Beginning on page 185, Pink details some specific strategies for working with kids, but it is basically a repetition of what I extrapolated on my own in my last blog post.
Instead of beating a dead horse, I thought I would share with you a REAL LIVE example of a functional English classroom in a traditional public school that actually puts into practice so many of the techniques and strategies we have learned about in theory. I am really hoping I end up in a place next year where I can get away with stealing basically everything here that she details. THIS is what intrinsic motivation and genuine learning look like. I used a lot of what I learned in Pink's book to create the Classroom Management Plan that we needed to put together for Julie's English Methods class. Like Shelley Wright in the link above, I want my students to be highly involved in planning the curriculum for the semester based on their own interests and curiosities. In other words, I want to give them autonomy of their own learning and allow them to set their own purpose. I've actually had some success in implementing this kind of strategy, though on a smaller scale, during clinical practice this year. In my first semester, we put on a class debate during our Persuasive Unit because a couple of students specifically asked to. And just last Friday, I have two students who want to expand their essay comparing a common theme between Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and The Hunger Games with a third text (one wants to use the 2nd Maze Runner and the other wants to use Children of the Corn, while a third students want to do a dramatic reenactment of "The Lottery." (I told him if he could figure out a way to make the thematic connection between the two texts clear, then he can go for it.) The best part of this recent project is that the three students mentioned are three of my LEAST motivated students. And here they are now, asking if its okay for them to do more work! While I feel like Pink could have summed up all of his arguments and suggestions into a solid 20-page article rather than a 180 pg book, there is a great deal of value in rethinking the way that we have traditionally tried to motivate students--his arguments go a long way to explain why what we've been doing doesn't seem to be working very well. While I think we're still quite a ways off in figuring out how to structure classrooms and administration in a way that accommodates students' innate desires to explore and pursue mastery of tasks, there are definitely some baby steps that ANY teacher (English or not) can take to improving students' sense of autonomy and purpose in the classroom.
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Parts 1 and 2 of Pink's book were all about selling you on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation and explaining why our traditional models of reward-based businesses are ultimately going to fail in the changing world.
If you do not need to be convinced of this, go ahead and skip the first 161 pages and start right at the good stuff in Part 3, which is the "Toolkit" for putting these theories into practice. And actually, I'll save you the trouble of even doing that much by summarizing here. Keep in mind that Pink is writing primarily to a business-geared audience of adults rather than to teachers. But again, his strategies are largely transferrable to a classroom context. Here are Pink's suggestions for increasing intrinsic motivation in a group setting:
Beginning on page 185, he details some specific strategies for working with kids, but it is basically a repetition of what I've summarized above. Ultimately, I have found one really good example of a classroom of what this should all look like when put into practice. Check it out: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/12/21/life-in-a-21st-century-english-class/ Pink, Daniel H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Penguin Group. Not the Transporter, silly, motivation. Specifically the intrinsic kind.
