Dan Pink's Drive: Rethink Motivation Video

Dan Pink's book Drive is fantastic. Here is an uber cool video about his book.



Other blogposts on motivation:

A Forever Home for Motivation
Dan Pink on Merit Pay
What gets you through the day may not get you through the night
Pink, Godin, Kohn and asymptotes
Intrinsic Motivation and Autonomy
Why the Why matters

Collaboration Agent

Collaboration is a very important skill to have. If you are a teacher or parent, you know how cumbersome group projects can be. Sometimes the project itself is the least of our concerns.

But is it possible to collaborate too much?

I took some class time to show my students these videos on Stanley Milgrim's Shock-Obedience Experiments. My students were fascinated and disturbed, as I was, by the results of this social experiment. I also plan on using this with my staff as a professional development activity.

Take a look. This might be your next lesson plan.

If you can see why we should teach children to be mindful of the consequences of their actions, then you have to see why teachers too must be mindful of their own actions.
When I relate this to education, I see teachers taking orders from all kinds of authority figures (politicians, superintendents, principals) as if the teacher was simply an agent of the state.

After all, they are just following orders.

After administrating a standardized test, the follow-up interview with a compliant teacher might go something like this:

Q: It looks like you were under some stress?

A: I found it quite stressful. Yeah I did.

Q: But you went on.

A: I did. Yeah. Because my principal said that these tests wouldn't damage the kids long term. So...

Q: So if by chance these tests do hurt the kids, whose responsibility would that have been?

A: Well, in the eye's of the Lord it would be my fault. Morally, it would be my fault. And I could argue that I was following procedure layed out by my government, superintendent or principal. Perhaps I could blame them. But in reality it would be me prepping and administring the test.

Q: And even with the burden of the knowledge, that morally you are responsible - you went on?

A: Hmm. I'm not entirely pleased about that, but I did. Yeah.

Q: How do you interpret the kid's reactions to these tests seeing that the bulk of a student's intelligence evades the clutches of these kinds of tests?

A: I didn't... I don't know... I didn't actually actually think about it - maybe I probably should have - but I didn't think about it that much. So... my job was to teach the curriculum and prepare them for the test. So...

And the interview with a non-compliant teacher might go like this:

Q: You were involved in an important exercise in educational accountability and the principal told you to go prep and administer the test. Why did you disobey?

A: It sounded a little bit like the Nazis in the Second World War Germany. It wasn't my fault - it wasn't me, I was told to do it.

Q: The majority of teachers go along with this testing - they prep their kids and administer the test.

A: I find that scary. I find that very scary.

-------------------

I get that there are strong external pressures on teachers to comply.

I get that there is a "real world" out there that teachers must face. The stakes are high for all of us to comply.

Evidently, we can convince ourselves, in certain circumstances, that these harmful assessment practices are absolutely justified. When I started to look into assessment, I thought of bad assessment practices as something bad teachers- other teachers - did.

And now I see for the first time that this apathetic compliance is not some malevalent force out there. It's very much in us.

In you.

In me.

In everyone of us.

If we aren't prepared to think for ourselves and stand for something - to move for something - then we will reconcile ourselves to the perpetual status quo, spending our time getting children to accomodate themselves to playing the game. We educate them in the elaborate tricks and subtle nuances of maneuvering through the game.

And if we do this...

Nothing will change.

The recipe for all this is simple - all we need is for good people to say nothing.

At some point, your silence is betrayal.

But here's the good news. If you asked any of the test-subjects from the videos above to participate in Milgrim's shock experiments again, they would likely not mindlessly comply.

Their conscious reflection would enable them to replace their mindless compliance with mindful subversion.

Now it's your turn...

Prescriptive vs Personalized

Metaphors are important.

For too long, parenting and schooling has taken on the metaphor of the factory. At one time, this was convenient because factories are predictable. And therefore can be prescriptive.

The problem with the factory model is that life isn't predictable and so when we attempt to be overly prescriptive, things go awry.

Alfie Kohn explains in his book Unconditional Parenting that prescriptive parenting and teaching is a ruse:

I might as well warn you now: What follows will not be a step-by step recipe for How to Raise Good Kids. First of all, I would have to be a nearly perfect parent myself, which I'm not, before I presumed to offer other people a definitive, fail-safe guide to raising their children. Second, I have my doubts about the wisdom of such an approach in any case. Very specific suggestions ("When your child says x, you should stand at location y and use z tone of voice to utter the following sentence...) are disrespectful to parents and kids alike. Raising children is not like assembling a home theater system or preparing a casserole, such that you need only follow an expert's instructions to the letter. No one-size-fits-all formula can possibly work for every family, nor can it anticipate an infinite number of situations. Indeed, books that claim to offer such formulas, while eagerly sought by moms and dads desperate for a miracle cure, usually do more harm than good.

