Standardization vs Autonomy

‘How motivated are you?” I hear this question all the time, and it makes me squirm. This question implies that motivation comes in only one flavor—and people either have lots or little of it. This is but one example of the massive disconnect between what education does and what science knows.

There are actually two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. But that isn’t even the catch; the catch is that these two kinds of motivation are inversely related – meaning that if one grows the other is likely to diminish.

Alfie Kohn unloads a mountain of research in his book Punished by Rewards illustrating that when people are told “do this and you’ll get that”, they tend to lose interest in the ‘this’ and gravitate towards the ‘that’. Kohn uses an old joke to capture this phenomenon:

"It is the story of an elderly man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds each day as they passed his house on their way home from school. One afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how stupid and ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan. He met the children on his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments about him would recieve a dollar. Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man ambled out and paid everyone. "Do the same tomorrow," he told them, "and you'll get twenty-five cents for your trouble." The kids thought that was still pretty good and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers. "From now on, he announced, "I can give you only a penny for doing this." The kids looked at each other in disbelief. "A penny?" they repeated scornfully. "Forget it!" And they never came back again."

The old man was able to sap the boys' intrinsic motivation for heckling with an extrinsic bribe. What's sad is that this is exactly what good-intentioned teachers do everyday when they use grades to artificially entice students to learn. Whether we know it or not - we are sapping students of their love for learning.
We are in an assessment paradox. Teachers are being encouraged to teach using differentiated instruction; however, at the same time, they are being torn in the opposite direction with top-down, authoritarian demands for high-stakes standardized test scores.

The true paradox lies in the reality that standardization and differentiation strive to achieve two very different goals. Standardization encourages management while differentations respects autonomy.

If we have to manage standardization, let's take a closer look at the term management. Dan Pink explains the folly of management in his book Drive:

We forget sometimes that "management" does not emanate from nature. It's not like a tree or a river. It's like a television or a bicycle. It's something that humans invented. As the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, management is a technology. And like Motivation 2.0, it's a technology that has grown creaky. While some companies have oiled the gears a bit, and plenty more have paid lip service to the same, at its core management hasn't changed much in a hundred years. Its central ethic remains control; it's chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. That leaves it largely out of sync with the non-routine, right-brain abilities on which many of the world's economics now depend. But could its most glairing weakness run deeper? Is management, as it's currently constituted, out of sync with human nature itself?

For everything Dan Pink suggests is wrong with managment, I suggest the same could be said of standardization. In fact, I would suggest you try and read the above excerpt again, but this time substitute the word management with standardization.
So if we are not wise to pursue managing standardization, what is the alternative? Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, the two architects of The Self-Determination Theory (SDT), have accumulated decades of research to support the idea that autonomy is at the heart of being human. Ryan and Deci explain:

Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.

Because standardization is not natural, it has to be maintained by a managed set of extrinsic manipulators that can only ever be experienced as controlling. Just as management, standardization is out of sync with human nature. A far better model of learning would see us subscribe to both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment.

All this means that we need to make a choice; we can no longer afford to ignore what science knows. We have got to decide which kind of motivation aligns itself with our ultimate objectives.

It’s time we purged our teaching tool kits of our carrots and sticks and created an extrinsic-free, autonomous learning environment that will provide our children an opportunity to authentically grow their natural, intrinsic love for learning.

The day we can authentically say that our children experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information will be a day that we can say we actually achieved something.

I wrote this for Synthesizing Education.

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

Dan Pink on Merit Pay

I subscribe to Dan Pink's free newsletter. I just received his take on merit pay.

Here's Dan Pink:

Q: Dan, there's been a lot of talk lately about "merit pay" for schoolteachers - that is, tying teacher salaries to student performance, especially on standardized tests. What do you think of this approach?


A: A few years ago, I thought this was a great idea. Incentivize teachers and the pay the outstanding one more? What coud be wrong with that? It's logical, straightforward, and fair. However, after looking at 50 years of research on human motivation for DRIVE, I've changed my mind. I think that this approach, despite is surface appeal, has more flaws than strengths - and that there's a simpler, more effective alternative.

