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.
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.
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