Motivated by Pink
“Daniel Pink’s presentation on DRIVE entitled “The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us” starts with two basic motivaters – food and money. As he plows forward, he gets into the third level which included some of the the following words that really motivate us: interest, curiosity, higher learning, thinking. Basically, once humans get past basic rudimentary cognitive skills, overall performance goes down.
Money is a motivator. Therefore, once you pay people enough, they will not worry about work and focus more on their work. Workers truly want autonomy – control over their work. Management is great if you want compliance, but businesses (schools) have to empower their workers if they want them to really productive.
Another level Pink refers to is mastery. An example he gives that employees would play a musical instrument on the weekend. People are motivated by doing things perfectly.
The final level Pink discusses is purpose. His example is Tom Shoes. This company was built on the idea of “With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair to a child in need.
TOMS Shoes - some rights reserved by stevendepolo
One for One.” Teachers and students need to believe that they have purpose in what they are doing. If they don’t believe in what they are doing, they will not go all in in their work.
As I transfer these thoughts from the business world into middle school students, I do believe human beings are human beings. And yes, MS students are probably motivated the same way a 20 something is. Students want autonomy, mastery, and 20 percent time to do it their way in their lives. When teachers lecture and speak at or down to students, they are considered “managed”. Management of time and thinking. However, as teachers truly transfer the learning, experiments, grouping, and higher level thoughts over to students, students will truly turn and run with ideas. In the first few minutes of the video, I didn’t understand where Jeff Utecht was headed with encouraging us to watch this video. However, it quickly came to me that teachers and students both need to opportunity to reverse instruction and move from management to mastery to purpose.
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