I hope you won’t mind me sharing a story with you from my last school - Kaiapoi Borough.

Believing In Kids - Giving Them Someone They Can Believe In - Living Proof It Works:
At Kaiapoi Borough School we received a lot of visits from ex pupils eager to stay in touch with us, keen to share how successful they have been at High School, and wanting to thank us for the ways we have supported them. Recently I had a visit from an ex pupil who called in to share where he is at in his learning journey, his sporting progress and his personal growth as a young man and a leader.
As I listened to him speak of the impact our school and our people had had on his life, I was almost moved to tears.
Kurt spoke of how he had been a tearaway, a thief, quick to turn an argument into a fist fight and with a “I don’t want to know” attitude.
Our staff persevered with Kurt and worked hard to build a relationship with him. I spoke often with Kurt about our values and our belief in him.               
Kurt shared how those things stuck with him - how he came to realise the importance of goals and the huge importance of honest and regular reflection.
Kurt uses reflection in all aspects of his life. If he misses a crucial drop-kick in a league game, he doesn’t beat himself up over it, he reflects on what he did and what he could do differently to be successful next time.
Kurt reflected on the pathway he was taking at High School. He realised it was leading him down a one-way path to a wasted life.
Kurt joined a group called “Tama ki Tane” (Boys to Men) at Kaiapoi High School after the Counsellor there and a senior Maori student both took him aside and asked him to reflect on where he was going, what he was trying to achieve and who he was trying to impress.   Now, as a year 12 Kurt can look back on a complete change in his life. He achieved a Merit in English last year. He has passed Level One NCEA. He is trialling for the Melbourne Storm Rugby League club and he is the first Year 12 Chief of the Tama ki Tane ropu at Kaiapoi High School.
I invited Kurt to come and speak to our staff on a Monday morning - a number of them were all but moved to tears also.
Kurt thanked them for putting up with him, for persevering, for caring and for giving him a foundation of skills and practices that set him up for success in the end. Kurt did this as a way of giving something back. He took a lot of satisfaction in being able to do this and he will be coming back in his own time to speak to our year five to eight students.
We don’t always work miracles overnight, but what we do does pay off sooner or later.

Here Is A Response from My Ex Board Chairperson:
Dear Ash,                         
 Awesome story about Kurt. I am sitting here with tears in my eyes knowing that every word is true and well spoken. I watched Kurt perform in Kapa Haka at recent high school events and I could see the pride and passion he had in doing a good job. You are so right that encouragement and belief that children’s innate goodness will shine through is very important for all adults working with children, especially those who need extra guidance.                                   
Another student who is doing remarkably well is Ammaron. I remember he also needed some special guidance from the KBS Board when I was there. My heart swells with pride when I see what a talented and hardworking young man Ammaron is turning into.  
 Both these boys/men needed the KBS and wider village to believe in them – well done for championing this positive and supportive approach to our children.

I would like to initiate a discussion around behaviour management and rewards and recognition.
Personally, I am opposed to a punitive behaviour management system. Obviously assigning lines, detentions etc is punitive. However, using stickers and certificates can also be considered punitive.

Here's some background reading for your edification on this topic...
Creating praise junkies. 
To be sure, not every use of praise is a calculated tactic to control children’s behavior. Sometimes we compliment kids just because we’re genuinely pleased by what they’ve done. Even then, however, it’s worth looking more closely. Rather than bolstering a child’s self-esteem, praise may increasekids’ dependence on us. The more we say, "I like the way you...." or "Good __ing," the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, our decisions about what’s good and bad, rather than learning to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and dole out some more approval.
"Good job!" doesn’t necessarily reassure children; ultimately, it can make them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK. Surely this is not what we want for our children.
To be sure, there are times when our evaluations are appropriate and our guidance is necessary -- especially with toddlers and preschoolers. But a constant stream of value judgments is neither necessary nor useful for children’s development. 
I cherish the occasions when my daughter manages to do something for the first time, or does something better than she’s ever done it before. But I try to resist the knee-jerk tendency to say, "Good job!" because I don’t want to dilute her joy. I want her to share her pleasure with me, not look to me for a verdict. I want her to exclaim, "I did it!" (which she often does) instead of asking me uncertainly, "Was that good?"
An impressive body of scientific research has shown that the more we reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. Now the point isn’t to draw, to read, to think, to create – the point is to get the goody, whether it’s an ice cream, a sticker, or a "Good job!”

