Drive
Think you might want to read this book?
If you are interested in motivation for yourself, your students, or those you lead, you will find plenty of ideas and research in Drive. Daniel Pink sandwiches mastery, autonomy, and purpose in between his call for new methods of motivating and toolkits to do so. A masterful combination of history, research, and theory will be a joy for anyone interested in motivating themselves or others.
What Would Socrates Ask?
What if learning were tracked without a link to grades/rewards?
Would schools run better if adult roles were laid out clearly and equitably and there were not stipends for extra work?
At what age do stickers and bonus points begin to have a negative impact?
What if we convinced teachers/students that experimentation and early failures were simply part of great teaching/learning?
How can we embed autonomy, mastery, and purpose into the teaching profession and learning process more fully?
What if project work were framed to students as: Why do this? Can you do this? How will you know you’ve done it well?
What if we reframed assessment so that the focus was strictly on learning?
Research
“That enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.”
“...school-children who are paid to solve problems typically choose easier problems and therefore learn less. The short-term prize crowds out the long-term learning.”
...the first systematic study of “merit pay” in which middle=school math teachers in Nashville could earn up to $15,000 in bonuses for good test scores showed the program had zero impact on student performance.
Concepts
“Self Determination theory(SDT)- we have three innate psychological needs-competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.
Goldilocks tasks- Challenges that are not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple.
Quotes from the author
For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve configured our organizations and constructed our lives around its bedrock assumption: The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.
Wikipedia represents the most powerful new business model of the twenty-first century: open source.
...if students get a prize for reading three books, they won’t pick up a fourth, let alone embark on a lifetime of reading….
Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.
Type I (intrinsically motivated) is the natural state- the default setting-for most human beings. By contrast, Type X (Extrinsically motivated) behavior is something people learn through their experiences at home, in school, and at work.
People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation.
Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.
Whatever they’re studying, be sure they can answer these questions: Why am I learning this? How is it relevant to the world I live in now?
Quotes from Others
“No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.” - Cali Ressler
“With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.” - Carol Dweck
Organizations Working on Answers
Gateways to Further Learning
Referenced books for purchase
The applicability of this book to education is ….
Resources
