Whose mastery, autonomy, and purpose are served by schools?

A popular TED talk features Dan Pink warning that business productivity suffers because managers remain captive to an outdated model of motivating employees with carrots and sticks. Rewards and punishments are effective, he says, but only for motivating routine mechanical tasks. Creative thinking requires more intrinsic sources of motivation. Workers who have control over their own tasks, who can see themselves improving, and who serve something bigger than themselves will be more motivated, and therefore more productive, than their counterparts who are micromanaged, are rewarded for meeting specific performance goals, and who focus on the single level at which they work.

The parallel problem exists in every classroom. Teachers are asked to motivate their students. Like the managers referred to by Pink, teachers are captive to a system of extrinsic motivators. They control nearly every aspect of a young person’s experience while at school. “This is your assigned seat, Johnny. If you sit and do your work you can join your classmates for recess. Line up to go to the restroom. You didn’t get finished so you have silent lunch. Great job, here is a smiley face. You get an A.”

It is too easy to criticize businesses and schools for the daily indignities imposed on old and young people like driving so many head of cattle – because that is how it is done. It is incumbent on us, however, to thoroughly understand something so ubiquitous. It worked in the past, Pink argues, because work was different in the past. Here’s the problem: it works now. If it didn’t, it would go away and be replaced by better motivational systems. In a Darwinian world any such system has to “pay for itself.” The only question, as the philosopher Dan Dennett frequently reminds his readers, is who (or what) benefits. Pink uses a word that captures the benefit of extrinsic motivation: if you want compliance, he says, then extrinsic motivators work very well. If you want engagement, you need intrinsic motivation. One way to look at schooling, then, is to see how we motivate students and to deduce from that what we value. We use extrinsic motivation, therefore we value compliance. That will be the subject of a future post. We will know that engagement is most important when we find that students are motivated intrinsically.

The fatal flaw in Pink’s appeal is his implied audience. He makes his pitch to managers as if it is up to them. If they would just realize what motivates people they could change something about what they do in order to get more out of their employees. The “more” they will get, however,  should not be confused with more progress toward the objectives of the manager. Managers and teachers cannot “use” intrinsic motivation as if it was an intervention to be imposed from the outside. Intrinsic motivation, by definition, emerges from individual employees or students. The manager cannot give autonomy in order for the employee to be more motivated to do the manager’s bidding. Autonomy means that the employee is free from the manager’s bidding. And what makes “purpose” motivating is when it goes beyond the narrow purposes of the manager. Even mastery is difficult for the manager to define. Improvement is motivating regardless of where one starts, and assessment of performance is likely to depend more on comparisons among peers than on standards defined from above.

Pink says he can show you that intrinsic motivation works better than extrinsic motivation. He uses the example of Google, who gives employees 20% of their time to use as they see fit. Half of Google’s great innovations, Pink says, have been hatched in that discretionary time. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are quite motivating for Google employees, but not because Google managers applied them toward their own ends. First, Google employees are compensated with stock options, which means to some extent they ARE Google. Second, the innovations they come up with are pitted against all the others come up with by their peers in a highly competitive environment. Finally, the set of people employed at Google are there because they already took initiative and stood out from those around them. They are go-getters with their own, strongly held, interests. Pink should have addressed workers, noting that in the world of tech start-ups, their interests define the company’s success.

Schools continue to impose top-down compliance because they serve their own interests, not those of their students. In the emerging technology-driven world, the interests of young people will eventually drive the goals of successful schools. This will not happen because administrators foresee it and intervene, however. It will proceed in the way of evolution, on the backs of those systems, and students, that failed.

Mastery vs Performance Goals

One major pitfall of reading about the training of an endurance athlete is that, if autobiographical, the author may not offer a disinterested report.  A complete and unbiased record is in principle possible if the athlete wears a GPS/heartrate monitor and publishes every activity throughout a training cycle with no exception. That you are unlikely to find this reveals the problem: self-reports are, by their nature, propaganda, and you don't even know the direction of the bias. An athlete may either under-report the volume and intensity of workouts or over-report them, and it will be hard for you (and probably the athlete) to decipher the motivation behind either tendency. It may well prove worthwhile to drill deeply enough to find out, though, because you can reveal the compulsions behind sport and performance more generally.

Imagine that a competitor of mine has asked me to characterize my training in the six weeks before a big win.  I may be tempted to under-report because if it seems to him that I was less prepared than he, then he will be demoralized because he will know that I have more innate talent for the competition. Imagine instead that a teammate asks me the same thing. I may over-report my preparation because I quietly hope that he will be inspired to prepare at a higher level himself.

In the case of under-reporting to my competitor, I have implied that performance depends on factors beyond his control (and that I am better than he is). In the case of over-reporting to my teammate, I have implied that his mastery may well depend on willful preparation -- and that if I performed better this time it is because I was the better-prepared. Regardless of what I actually did, does the perception of  how I was able to perform make a difference to the person I reported to?

As compelling as sporting performance is to many people, it doesn't have the same gravitas as academic performance. Precisely the same problem hovers over every question about motivation in schools though. Are classrooms places where kids relative performance is determined by factors largely outside of their control, or are classrooms places for kids to develop mastery of chosen concepts and skills? If you think there is a right answer then you haven't plunged the depths of this question. It is an organic tension that lives in every school and classroom.

Rebecca Givens Rolland just published this interesting, if cumbersome, piece in the December volume of  Review of Educational Research: "Synthesizing the Evidence on Classroom Goal Structures in Middle and Secondary Schools: A Meta-Analysis and Narrative Review." She found, not too surprisingly, that across many studies when students perceive that mastery goals are more important in the classroom they tend to have better outcomes than when students perceive that performance goals are more important. In other words, an emphasis on the process of learning is more motivating than an emphasis on comparative outcomes.The pitfall, and the reason this will always be a live issue, is that in order to have a goal orientation at all there has to be a performance on which some will do better than others.  In order to maintain optimal motivation across all individuals teachers, like their athlete counterparts, will need to remain obtuse.

Confronting Misconceptions

Among science educators it is almost gospel: the way to have students improve their understanding of the natural world is to have them confront their own misconceptions. I fully embraced this pedagogy myself as a high school physics teacher. Aside from potential efficacy, it is just fun to surprise young people with demonstrations and experiments.

To the extent I now teach principles of evolutionary biology to college students in southwest Virginia, I felt I was encroaching on ideology -- and instead of getting progress I was getting blowback. Anecdotally my students reported that my lessons helped to strengthen their prior and deeply held beliefs.

So this semester I worked with one of our biology professors to put the potency of confronting misconceptions to the test. We administered pre and post surveys to an entire cohort of our sophomores who took a "Becoming Modern" class that had the express purpose to help students think about progress in scientific understanding of the natural world. The course was inquiry-based and required students worked on four basic questions: By what means was ancient wisdom concerning motion and the heavens challenged? What is life? What is the relationship between the individual and the group? and What is a scientific model and how does it change?

The life question was addressed through an exhaustive unit we called "The Darwin Game." It is a published role-playing game in which students become members of the Royal Society and ultimately determine if Charles Darwin should receive the Copley medal. Because students are assigned roles that give them a stake on one side or the other of the debate, and because making the best case depends on understanding natural selection, they are quite likely to confront their own misconceptions about evolution. So we wanted to know: will students agree more strongly with a statement like "Humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas share a common ancestor" after taking this course?

Well, the data are in! I wish I could report those data, but alas, we plan to write up our investigation and report the results to a proper journal. Still, I wanted to launch Above Grade with something inspiring, so I will say that to at least a small extent my hopes for science education have been restored. More to come.