Part 2 of David Pink (not Plink, as I kept saying in my last blog) is all about the three elements that inspire intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. I think autonomy is mostly self-explanatory. We've all heard the horror stories of the soul-crashing micro-managing boss. People are more motivated when they have opportunities for self-determination and breathing room to put those decisions into practice. Excessive restrictions and accountability checks--time clocks, mandated breaks, activity logs, billable hours, progress reports--are all demotivators. The drive for mastery, according to Pink, is one we all naturally possess. This is what keeps a teenage boy up at 4am playing WOW and what drives my six-year-old to flip and catch his tooth fairy money three hundred thousand times right next to where I'm trying to work. But mastery, being something that is by nature unachievable (Pink refers to it a "asymptote"--we can approach but can't reach it), is NOT something we will be willing to dedicate ourselves to purely for the sake of a paycheck or a grade. This leads into the final facet of intrinsic motivation: purpose. Pink writes, "Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more" (131). I would equate purpose with Maslow's need for "self-actualization," we have an emotional drive to be part of something larger, and ultimately and more important, than ourselves. In Chapter 4, "Autonomy", Pink describes an emerging results-based company model that forgoes all of these traditional means of accountability. In this model, there is little to no concern over how a task gets done, so long as it gets done on time. These employees enjoy a flexible, self-set schedule, they can work where they want when they want, and they can pursue their tasks by whatever means work best for them. The owner/manager is not concerned about any of the details of HOW the work gets done, because he knows that he can trust his employees to get it done. Employees, for their part, report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction and personal fulfillment in their professional occupation. The reason this stood out to me is that it reminded me very much of my high school Film class. It is the only class I've ever taken in a public school setting that functioned this same way. Mr. Beauvais would spend the first part of class teaching a particular concept--using the equipment, framing a shot, panning/zooming, etc.--and then send us out on our own to go make it happen. We were free to roam the campus or even leave altogether to find a different setting (my high school was conveniently an open campus.) Often (presuming we cleared it with him in advance), we would leave and not even return to campus that day. (One of the benefits of having this class 6th period.) The most surprising thing is that his methods worked. We were not inclined to abuse the freedom he gave us, because we actually wanted to do the work. To be fair, I can't say that we were productive 100% of the time (we were teenagers, after all), but at the end of the day, we produced high quality work that reflected our personal investment in the project. At the end of the year, we showcased our work in a film festival at the little theater in Downtown Oceanside that was open to the public and complete with an award ceremony. At least one of the students in that class went on to become a professional film editor and actually won an Academy Award. Overall, I don't think we ever gave Mr. Beauvais cause to regret his classroom model. And his success goes to show that it is possible, under certain conditions, to abandon traditional methods of classroom activities and accountably without sacrificing results. I think it does make a big difference that it was an elective class. Students did not sign up if they were not already interested in the content. Also, this class was only open to older, more mature students--juniors and seniors. Finally, it required teacher recommendations and a kind of application essay to get in. None of this would be the case in a traditional English class, but that doesn't mean adapting the traditional classroom model to accommodate some of these same strategies can't be done. It just requires a little more scaffolding to get students on board first. Pink, Daniel H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Penguin Group. This book discusses the necessary conditions that must exist in order to engage people's intrinsic motivation. In Part 1 of the book, Plink focuses on detailing what he calls "Motivation 2.0", or the incentive-based system on which 19-20th century labor has depended. The book is written with an eye towards business practices, but given that our schools are largely modeled on the same reward-based system as businesses, it does not take an extraordinary leap of the imagination to visualize the connection to teaching.
The problem is, according to Plink, that more recent psychological studies consistently reveal that relying on incentives to motivate people to do more/better work does not actually work. Incentives may produce a short-term boost in productivity, but in the long term it stifles creative thinking and demotivates, For example, one study had participants engage in a solving a puzzle. The control group, who was left to solve the puzzle without external motivations, consistently demonstrated higher levels of engagement, as measured by the amount of time spent working on it. Another group, however, was offered monetary compensation for each puzzle they solved. For a short burst, they became very productive, but their interest soon waned. The next day, when they were told there was no more money for compensation, their interest in the puzzle--which had been fairly high before the introduction of the bonus--was now reduced to almost zero. Plink explains this phenomenon by reasoning that the 20th-century mindset has trained us to associate compensation with tasks that are, by nature, unpleasant. After all, if the task was in itself rewarding, we wouldn't need to be paid to do it, right? We might even be paying to do it! What this means is that as soon as you introduce an external