Does praise motivate kids? Sure. It motivates kids to get praise. Alas, that’s often at the expense of commitment to whatever they were doing that prompted the praise.

Reducing achievement. 
As if it weren’t bad enough that "Good job!" can undermine independence, pleasure, and interest, it can also interfere with how good a job children actually do. Researchers keep finding that kids who are praised for doing well at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task – and they don’t do as well as children who weren’t praised to begin with. Why does this happen? Partly because the praise creates pressure to "keep up the good work" that gets in the way of doing so. Partly because their interest in what they’re doing may have declined. Partly because they become less likely to take risks – a prerequisite for creativity – once they start thinking about how to keep those positive comments coming. More generally, "Good job!" is a remnant of an approach to psychology that reduces all of human life to behaviours that can be seen and measured. 

Unfortunately, this ignores the thoughts, feelings, and values that lie behind behaviors. For example, a child may share a snack with a friend as a way of attracting praise, or as a way of making sure the other child has enough to eat. Praise for sharing ignores these different motives. Worse, it actually promotes the less desirable motive by making children more likely to fish for praise in the future.

What kids do need is unconditional support, love with no strings attached. 
That’s not just different from praise – it’s the opposite of praise. "Good job!" is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and acknowledgement and approval for jumping through our hoops, for doing things that please us.

The real problem isn’t that children expect to be praised for everything they do these days. It’s that we’re tempted to take shortcuts, to manipulate kids with rewards instead of explaining and helping them to develop needed skills and good values.

So what’s the alternative? 
That depends on the situation, but whatever we decide to say instead has to be offered in the context of genuine affection and love for who kids are rather than for what they’ve done. When unconditional support is present, "Good job!" isn’t necessary; when it’s absent, "Good job!" won’t help.
If we’re praising positive actions as a way of discouraging misbehavior, this is unlikely to be effective for long. Even when it works, we can’t really say the child is now "behaving himself"; it would be more accurate to say the praise is behaving him. 

The alternative is to work with the child, to figure out the reasons he’s acting that way. We may have to reconsider our own requests rather than just looking for a way to get kids to obey. (Instead of using "Good job!" to get a four-year-old to sit quietly through a long class meeting or family dinner, perhaps we should ask whether it’s reasonable to expect a child to do so.)

We also need to bring kids in on the process of making decisions. 
If a child is doing something that disturbs others, then sitting down with her later and asking, "What do you think we can do to solve this problem?" will likely be more effective than bribes or threats. It also helps a child learn how to solve problems and teaches that her ideas and feelings are important. Of course, this process takes time and talent, care and courage.Tossing off a "Good job!" when the child acts in the way we deem appropriate takes none of those things, which helps to explain why "doing to" strategies are a lot more popular than "working with" strategies.

Say what you saw. 
A simple, evaluation-free statement ("You put your shoes on by yourself" or even just "You did it") tells your child that you noticed. It also lets her take pride in what she did. In other cases, a more elaborate description may make sense. If your child draws a picture, you might provide feedback – not judgment – about what you noticed: "This mountain is huge!" "Boy, you sure used a lot of purple today!" If a child does something caring or generous, you might gently draw his attention to the effect of his action on the other person: "Look at Abigail’s face! She seems pretty happy now that you gave her some of your snack." This is completely different from praise, where the emphasis is on how you feel about her sharing.

Talk less, ask more. 
Even better than descriptions are questions. Why tell him what part of his drawing impressed you when you can ask him what he likes best about it? Asking "What was the hardest part to draw?" or "How did you figure out how to make the feet the right size?" is likely to nourish his interest in drawing. Saying "Good job!", as we’ve seen, may have exactly the opposite effect. 

This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. 
We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head. 
It’s not a matter of memorising a new script, but of keeping in mind our long-term goals for our children and watching for the effects of what we say. The bad news is that the use of positive reinforcement really isn’t so positive. 

The good news is that you don’t have to evaluate in order to encourage.
Copyright © 2001 by Alfie Kohn.

