Skip to main content

Daniel Pink Visits Wood River Valley

Daniel Pink, author of several novels such as Drive and A Whole New Mind, spoke in our valley last night. I was somewhat familiar with Daniel Pink's work prior to his speech from skimming Drive (I know...bad English teacher) and watching his TED talk. I thought it was a great speech and felt I was able to make a lot of connections between my philosophies and struggles, and the studies he's compiled on motivation.

His ideas about motivation and rewards are in line with some of the ideas I'm struggling with this year.  In particular, reading (which I also talk about in this post).  I'm struggling to answer how we as educators can encourage a love of reading without applying damaging constraints or meaningless rewards. Reading for pleasure is not something that should stop after elementary school, but for some reason it does. I'm still not sure what the answer is, but the next book on my reading pile is The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, which I'm hoping will help me continue to work out this tricky problem. I'm also planning to involve my students in brainstorming ideas on how to improve.

Another concept that I needed to hear was his analogy of commissioned and non-commissioned work. So much of what teachers are asked to do, and so much of what we ask our students to do is commissioned work. I need to think more about how to improve student choice in purposeful and meaningful ways. As I've mentioned in my blog and to anyone who will listen, I have been trying out Genius Hour in my seventh grade English class this year. It was fantastic to hear that experiment validated because so many times throughout this year, it has felt like an absolute failure. I have a lot of work to do to improve Genius Hour, but it was great to be reminded that the work of autonomy-building can be messy. My students will be presenting their work next week, so I will be blogging about that soon.

One of the ideas I most appreciated hearing from Pink was a message of balance and small steps. Sometimes I have a tendency to jump on new things, and then I promptly drown in them. I also have a tendency to read a book and put it on a pedestal by itself. If we just look for small ways to increase the amount of time for student-driven learning and draw from many sources of knowledge, we will increase the motivation students have overall and improve our teaching.

With all that in mind, Daniel Pink certainly gave me plenty of food for thought to chew on for a while.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Perception vs. Reality

Before I became a "real" teacher, my perception of teaching English was that I would be blowing kids' minds with classic literature and handing out grammar worksheets.  Needless to say, that hasn't happened...yet. Instead, I was surprised to find that I loved teaching about writing. In particular, I found a love of teaching argumentation and persuasion. The seventh graders are gearing up for argumentative writing. We begin by talking about the concepts of perception and reality and how those two things influence our views of the world and all its issues. I have them make a poster that's based off a popular meme to help ground those concepts. It hardly seems like work, and it's one of the few assignments we do where I get to hear things like, "Can I finish this at home?" or "Can I do another one?" The task is to make a perception and reality poster. I start by showing them an example for a teacher, like this one . This makes for a great
Post a Comment
Read more

First Week is in the Books!

In 7th grade English, we did some activities to help get students get acquainted with their new lives in junior high. On the first day, I challenged the students to work together.  We did this activity.  It was great to observe how each student approached the challenge and helped their team out.  My favorite part of class this week was talking about the Genius Hour project. I didn't have a much time to talk about it as I would have liked, but we were able to brainstorm a few ideas to think about over the weekend. Genius Hour brainstorming "Seventh Grade" activity Most of the students I have in Public Speaking had not previously had a class with me, so I think we got to know each other a little better this week.  We did a speaking and listening activity where one student had to describe a picture while the other student listened and tried to draw it. Students also worked in small groups to brainstorm all the different ways we communicate and wrote definitions of
1 comment
Read more

Tongue Twisters, Growth Mindset, and Self-Portraits

To celebrate the beginning of fall (or to mourn the end of summer), here is a lovely picture of a sunflower in my yard. Here’s what we were up to this week! The seventh graders continued their exploration on narratives this week.   We practiced summary writing and writing about theme.   We also talked about how setting can influence the events of a story.   We used close reading strategies using the Collections Close Reader .   To put all this practice together, my students have some interesting short stories of their own in the works.   I can’t wait to read them! I’m really kicking myself for not getting any pictures of the demonstration speeches we did in second hour this week.   I’ll leave it up to you to picture my students teaching the class how to make cheesecake, wash a dog, tie a bowtie, ride motorcycles, and make lava lamps.   It was a diverse set of topics to say the least. Friday, we relaxed a bit from the stress of speech delivering and had a Tongue Twister Battle.
Post a Comment
Read more