dtangl

I was watching TED 2009 this morning as I mass transited my way to work, and I discovered this gem from the conference: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

If you have 15 minutes or so to spare from your day, the video is well worth the time. Dan Pink is an engaging speaker and the information he presents  uproots the long accepted belief that motivation using cash incentives works.  It doesn’t.

To summarize: The ideas on motivation that held true during the process oriented do-as-you-are-told methodology of the industrial era, no longer holds true in an age where mechanical processes (manufacturing, inventory management, etc) are being delegated to machines, and creativity and outside-the-box thinking drive the economy. Believe it or not, using money as the primary tool for motivation is counter-productive when you are trying to encourage creativity.

When linear thinking is necessary, money still works. But when you need to think laterally, productivity drops as the monetary reward goes up, i.e. we get less creative so it takes longer to solve the problem.

The solution to  encouraging creative thinking and increasing productivity is not money, it is the freedom to act. The best way to encourage creativity is to stop treating employees like a dog you can train and start acknowledging that they are independent agents capable of much more than you give them credit for. As employees, it is important for us to believe that what we do or what we are trying to do has some sort of intrinsic value.

Now Dan Pink was speaking from a business perspective, but this idea got me thinking. What about education, both from a student’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective?

From a student’s perspective, grades would look a lot like monetary incentives. The higher you score on this test, the more you participate in class, or the more homework you complete… the higher a reward (grade) you get. We are trapping our children in the same do-as-your-told processes that has dominated business for so long. And in doing so we do them a grave disservice.

Those standardized tests that we as a world have put so much emphasis on as the way to measure our ‘ability’ are a perfect example of what is wrong with our education system. Those tests claim to measure intelligence, but all they really measure is how well you can take a test. Walk into any Princeton, Kaplan, or any other test prep center and they teach you the same thing. They teach you how to recognize patterns and types of questions. In essence they teach you how to game the system. And to compound the problem, these test prep course cost a lot of money, so in most cases it is only the wealthy that can take full advantage of this service.

So now what of the teachers? A few weeks ago, Obama suggested implementing a pay-for-performance plan for teachers, where seniority and tenure are de-emphasized as the means for determining pay and merit is elevated. One of the problems with this, as I wrote in my last post, is that merit is a difficult quality to categorize and measure. And if we set our standards for merit wrong, we could easily do more harm than good.

In that post, I didn’t explain what I meant by that, because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how. To me it just seemed intuitive. But listening to Dan Park brought me back to that problem. And now I think I can explain what I meant.

If we measure merit based on how well a student performs in our current system of education, then we are only going to end up magnifying the problems that exist in the system. More focus on grades and standardized tests will result in more subject oriented and do-as-you-are-told teaching. We get more of the same when what we need is a change.

To make a pay-for-performance plan work, we need to first change the system so that we de-emphasize grades and test scores and grant teachers more freedom on how to teach, so that teachers can focus on instilling in our children that which is really important: a life long love for learning.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but the acknowledging and acting on the ideas that Dan Pink presents and others like him argue are the first steps toward solving this problem.