The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

Drive: The Surprising truth about what motivates teachers

March 05, 2010 by Corey Busch

I can still remember when my dad came back from our dog’s first training class. He was thrilled. We had been wondering how to get our German Shepherd, who didn’t understand English, to sit.  He had finally learned her language: thimble-sized chunks of hotdog. Turns out, dogs will do anything for a wiener, just like they’ll stop doing most things at the sound of our raised voices. My dad could now motivate a dog.  What he said next struck me as a little funny, “If only I had taken this class when you boys were younger, I would have been a much better parent.” It was then that he realized the power of carrots and sticks.   

Now that I work with kids on a daily basis, I use an arsenal of carrots and sticks. Carlos keeps aiming balled up handouts at Jennifer’s head:  that’s a demerit. Jared only does his homework half of the time: he can go on spring trip if he turns starts turning it in. Carrots and sticks have been schools’ primary tools for motivation since the start of public education. And they’ve worked well enough that we never really question them. Then comes this guy, Daniel H. Pink, and his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.  It turns out that we should start questioning.

Drive is not about schools. It mostly speaks to the business world, but its insights have direct implications for us in the business of educating kids. Pink explains that just because carrots and sticks have been the motivational method of choice since the stone age, doesn’t mean it’s the best. He explains that our tendency to seek rewards and avoid punishment is pretty primitive and that a deeper drive exists. This drive, Pink calls Motivation 3.0, is the intrinsic motivation to do a job well. 

Take for example my high school English teacher, Mrs. Moen. She came to school early and left late every day. She called parents, graded mountains of papers, and constantly innovated her curriculum, even after twenty-five years in the classroom. Why did she do this? There were no pay-for-performance incentives. She rarely even received a “thank-you.” According to the carrots and sticks idea, Pink says, this doesn’t make sense. 

 It turns out that she was driven by an internal fire Pink calls Motivation 3.0. This means that, more than rewards and punishments, people are motivated simply by working hard at a job they love. In order to tap into Motivation 3.0, people need three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.   Pink shows us dozens of examples where companies and leaders use these three motivators to garner amazing results. One such example is Google, where engineers get what’s called 20% time.  They get one day per week to work on whatever project they want. It is during this time that they’ve developed some of Google’s most important programs, including Gmail and Google News. Pink cites that not only are people more motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose, but that they produce better results.

This doesn’t mean that carrots and sticks never work, just that we need to question whether or not there’s a better way.   YES Prep already embraces the idea of Motivation 3.0 on a large scale, giving faculty quite a bit of autonomy as to how they run their schools, programs, and classrooms.   But is it enough?  What if we gave teachers and students more autonomy as to what projects and skills they worked on? What if we gave our students a deeper sense of purpose by connecting their learning with the real world? I don’t have the answers, but read this book and you’ll start asking more questions.  

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