Jamie Feild Baker has been reading Daniel Pink lately; Pink writes about motivation for a business audience, but a lot of educators have been excited about his book Drive. A bit like Alfie Kohn, Pink argues that extrinsic motivators--like gold stars, grades and merit pay--can have the opposite of their intended effect.
His idea is to replace the carrot-and-stick approach with "three essential elements:
(1) Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives (2) Mastery – the urge to get better and better at something that matters and
(3) Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”
Reflecting on Pink's work in her blog, Baker challenges us as teachers to "scrutinize" our curricula for these three elements.
1. Does the work we offer our students include an opportunity for
choice and self direction?
2. Does it offer students a sense of increasing mastery--as opposed to repeating something they know how to do?
3. Is there a palpable "Big Picture" purpose to the work?
Pink and Baker are both admirers of "Google's 20% time," a model which allows Google engineers one day a week to work on something they are passionate about. Word is that our own NWS Curriculum Committee is contemplating the feasibility of a senior "capstone experience." Setting up such a program presents more than a few serious challenges, but Daniel Pink is emphatic about the pay-off of harnessing students' intrinsic interests and giving them practice with problem-solving...that is, solving real- world problems, where answers are often "poorly defined, multi-disciplinary and have several possible answers, none of them perfect."
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