For some, the conditional nature of rewards and punishments have grown tiresome, and there are many teachers and parents who are eager for a new game plan.

However, making the leap from something as prescriptive as if this happens, say this, do that and stand there, to something that resembles less of an instruction booklet can be intimidating.

The factory metaphor is prescriptive and dehumanizing, and it has reached the end of its shelf life.

The organic metaphor is personalized and humanistic.

Rather than guiding our actions with an instruction book, we need to draw on good pedagogy. Here are two very powerful adages I use to guide my teaching and parenting:

Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

There is a big difference between doing things to children and working with them.

Because one-size-fits few, these adages play out in all sorts of different ways. Rather than standardizing our approach to working with children, they need our personalization.

Sometimes they are just tired

I was reading an excerpt from a super cool book to my students that I was really excited about. I read it with enthusiasm and vigor. I placed a great deal of effort into pronouncing the words correctly with appropriate emotion and significant tone.

Despite my greatest efforts, my students were not that into it.

Their eyes drooped. Their shoulders slumped, and their heads sagged.

I stopped.

"You guys look tired."

Almost in unison they responded, "We are." One girl added, "I've been here since 7:00 am."

It was 3:00 pm. The end of the day. They are thirteen years old.

I closed the book, and we waited for the bell.

One boy came up and said, "sorry Mr. Bower, but I'm just really, really tired today."

I said it was okay. They went home.

We'll try again tomorrow.

Positive deviants

Youngme Moon writes in her book Different about positive deviants:

The writer-physician Atul Gawande has written about the phenomenon of "positive deviants" in the medical profession, that small set of players who are mired in the same environmental conditions as everyone else but stubbornly refuse to allow themselves to be constrained by conventional wisdoms, and as a consequence are able to identify fresh and often counter-traditional ways to address seemingly intractable problems.

The idea of a positive deviant intrigues me. I'm not a big fan of labels, but it is probably safe to say that I am a kind of positive deviant. When I talk about abolishing grading, changing the homework default or reducing/eliminating curriculum, I am often encountered with a myriad of responses that resemble pragmatism, realism, skeptism, and flat-out apathy.

I'll be honest, I am sometimes shocked by how resistant and closed minded some teachers can be towards change.

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe this isn't a teacher thing but a human being thing. I don't know.

Either way, I find it disturbing how rigidly opposed or hopelessly apathetic educators can be towards change.

And then I think of an even more disturbing thought. If this is how they treat positive deviants who are their colleagues, how do they treat the positive deviants that are in their classroom?

Sometimes I'm the distraction

Yesterday, I had my class in the computer lab where I read to them a short story. Afterwards, I asked them to write a blog post on our class ning. While they blogged, I walked around and read over their shoulders, sharing outloud for all to hear ideas that might inspire their blogging.

As I walked around the room, I saw one of my students deep in thought, pecking away at his keyboard. But then he stopped.

As I stopped walking and talking, he looked at me and said:

Could you stop talking? You are making me lose my focus.

I wasn't upset.

Or defensive.

Instead, I laughed outloud and smiled within.

I was proud.

I was proud that a student in my class felt comfortable enough to speak his mind. He wasn't rude about it. He waited for me to stop, made eye contact and asked me to stop.

He needed me to stop talking so that he could start thinking.

It was a good way to end the day.

Failure is an option

 
Failure is not only an option, it is inevitable. And we are better for it.
 
When we sell life as an exercise in mistake avoidance or perfection, we we end up lying to children who grow up to become adults who live their lives in fear of being wrong.
 
But if we are never prepared to be wrong - to make a mistake - to fail - then we will never create anything new.
 
When we say that failure is not an option, many kids really hear us saying that failure is something that should never happen - but then it does, and they are left debilitated and helpless. So they quit.
 
No one is successful all the time. Successful people see mistakes and failure not as something that should have never happened but as information to be used in the pursuit of life long learning.

No plan might be a good plan

Is there a place for a good plan?

Sure, but let's not kid ourselves - planning is guessing.

At best, plans can be used to guide us as we maneuver our way through life. Problems arise when we re-label plans from guides to dictates. When the tail wages the dog, we lose our way.

We tell kids we can't discuss this because we are suppose to be learning about that.

Instead of asking kids what kind of project they want to do, we tell them what project they have to do.

Peter Bergman explains Why Not Having a Plan Can Be the Best Plan of All:

Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg's strategy in 2004.



And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn't stop them from starting. It wasn't until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company's money-making platform.

Lesson planning has taken on a life of itself - often these content-bloated, overly prescriptive lesson plans are by-products of a curriculum that demands kids know an infinite amount of material in time for yesterday.

Just as Mark Twain coined the phrase "I never let schooling get in the way of my education", it is just as true that good teachers don't let lesson planning or curriculum get in the way of learning.