Here's my reasoning:

For starters, most proposals for "merit pay" (sorry, I can't use the term without quotation marks) tie teacher compensation to student scores on standardized tests. That's a disaster. It focuses teachers almost single-mindedly on training their students to pencil in correct answers on multiple choice tests - and turns classrooms into test prep academies. (What's more, it can encourage cheating, as Georgia's experience shows.) So let's knock out this approach to merit pay.

A second option is for school principals to decide who gets performance bonuses. Again, there's a certain theoretical appeal to this method. But I've yet to meet a teacher who considers it fair, let alone motivating. Teachers worry that principals don't have sufficient information to make such decisions and that "merit pay" would be based too heavily on who's best at playing politics and currying favor. So let's kibosh this method, too.

A third approach is to use a variety metrics to determine who gets a bonus. You could measure teacher performance using: standardized scores for that teacher's students; evaluations of the teacher's peers, students, parents, and principal; a teacher's contribution to overall school performance; time devoted to professional development; how much the teachers' students improved over the previous year; and so on. This isn't necessarily a bad idea. But it has a huge downside: It would force resource-strapped schools to spend enormous amounts of time, talent, and brainpower measuring teachers rather than educating students. Schools have enough to do already. And the costs of establishing and maintaining elaborate measurement systems would likely outweigh the benefits.

In short, I can't see a way to construct a merit pay scheme that is both simple and fair. What's more, it strikes me as slightly delusional to think that people who've intentionally chosen to pursue a career for public-spirited, rather than economic, reasons will suddenly work harder because they're offered a few hundred extra dollars. Truth be told, most teachers work pretty damn hard already.

Fortunately, I think there's an easier and more elegant solution - one that's also supported by the science of human motivation.

First, we should raise the base pay of teachers. Too many talented people opt out of this career because they're concerned about supporting their families. For prospective teachers, raising base salaries would remove an obstacle to entering the profession. For existing teachers, it's a way to recognize the importance of their jobs without resorting to behavior-distorting carrots and sticks. The science reveals a paradox about money and motivation: In most cases, the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Raising base salaries would help take the issue of money off the table. Instead fretting about paying their bills on an insufficient salary or scheming to get a small bonus, teachers could focus on the work they love.

At the same time, we have to make it easier to get rid of bad teachers. Teaching, like any profession, has its share of duds. Showing these folks the door, which now is quite difficult, is the right thing to do. It's better for students, of course. But it's also better for the teachers who remain. Just as it's very motivating to have great colleagues, it's incredibly de-motivating to have lazy or incompetent ones.

So . . . if I could wave a magic wand, I'd dispense with elaborate and complicated "merit pay" schemes for teachers. Instead, I'd raise teachers' base pay and make it easier to get rid of bad teachers. That solution is simpler, fairer, and much more consistent with what truly motivates high performance.

Thanks again for reading.

Cheers,

Dan Pink

P.S. Hope you'll also check out the Pink Blog if you get a moment. Our two most popular posts last month explored whether purpose is really an effective motivator and examined the differences between failure and mediocrity.
DanPink.com is my website on business, motivation and creativity. You can also follow me on Twitter @danielpink.

Intrinsic Motivation and Autonomy

Teachers and parents complain regularly that their students or children show a lack of initiative. They aren't self-starters and seem to need more and more kicks-in-the-ass to get motivated. What we may not realize, is that we may to blame.

More and more research has come about to show that human beings are autonomous creatures.

We all, to some extent, want to be kings of our own castles.

Dan Pink writes in his book Drive about how autonomy in the work place has helped companies like Google to give their employees the autonomy they need in order to be uber-productive.

In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of autonomy. For example, scientist Krishna Bharat, frustrated by how difficult it was to find news stories online, created Google News in his 20 percent time. The site now recieves millions of visitors every day. Former Google engineer Paul Bucheit created Gmail, now one of the world's most popular e-mail programs, as his 20 percent project. Many other Google products share similar creation stories - among them Orkut (Google's social networking software), Google Talk (it's instant message application), Google Sky (which allows astronomically inclined users to browse pictures of the universe), and Google Translate ( its translation software for mobile devices). As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: "Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time.

