s look at a different example. Tina Marie Clayton (2005, as cited in Blackledge, 2003) studied employees who thought of their workplace as chaotic—a feeling teachers likely relate to. Employees who were told the workplace wasn’t really all that chaotic didn’t develop better attitudes toward it. But employees who learned that chaotic places are conducive to creativity did develop better attitudes toward their workplace. The place itself didn’t change, and their assessment of the place didn’t change either—but what a chaotic workplace means did change.
Now let’s look at an example related to school. Say Teddy is doing poorly in mathematics. He tends to give up quickly on his homework because it’s so frustrating and exhausting and it makes him feel stupid. Sometimes he does it, especially if his parents are there to nag him. Sometimes he does only the easy problems and then gives up. Sometimes he rushes through the work and suspects most of his answers are wrong. And sometimes, he just doesn’t do the work at all.
Asking his mathematics teacher for different homework might help, but she could say no or assign different but equally difficult homework. If he receives an easier assignment, Teddy could get the message that he’s too dumb to do the “real” work. But imagine if, instead of changing the homework itself, Teddy learned to connect the homework to goals that matter to him: “This homework will help me learn math, and that will help me when I become a sports agent” or “Persisting in math will help me learn how to keep going when something gets tough, and that will help me during baseball practice.” Armed with these understandings, he has a better chance of confronting the struggle rather than avoiding