reward (i.e., a paycheck or a grade) to an activity that we would have naturally enjoyed doing just for the pleasure of doing it, our thinking shifts from "play" to "work"--the joy is lost. That is when the “stick” comes in—the fear of reprimand or getting fired. But as Ron Livingtson’s character pointed out in the movie Office Space, “That’s only enough to get some one to work hard enough not to get fired.” Doesn’t this whole concept just seem to capture the essence of the average classroom experience? Kids submitting to the drudgery of assignments with little to no personal investment, prodded along by the promise of a passing grade or the fear of failing [and subsequently repeating the experience all over again.] So what do we do to transform today’s classrooms into an environment where intrinsic motivation can take over? Well, that is what Plink explores in Part 2. Stay tuned. Plink, Daniel H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Penguin Group. Chapter 7
"In the new information economy, expertise is less about having a stockpile of information or facts at one's disposal and increasingly about knowing how to find and evaluate information on a given topic" (p. 93). I can read this excerpt with a degree of tongue-in-cheek for the much younger me who felt I was not "smart" because the sophisticated literati on TV could rattle off from the top of their head a suave quote from a book I had not heard of, and another would invariably recognize it: "Ah, you've read Pablo Neruda!" I grew up believing that being smart meant having near-perfect recall, which I did not. (Then again, I grew up without dial up AOL until sixth or seventh grade, and AskJeeves was the height of search sophistication until some time into high school. It was not quite the "information age" yet.) This chapter focuses on Knowing (the shift from "what" to where to find it), Making (hands-on creative activities and experiences to have an impact on the surrounding environment), and Playing (they compare knowledge acquisition to solving riddles: it is an experimental, plug-and-play-and-try-again model that only really comes together once you figure out the answer.) Wouldn't "Making" just be a specific kind of "Playing"? Chapter 8 "As people start to play in their environment, they [experience] . . . a shift in perspective, where the process of knowing stops being about one's relationship to others and becomes about one's relationship to the environment" (p.102). Thomas and Brown describe a three-step process to developing that sense of indwelling. 1) "Hanging Out" is social in nature and involves developing a social identity in relation to others in the collective and in learning how to navigate socially in context. 2) "Messing Around" sees a shift from social focus to environment focus as the user begins to experiment with changing and customizing their environment. Lastly, in 3) "Geeking Out," the user combines the social with the play as he explores and grows the limits of his abilities within the boundaries of that space. The book does not address this, but I wonder if there are many others who more or less bypass Stage 1 (e.g. the social interaction)? Chapter 9 "As we watch the world move to a state of near-constant change and flux, we believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning" (pp. 117-118). In this chapter, Thomas and Brown use World of Warcraft to illustrate their vision for the future role of education. The game provides a natural boundary (the web-based program itself), but within it the users have freedom to create characters, manipulate the environment, to create and insert their own code, etc. They work collaboratively to achieve common goals and objectives within the game, and they constantly engage in self and group assessment for continual improvement. I was thinking just the other day about Economics and how the only way I think it could be fun to teach is if you could have the kids engage in project-based learning by setting up their own class token economy that they would spend the semester building and developing collaboratively. In my head, I was trying to picture how this might look in practice via traditional classroom materials. Ideally, though, it would take place online. I wonder if there is any kind of program/website out there to sustain this kind of project with total flexibility for an entire semester? Chapter 4: "Once a particular passion or interest is unleashed, constant interaction among group members, with their varying skills and talents, functions as a kind of peer amplifier, providing numerous outlets, resources, and aids to further an individual's learning" (p. 51). Basically, the entire purpose of the existence of the collective is to participate in a shared experience in exploring a particular interest. In other words, without the common interest the collective would have no reason to exist. It also implies that active collaboration on the part of the learner is what makes learning possible. But what about self-proclaimed and not-ashamed "Visitors" like me? I learn a LOT by trolling forums without ever actively participating in the conversation. Sometimes one forum does not already contain the answer that I am looking for. In theory, I could add my comment to the cluster, and wait around until someone who knows responds to me... OR I could just Google a little deeper--try a different search term or a different forum--until I find what I'm looking for. It's faster NOT to participate because the vast majority of threads are long inactive by the time you get to them, and the ones that are active may contain much less relevant information. Chapter 5: "They [Facebook and MySpace] provide means for truly harnessing the collective. Through new media. the collective serves not only as a kind of resource for learning but also as a kind of amplifier: It intensifies and heightens the process of learning by continuously relating it back to the personal" (p. 67). While I agree that Facebook definitely produces an amplifying effect on the "content" being consumed, I can't help but to question how often ANYTHING posted, reposted, shared, and liked twenty thousand