What Dan Pink shares with us is that providing autonomy for employees is not only something we must do, but it is something we should do. We should not only because the employee benefits, but because ultimately everyone benefits.

As a classroom teacher, I have decided to provide more and more autonomous time for my students to learn things of their choice. This doesn't mean I give them a blank cheque and wash my hands of them. Rather, I am still their teacher offering the guidance they need, while still actively engaging in their learning.

In an article entitled Freedom helps kids learn more, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci offer this indictment of control and testing:

Too much control over a child's learning - and this includes excessive testing - is bad, a pair of visiting researchers have said.



An emphasis on exams puts stress on the child, and also on the teacher - whose performance hangs on how well his students do.

Deci and Ryan go on to explain Cognitive Evaluation Theory:

Cognitive Evaluation Theory further specifies, and studies have shown, that feelings of competence will not enhance intrinsic motivation unless accompanied by a sense of autonomy or, in attributional terms, by an internal perceived locus of causality. Thus, according to CET, people must not only experience competence or efficacy, they must also experience their behavior as self-determined for intrinsic motivation to be in evidence.

Providing choice and autonomy is a human need, and to overly limit or control this in a way that provides children with less than they need is detrimental to their learning. Alfie Kohn writes about choice and autonomy in the classroom in his book Punished by Rewards:

The rational for giving children choice is threefold. First, it is intrinsically desirable because it is a more respectful way of dealing with others. Second, it offers benefits for teachers. their job becomes a good deal more interesting when it involves collaborating with students to decide what is going to happen.

One of the best ways to motivate students is to realize that we can't. We can extrinsically motivate them, but that would only work against some of the very research that shows students require more autonomy and choice rather than control and manipulation.

The best we can do is provide children with an extrinsic-free learning environment where we can work with them to become the mature, logical, creative, free-thinkers we would want them to become.

Pink, Godin, Kohn and asymptotes

Dan Pink and Seth Godin both refer to asymptotes in their books Drive and Linchpin.


I found myself agreeing with Seth Godin when he wrote, "asymptotes are sort of boring." But my tune quickly changed after reading both Dan Pink's book Drive and Godin's Linchpin. I found myself oddly fascinated with how they used analytic geometery to show how learning mastery can be achieved.


Essentially, asymptotes occur when you have a line that forever approaches a point but never gets there.



Pink explains in his book Drive:

This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really close to it... The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it's also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

I love how Pink shows the cons of pursuing mastery is at the same time the very reason mastery is so appealing.



Godin takes a slightly different perspective on the pursuit of mastery in his book Linchpin:

Ten percent of applications to Harvard are from people who got a perfect score on their SATs. Approximately the same number are from people who were ranked first in their class. Of course, it's impossible to rank higher than first and impossible to get an 820, and yet more than a thousand in each group are rejected by Harvard every year. Perfection, apparently, is not sufficient. 

We have a lot of bean counters in our world. They are busy little people who love to count stuff - and in education, these bean counters love to add up grades. In doing so they wrap themselves in a blanket of grades. Keep in mind though that this blanket is wholy and entirely fabricated. 

Grades are a man-made attempt at counting something that you can't count - mastery of learning. How many students are duped into thinking that the pursuit of that A or 100% is the asymptote they should be striving for?

We set kids up for failure when we use grades to guide students as they pursue mastery, because they encourage students to think of learning mastery as linear, as opposed to an asymptote.

When students come to see the pursuit of mastery as a destination, rather than a journey, they can't understand how anyone could be attracted to something that is so elusive and so frustrating.

Alfie Kohn explains how research has come to differentiate between students who have a 'learning orientation' and a 'grades orientation'.

Did you notice what I labelled the y-axis? Can you see how the objective of an asymptote changes depending on whether you put learning or grades on your y-axis?

This is exactly why I become so bothered when I see educators become distracted by attempting to define and standardize what constitutes as an A or 90%, when the real problem is that grades, by their very nature, undermine learning and mastery.

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.