The Dan Pink video that we watched in class last week greatly surprised me. I always assumed there was only one way to reward people: through performance with the carrot and stick method. It kind of comes natural that we would assume that high performance should bring greater rewards. Dan Pink points out that this is not always the case. For simple, straight forward tasks, nothing beats the carrot and stick method. For rudimentary cognitive tasks that require conceptual, creative thinking actually hurts the top performers.
Pink asks two questions: If you reward something, do you get more of the behavior that you want? And if you punish something do you get less of the behavior you want? To help answer these he brings up the issue of money. Money is a big time motivator, but it has to be enough money or else the person won't be motivated.
Then he switches gears to talk about three things that were interesting and I think can help me in my future class: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is a fantastic way of motivating people. But it can also hurt because you don't want your students to feel like they have complete independence from you, but instead your students are like your protectorates, if that makes sense. Autonomy can highlight certain abilities and skills if they feel like they have choice in the matter when it comes to assignments. Dan gives the example of the Australian software company that allows its developers one day of autonomy each quarter to develop ideas and such. That allowed for the company to see the great ideas its employees had without interfering or governing their work, and probably made them feel satisfied. This is awesome because who wants to be told what to do ALL of the time? I. Love. Autonomy and I'm going to utilize it in my future classroom.
The next motivator is mastery. Mastery is the urge to get better at stuff. Mastery drives us to improve on unique things that make us individuals in our free time. Dan talks about Linux and it powers many servers worldwide, Apache is a free browser (correct me if i'm wrong, I don't use it), and the all mighty Wikipedia. These things are free and are made by people who have jobs but yet still are driven to create these tools for free. Wikipedia is absolutely free and it runs on donations from people who contribute to its purpose. Why do people do this KNOWING they won't get paid? Challenge, mastery, and making a contribution to something greater.
Lastly, Dan discusses the purpose motive. Striving for a purpose, well for lack of a better term, gives us a sense of purpose. It's why we get up every day and find something useful to do. Employers more and more are starting to put the purpose motive higher than the profit motive. A great purpose brings great people who are looking to be a part of that greatness. I mean, who doesn't want to work for an employer that does cool stuff or maybe has half-days on a Friday once a month I don't know. Purpose is exactly why I want to teach. I know without any doubt that teaching will give me that sense of purpose that I'm ready for. I really enjoyed this video and hope that everyone else in the class gets a chance to watch all of it.
I like your "protectorates" metaphor for students, that might be one to keep envisioning, you could use it for your CSEL paper.
ReplyDeleteNice commentary. One thing I was thinking about related to this was the idea of learning and mastery goals vs. performance goals. With learning goals, students have that desire to get better and master something. With performance goals they have that incentive-based motivation. Performance is important, of course, but in school, when everything is graded, that tips the scales too far towards performance goals and squeezes out time for mastery and learning.