times on Facebook is something that is actually WORTH learning?? Social media, blogs, and forums are too often created and maintained not for the pure sake of sharing and growing in knowledge, but to provide some half-valid excuse for click bait to generate PPC ad revenue. I'm not saying that there aren't places on the internet where Thomas and Brown's idealistic view of collective learning occurs, but I would certainly argue against that place being Facebook. Chapter 6 "The concept is a certain familiarity that forms through the process of prolonged inquiry on particular topics or from repeated use of the skills and techniques . . . Indwelling is a familiarity with ideas, practices, and processes that are so engrained they become second nature" (p. 84). In this chapter, Thomas and Brown explore two forms of innate knowledge that are integral to inquiry-based knowledge: tacit knowledge and indwelling. Tacit knowledge could be described as a form of intuition: an internal and unspecified knowledge about a subject with which we are familiar. Indwelling is perhaps the manifestation/application of tacit knowledge. For example, I have a tacit knowledge for drilling corks: I know by an intuitive feel born from thousands of times doing it whether a cork will drill quickly and cleanly, whether the Dremel will be prone to skipping, whether the cork will be at risk for splitting, and the best way to jimmy it in and out of the jig without breaking or tearing it. I wish they included some additional examples to elaborate what they mean by dispositions though. Any ideas? Chapter One: "The new culture of learning gives us the freedom to make the general personal and then share our personal experience in a way that, in turn, adds to the general flow of knowledge" (Thomas and Brown, 2011, p. 31). Chapter One details three examples of what Thomas and Brown refer to as the "new culture of learning." What all of these three stories have in common is that it allows individuals to reach out to others--near or far--using technology in order to direct their own learning. The Internet provides a platform for conducting research, experimentation, and collaboration. Today, the most valuable resources for information are not the traditional authorities of information--they are formed by a collection of stories by individual authors (everyday Joes, if you will) compiled together in forums or by search engines. But how can you be sure that this user-supplied content is true or valid? While Thomas and Brown provide these three illustrations of success stories--people successfully navigating the almost limitless amounts of information and finding within it value for their personal lives/goals, they do not [yet] discuss how, in order to learn through forums and online communities, the researcher must possess some fairly high-level critical thinking skills that enable them to differentiate good information from bad. After all, the amount of misinformation out there--particularly on hotbed issues relating to health/wellness and politics/current events--very likely outweighs the reliable. I certainly found this to be true while researching questions regarding conception and pregnancy before my son was born, and I experience it to a slightly lesser degree today whenever I conduct research about best practices for aquarium maintenance. I would not dispute the helpfulness of these forums (well, the aquarium ones anyway), but one should not just assume that everything posted in a forum is necessarily accurate. Chapter Two: "One of the basic principles of this kind of cultivation is that you don't interfere with the process, because it is the process itself that is interesting. In fact, the entire point of the experiment is to allow the culture to reproduce in an uninhibited, completely organic way, within the constraints of medium and environment--and then see what happens" (p. 37). Thomas and Brown compare the changes that a systemic educational setting needs to undergo to maintain relevancy and efficiency in today's world to a culture used in a scientific experiment. The teacher is responsible for creating an environment that contains both resources and boundaries, and allow the students to discover the content and process organically (much the way that a biological agent grows within a culture.) What does this really look like in practice? (Particularly in a traditional public school setting and traditional subject like English or Math or Science.) I can think of two examples of this style of learning environment from my high school career. The first was a creative writing activity in Honors English. We spent about a month passing a notebook from student to student in order to compose a collaborative class story. We had some limitations: a minimum of one page contribution, we had to be familiar with the parts of the story that had been written before ours, and we could not end the scene with the "waking up from a dream" trope. So there was a great deal of room for "play" (as Thomas and Brown define it.) As much as I loved doing the class story, it was only one activity in an entire year of curriculum, and it only took up about 15 minutes of class time per day. The other example that comes to mind is the format of my Film class. Once we had learned the basics, the teacher let us pick out our desired equipment and told us to go off and create. We were free to roam the campus or even leave campus. We were free to use outside actors, come up with our own props, create our own stories, and edit and compile them however we wanted. I can't say that every single day in this class was used as productively as it ought to have been, but we worked collaboratively and we turned in finished projects of high quality and creativity, and the class was considered an enormous success. Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. Grant Wiggin’s blog analyzes what a typical day in a classroom looks like from the oft-forgotten students’ perspective. From this experience, Wiggins is able to boil down from the experience some common practices teachers probably engage in every day that would benefit students enormously if they changed.
