Last week, I wrote about how my wife and I spent two days of our summer vacation, this only to share some thoughts about Jim Sweeney and the remarkable leader that he is. While not hiking the High Sierras or chilling in the California wine country, however, I stole a little "me time" to read two books that had been sitting on my shelf for way longer than I care to admit. Relax. This is not a book report.
If, however, you have not yet perused Dan Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and Dan Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, you owe it yourself to do so. To make a connection to the world of TLA, I need to say just a word about both books. And I do have a point to make.
In Drive, Pink draws on 40 years of research on human motivation, exposing the mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Although carrots and sticks worked in the last century, he argues, that is exactly the wrong approach for today's knowledge workers. For folk in complex, creative jobs, employers should tap into the ingrained need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
This got me thinking about the Obama administration's educator pay-for-performance scheme. The fact that multiple large-scale merit-pay demonstrations have failed to increase student achievement notwithstanding, Pink's research suggests that such attempts are doomed to fail from a scientific, motivational perspective. I asked my wife, a middle-grade family and consumer science teacher, could she work any harder if she was paid more. She laughed at me.
And now Dan Ariely. Many of you may know that he is Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. In The Upside of Irrationality, Ariely marshals data from his own original and sometimes hilarious experiments to draw compelling conclusions about how and why we behave as we do. To stay with the pay-for-performance issue, Ariely's first chapter explains why neither CEOs nor professional basketball players perform any better with increased compensation. Among other things, his studies show that with increased pay comes increased performance anxiety. At best, the data demonstrate an inverted U shape suggesting that pay and performance are related--but benefits accrue only up to a point and then drop off.
What Pink and Ariely say to me is that there are no magic bullets when it comes either to improving leading or teaching in schools. We know that money matters and we have woefully little of it in public education right now. Until we learn more, however, about the connections between compensation, motivation, stress, and performance, I urge caution in creating high expectations around what may ultimately prove a red herring to school improvement.
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Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. These three areas of importance were also the main focus of the Langford Quaility Tools Training. I guess all these researchers know what they are talking about... Now how to infuse and motivate our teachers to look at these "Best Practices" and implement in our classrooms to facilitate active learning.
ReplyDeleteThe key to success, on all levels, is motivation and to have the intrinsic desire to do, to learn, to accomplish.
Have a good weekend.
Donna