Gerald W. Aungst

Thanks to my net­work on Twit­ter I saw two TED videos yes­ter­day that got me think­ing about (and then rethink­ing) my ideas about teach­ing and learn­ing. (Inci­den­tally, if you haven’t spent any time perus­ing the TED site, take some time right now and do it. You won’t be dis­ap­pointed. I’ll wait.)

The first came to my atten­tion through Matt Per­man’s blog, What’s Best Next. Daniel Pink recently gave a talk called The Sur­pris­ing Sci­ence of Moti­va­tion.

Though his talk is geared at busi­ness lead­ers, it has obvi­ous appli­ca­tions to edu­ca­tion. The key idea here is that extrin­sic, con­tin­gent moti­va­tors only improve per­for­mance when the task in ques­tion is nar­rowly defined with a clear goal and obvi­ous route to achieve it.

The prob­lem is that we want our stu­dents to learn how to solve non-​​obvious, messy prob­lems that don’t already have opti­mal solu­tions. But our cur­ric­ula, our sys­tem, and our teach­ing meth­ods are still based on (a) trans­mit­ting knowl­edge and wis­dom from experts to novices through (b) rote appli­ca­tion of rou­tines and skills, using © extrin­sic moti­va­tors such as grades to increase stu­dent per­for­mance. We oper­ate our school sys­tems and man­age the employ­ees the same way. We may paste new labels over the old cover, but the fun­da­men­tal struc­ture and phi­los­o­phy remains the same.

Almost uni­ver­sally, accord­ing to Pink, the social sci­ence research of the last forty years says that higher incen­tives lead to worse per­for­mance. So what does that say for our sys­tem that is based on increas­ing per­for­mance by reward­ing the top per­form­ers? Pink sum­ma­rizes it this way:

Pink offers an idea that seems rad­i­cal, but I think has some poten­tial for schools: 20 per­cent time. In com­pa­nies like Google, the employ­ees are per­mit­ted to use twenty per­cent of their time to work on any­thing they like—complete auton­omy. In com­pa­nies that have used it, a sig­nif­i­cant amount of the “real work” ends up get­ting gen­er­ated dur­ing the 20 per­cent time.

What would this look like in schools? Stu­dents would have the equiv­a­lent of one day per week to spend on learn­ing any­thing they choose to learn in any way they choose to learn it. Com­plete auton­omy. Teach­ers would be a resource to sup­port the learn­ing instead of direct­ing it. No one would say, “No, you can’t do that in school.” Stu­dents would have the free­dom to choose the tools and means and sources of learning.

Crit­ics will say we have hardly enough time as it is to cover the required mate­r­ial. Giv­ing away one-​​fifth of the school year would be mad­ness! Maybe then it’s time to seri­ously rethink what is “required.”

The flip side of this is that we will still have core con­tent dur­ing the other eighty per­cent of the year that some stu­dents will have no inter­est in learn­ing. If the tra­di­tional incen­tives don’t work, how do we get stu­dents to be moti­vated to learn?

The sec­ond video I saw inspired me and gave me a glimpse of what teach­ing might look like if we move away from those extrin­sic moti­va­tors. Ben­jamin Zan­der, con­duc­tor of the Boston Phil­har­monic Orches­tra, speaks on Music and Pas­sion:

Zan­der says some­thing that is as true for teach­ers as it is for con­duc­tors:

Test scores, incen­tives, and other extrin­sic moti­va­tors prob­a­bly aren’t going away. But as an indi­vid­ual teacher, when I turn my atten­tion to those, I lose sight of my real job. Instead I must ask myself every day