The further we progress into the 21st century the more strongly I feel the need for us to teach discernment. In fact, if I had to settle on one skill as crucial for our children beyond the basics of literacy and numeracy, I think this might be it. It fits within the Key Competency of Thinking, and it should be assuming ever greater importance. 
Nowadays we have Google in our pocket, we have constant access to information, and are pretty much constantly surrounded by “information”. We live in a print-saturated, image-saturated, talkback-saturated, social-connectivity-saturated, sound-saturated, video-saturated, environment. The numbers for Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, and iTunes are mind-boggling in the extreme. 

On the face of it, Google in our pocket seems to be such a great benefit. But access to information should not be the main purpose – understanding information is the purpose. We need to look at how our children – and ourselves – are using Google. The pattern tends to be that most searchers sample the first link or two, and very few go past the first page or two. 
One of the biggest problems is that our children tend to believe whatever they find on the internet – “if it’s on the internet, it must be true.” 

American educator Alan November has shared some thought-provoking sessions on verifying what we find when we search on the web. whois.com is a useful tool recommended by Alan. He shares the search results from Google on “Doctor Martin Luther King”. On first look, the fourth entry on Google’s result page appears to be a considered, erudite review of the great man’s life. However, the further into that site you go, the more controversial and disparaging becomes the material, until it eventually leads children to a set of flyers they can print out and distribute in their community. The source of this web site is the Ku Klux Klan. You can guess their motives. 

We need to teach our children discernment – the ability to judge what is right. When faced with challenges outside our knowledge, we need the right tools and dispositions. 
It’s not “knowing the answer” anymore. It’s not even being able to find the answer. It’s knowing how to behave intelligently when I don’t know the answer. 

Previously we sought answers – usually simple and factual, to finite questions. Now our students are beginning to realise there is a difference between information and knowledge. One touches the surface – lands and sinks. One involves understanding – lands and generates ripples. 
The problem now is not access to information, nor is it the up-to-date-ness of information. Instead, the issue is truthfulness – reliability – usefulness – source. We need to look for slant – bias – hidden agenda.
 
This of course could and should lead to discussions on... What is news? What is newsworthy? Who decides? So consider this: if we don’t teach discernment to our children who will? If we don’t teach discernment to our children what might the resultant outcomes be? We need to be asking questions that Google doesn’t know the answer to. Finally, discernment is something we need to teach in partnership with parents. 

At any given time, we carry around with us thousands of views, opinions, and beliefs, and often regard them as facts. Today I was reminded of the story of Schrödinger's Cat by an Apple Distinguished Educator who wore a T Shirt declaring Schrödinger' Cat is Not Dead.

Schrödinger's Cat: 
A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.
Part of the premise, as I (barely) understand it, is that reality is influenced by us observing it. If we were not observing, what would be happening would be different.

I guess what this says to me, is it is very hard to be very certain about anything. In fact, it's quite likely that the more certain I am, the less likely it is that I am fully informed.
This sounds somewhat esoteric and confused, but the point I am taking from it is that I find it increasingly important to be open-minded.

I used to think I knew so much. I am a passionate person and tend to be strongly opinionated. I still am when it comes to many things such as the importance of equality of opportunity, the importance of valuing the whole child in the learning process, and the aesthetic beauty and operational beauty (simplicity, effectiveness and efficiency of use) of all things Apple, the importance of family, the importance of preserving our beautiful world and so on.

I am becoming increasingly aware that in reality I know so little. Schrödinger''s cat is a very small example of a whole world of understanding that is completely beyond me in terms of physics. And what of politics, religion, science, art, literature, politics? I have so many small and imperfectly formed kernels of information, and yet even with such a small reserve to draw on, I find it all too easy to make sweeping statements, hold untested opinions and claim understanding that simply has no foundation of merit.

I have changed my thinking about parochialism and realised the need to see not just our ANZAC neighbours as whanau but all nations. The selfless acts of the workers at the Fukoshima Nuclear Plant, and the Japanese USAR volunteers who came to Christchurch and showed such reverence for human life, are just two examples of why we should see our world as a whānauhood.

I have changed my mind about thinking, realising that what we refer to as what 'we think' is actually often based on too little thinking and too little information. A truer phrase might well be, "I assume".
I have spent too long assuming too much, and must become more open minded. My action goal needs to be to listen more, and assume less. As a colleague once taught me, "When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me."