Book Review: Daniel Pink's "Drive"

How many of us need rules and policies to make us honest and how many of us would work hard and act honorably even without rules? Daniel Pink says 85% of us are in the latter of these groups, and yet most of us work in environments built to regulate the other 15%. What if we ditched our current system of rewards and punishments and instead provided the conditions that intrinsically motivated people need:

1. Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives
2. Mastery: the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters; and
3. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves (p. 219)

That’s essentially Pink’s argument in his book “Drive” (and in this TED talk as well). The 21st century requires creative, empowered, self-motivated thinkers, and the old way of using punishments and rewards can actually do damage when used in creative endeavors. He describes several experiments that demonstrate when participants were paid to solve a puzzle requiring outside-the-box thinking, their ability to solve it and their speed in doing so decreased dramatically. When they’d done it for intrinsic reasons, just for the joy of finding the solution, they’d performed much better. Extrinsic rewards end up turning an act of play into work.

Although he wrote this book with the business world in mind, a majority of what he has to say easily applies to education. In particular, I thought a great deal about the merit pay question, clearly a huge carrot (since the stick of closing down schools under NCLB didn’t appear to work). But according to Pink’s argument, merit pay could result in exactly the opposite of its professed goal because teaching is a creative endeavor.

Many of us, the ones who are smiling as August nears at least, enjoy teaching for the intangible rewards it brings – the joy of seeing the spark of understanding in a child, the satisfaction from hearing confidence grow, the energy from an engaging discussion with kids. This is why we teach.

Will being paid to make kids pass tests kill this joy? For many people, hasn’t it already?

How do we give teachers autonomy while allowing them to gain mastery towards the higher purpose of educating kids to be future leaders? I think it starts by taking much of the emphasis off test results. Pink says the more diverse the evaluation tools, the harder they are to subvert, so perhaps this means introducing other methods of evaluation – peer observations, student surveys, participation in leadership activities, etc.

The majority of teachers – around 85% I’d suspect – don’t need these rules and regulations. We need to spend most of our time building supportive structures to encourage these intrinsically motivated teachers to continue in the profession and not let the other 15% create the rules.

Leaders of the Free World

When my niece was 5 years old and beginning Kindergarten, her first day of school was the main focus of the extended family. We all had high hopes for her, knowing as we did that she was gifted and precocious, it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world discovered what we already knew - that she was the next leader of the free world.

She did impress her teacher and the other teachers in the school fell in love with her just as we had. But that didn't mean everything was peaches and cream. She'd ruled the roost for so long that following other's rules were a little hard for her to understand. After getting in trouble one too many times for not following directions, my brother sat her down and asked her why the teacher was having to redirect her so much.

"I like school and all," she said, "but really I just want to do what I want to do!" That comment stuck with us and has become an inside joke anytime one of us wants to be headstrong. Isn't that what we all want? Just to do what we want to do?

That comment came back to my thoughts again today when I worked with a second-language first grader during writing workshop. His teacher was concerned that he might be dyslexic because when rereading his writing his words were all over the place. It was almost as if he tossed them up and they stuck where they landed.

So, when Bryan said, "Miss, I've finished my book!" I went over to see, surprised and excited that he'd spent the time and energy to complete an entire story. Sure enough, he had written a story about playing soccer, and the words were scattered about. The cover said I play with friends my but when he read it to me, he read it correctly. He pointed to each word and simply pointed to my and then went back to friends. The same with the next page, which said: game the Me and Ernesto started which he read as Me and Ernesto started the game .

When I talked to him about it, and pointed out how it looked to me, he corrected me: "No, this is how you read it."

"I can see that, Bryan," I said, "but someone else reading it will get confused. You need to write it from top to bottom, just like other books in the library are written. Let's fix it and then see if Ernesto can read the page about him." Bryan erased and rewrote the words correctly, and when Ernesto successfully read his page back to him, his face lit up with a huge smile. Ernesto had read his book!

I think until that particular moment, Bryan had his own personal system of writing. He knew what he wanted to say and how he would write it. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do, by gosh! The thought had never crossed his mind that someone else might want to read what he wrote.

However, when they did, suddenly he was an author. An author with words that others would be interested in. And what we'd thought might be dyslexia simply became what it was - a misunderstanding about the purpose and intent of writing.

I wonder how many kids in our schools misbehave or have misconceptions about school simply because they want to do what they want to do. Kids like this need a certain element of choice in their day. They need to feel empowered. They just need help directing that empowerment in the right direction. Who knows...they might be the next leaders of the free world.

Why the resistance?

When I became an instructional coach, eager and energetic and ready to change the world, I thought everyone would welcome me with open arms into their classrooms. After all, I was a classroom teacher too, just like them, and I was bursting with ideas to share. So I was understandably dismayed when no one came banging on my door begging me to come help them set up their room or read to their class or plan for their first writing unit. Some teachers were even actively resistant, turning down my offers with “thanks but no thanks” and a wan smile.

I was soon to learn that every coach deals at some point with resistant teachers. Many coaches have it even worse than I did, with folks who are outright rude about their desire to be left alone. Sometimes this resistance is due to the way coaching was explained to the staff – if teachers have the misunderstanding that the coach is there to “fix” them, or if in the past they’ve only known coaches to work with struggling teachers assigned to them by the principal, then they are understandably resistant to working with the coach themselves. Working with the coach then becomes an admission of incompetence.

But even if the idea of instructional coaching has been introduced positively to faculty members, coaches still often encounter resistant teachers. These are the teachers who sit inattentively in the back of professional learning meetings, if they attend at all, and then return to their classrooms to teach the way they’ve always taught. The temptation is to label them “afraid of change” or “set in their ways” and to inwardly feel like a failure every time you walk by their room.

However, in Jim Knight’s book “Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction”, he argues that may be the wrong perspective. Teachers are among the professions he calls “knowledge workers” and have a deep-seated need for autonomy. Knight quotes Thomas Davenport, an expert on knowledge workers:

One important aspect of knowledge workers is that they don’t like to be told what to do. Thinking for a living engenders thinking for oneself. Knowledge workers are paid for their education, experience, and expertise, so it is not surprising that they often take offense when someone else rides roughshod over their intellectual territory.

People who think for a living. When I read that for the first time, a metaphorical bell went off in my head. Of COURSE that’s why some teachers are resistant to unsolicited suggestions or interruptions in their carefully planned day. Because teaching is about thinking, any unsolicited comment can become a judgment on the teacher’s thinking. Even something as simple as beginning a “no fake reading” campaign in every classroom can become, to some teachers, a judgment on the worth of their prior instruction.

The key, then, is to create a nonthreatening coaching partnership with the faculty so that when the classroom teacher encounters a difficult situation in her teaching – a hole in her “intellectual territory” so to speak – she feels comfortable asking the coach for suggestions. This requires that the coach respect the teacher’s need for autonomy and choice. Many times this is easy, because most highly-effective teachers are also highly reflective, and are constantly searching for new and better ways to reach their students. I find that the best teachers are often the hardest on themselves, and they are the ones always asking me for more and better strategies for reaching those puzzling students that keep them up at night.

Resistant teachers are not necessarily resistant to new ideas – they’re resistant to feeling as if their prior ideas and experience have no value.