His first observation about how students are expected to sit quietly and passively receive information all day long. This is far from optimal for student engagement. Students need to be allowed (and sometimes forced) to get up at some point—or multiple points—in each class, whether that is for a mandated stretch break or to actively transition from one activity to the next. Wiggins says one of the major changes he would implement would be to “build a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day,” even if it meant sacrificing some time for content. After all, if students have completely disengaged from the your class, they will not be absorbing any of that content anyway. Because students typically spend so much time listening passively (up to 90% of their class time, according to Wiggins), he recommends breaking up the class into mini-lessons (approx.. 10 minutes) followed by some kind of hands-on activity with built in assessment. He also recommends tracking and limiting how much time you, the teacher, spends speaking to the class as a whole. Another idea is to get students more involved in the material that will be covered by having them pose their own list of essential questions, and choosing from that list what is most important to them to have covered. Finally, Wiggins emphasizes how easy it is for teachers to unintentionally make their students feel marginalized. From repeatedly quieting their talking, to using sarcasm, or being reticent to answer their questions, many students receive the message that they are not an important contributor to the class and that, as a result, their presence there is dispensable. While I don’t necessarily think that all sarcasm needs to be banished from the classroom, I think it should be used with caution and only in circumstances where good rapport already exists with that student, and in a situation that will not embarrass or single anyone out—and to make sure that joking around is a two-way street. In other words: don’t dish it out if you can’t take it (and don’t dish it out if they can’t take it!) Wiggins, Grant. (2014, Oct 10). A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days—a sobering lesson learned. Retrieved from: https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/ How to Get a Job at Google
According to an interview in the New York Times with Laszlo Bock, (the man in charge of hiring for Google), Google hiring process does not rely overmuch on grades and test scores, as they have been found to make poor indicators for actual on-the-job performance and success. Instead, what they assess is:
Expertise is the last and least important criteria that they consider in hiring because it is content-specific, and content can be learned much more readily than the four aforementioned characteristics—particularly by someone who does possess those other four characteristics. In Bocks experience, those with particular expertise in a given field will not necessarily perform the job better than someone with less experience. In spite of Google’s less traditional hiring criteria, Friedman still recommends traditional career prep routes for our youth, i.e., college. “For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers,” he writes. This may be true, as Google’s way is not necessarily the model for most companies out there. Given Google’s level of success and growth, perhaps they should be. My husband and I both, (until recently), took the alternative route of jumping directly into the working world outside of high school. We both attended community college for a year or so, though eventually those plans were abandoned. (By him much more quickly than me. I spent nine years taking classes off and on, though not consistently working toward any one degree for it to have a positive impact on my job marketability.) My husband is one of the exceptions who has managed to stay with the same company for eleven years and to be promoted from within to a coveted managerial position. My story was less successful. After bouncing around from dying industry to dying industry, I eventually gave up a mediocre jack-of-all-trades position in order to become a SAHM. The job prospects once our son was old enough for me to go back to work were incredibly depressing without a college degree, as my skills and inclinations are not at all suited to sales. We made the difficult decision to take a decent hit to our financial security in order for me to go back to school, complete my degree, and embark on a path that would eventually lead to a sustainable career. You’ll have to stay tuned for at least a few more months to see how that one works out. While I don’t necessarily believe that every student should attend a traditional 4-ear university, I do agree that the majority need to pursue some kind of post-high school formal education. This could take the form of vocational/trade school, two-year programs, certifications, and apprenticeships, depending on the career involved. At the same time, I believe that even this model may change in coming years as more companies begin to follow in Google’s footstep in seeking out those who prove their abilities by actually doing, rather than just completing the rote requirements for a degree or vocational program. If this proves true, it will be very important that children are educated in the classrooms to tackle real-world problems. In a world where Google drives the job market, Project-Based Learning may need to become the new curriculum. Friedman, Thomas L. (2014, Feb 22). How to Get a Job at Google. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://nyti.ms/1eh1z02 |
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