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. |
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