Category — boredom

I think we’re making another mistake when it comes to the conversations around motivation. One of my basic premises in writing this blog is that we, the people having a conversation about young people and learning, are continually lead in the wrong direction – or down a rabbit hole – by calling what we do in schools education.

That mistake leads to further mistakes. One of those mistakes is motivation. I’ve argued that extrinsic motivation is has potential short term gains (at best) but long term has more potentially damaging impacts.

We know there are movements for paying teachers based on merit – for performance (getting better test scores). We also know about the experiments taking place where young people are being paid to improve their test scores.

That seems to speak pretty loudly that test scores, and more specifically scores on standardized tests, are what is important in schools.

This Time Magazine article,  Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? describes the research of Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. in which he discovers bribes do work – for behaviors within a young person’s control – but do not necessarily work for things (like grades) that are subjective and young people cannot control.

Daniel Pink, in his video presentation above and in this CNN article argues that paying for performance (extrinsic rewards) work in a very narrow set of circumstances but for most conditions have long term negative impacts. Paying large bonuses do not produce the kind of results one might think they do. He further argues in his newsletter that merit pay for teachers is a pretty bad idea. He lays creating a system that is actually fair and based on good measures is near impossible and suggests a better alternative for improving performance is to simply raise base pay and creating a way to weed out bad teachers.

In my opinion, finding ways to improve the performance of either students or teachers in a system that is doing the wrong thing isn’t worth putting our energy into. I don’t think the results will get us anywhere closer to an educated populace – but then maybe that’s not what our government and the powers that be really want.

I wonder why there aren’t more people concerned about the high school system in this country. BUT, that said, just being concerned will get us no where. I learned yesterday that the landmark report called A Nation at Risk was developed by the Nixon administration and has been used since then to drive the right wing ‘reform efforts’ in the school system – culminating in what we have now as No Child Left Behind. This kind of thinking will only continue to make matters worse as I’ve stated previously. Now, here’s some pretty hard evidence that the “product” being produced by the current education system is not engaging the teenagers of today, that they experience much of high school as irrelevant’ and that it seems that teachers don’t care about them.

What’s quite interesting to me is that most of the educators I speak with already know this – but they haven’t figured out how to create an experience that is engaging and desirable by the young people that come to their schools. What will it take for the kind of change that is needed to actually occur?

Survey: Many U.S. high school students bored in class
POSTED: 12:15 p.m. EST, February 28, 2007
CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) — A majority of U.S. high school students say they get bored in class every day, and more than one out of five has considered dropping out, according to a survey released Wednesday.