Daniel Pink's Drive: You Gotta See This

Rather than post another of my takes on Daniel Pink's Drive, check out this amazing animation instead. It is just under 11 minutes but it is worth your time, especially if you can't pick up the book right away.

Hopefully this video will encourage you to add Drive to your reading list.

A Lesson from Daniel Pink's Drive: Don't Empower... Give Autonomy

As an educational leader I have been doing everything within my authority to empower teachers who work with me. After reading Daniel Pink's Drive, I realize I am doing this all wrong. Beginning next year, I will no longer seek to empower teachers. Rather, I will seek to give my teachers autonomy. Splitting hairs, you say? Daniel Pink would disagree. Let's take a look.

The whole reason I have sought to empower teachers in the classroom and in the greater school community is that I have always tried to hire professionals to a job then provide support for them. In my mind, empowerment for teachers translated into giving teachers freedom and authority. However, according to Pink, empowered individuals never will be as motivated to do a job or task completely, thoroughly and with excellence if they simply are empowered. Why? Empowerment allows my teachers to do things their way only up to a certain point and entirely within the parameters I set for them. This may sound great at first, and it probably is relative to many schools, but it isn't quite enough. After all, I may know good teaching but I don't know Physics or Calculus or Latin.

From this point forward my goal is to grant autonomy to my teachers. Pink argues that for a person to be motivated completely, he or she must have autonomy over four things in his or her work environment: Task, Time, Technique, and Team. without reinventing the wheel, allow me to explain (you should read the book for full details).

Task - If I give a teacher a task and set parameters, he or she will seek to do the task and probably will do it well. If I give a teacher autonomy over the task and I get out of the way, he or she not only will do it well, but also will invest more time, energy and creativity in the task because with autonomy comes ownership. Besides, the parameters I would set probably would be determined by the limits of my own knowledge and experience.

Time - If I require a task to be completed by a particular date and time, practically none of my teachers would take issue with it. If I give a detailed timeline including checkpoints, some teachers likely will work only in the small increments required to complete the task. However, if I assign a task and a deadline and give a teacher autonomy over his or her time, that teacher is far more likely to invest a great deal of time in the task (especially if I have granted autonomy over the task). Do I care if the teacher works in erratic chunks of time including marathon sessions as the deadline approaches? As long as the deadline is met, I absolutely do not. Some of my best work has been generated that way. This is a concept that is causing fits for many baby-boomer leaders and managers who have been brought up and trained to work by a schedule, put in x amount of hours each day, etc.

Technique - If I simply empower teachers to teach a particular way, I am short-changing them and their students. However, if I can give my teachers autonomy over their technique, their pedagogy, I am setting them free to explore new and better ways of teaching, to seek creative new ways of doing the same old thing. By granting autonomy over technique, I will be tapping into what really motivates human beings to excel.

Team - While I can't completely turn teachers loose to choose their own teams in all aspects of daily life at school, I can find some ways to grant teachers autonomy over some of their team assignments. Grade levels and departments obviously must be determined by a division head or director. However, committees, duty rotations, football game gate workers, and more, could be chosen by the team members themselves. After all, who knows better than the team members which teachers will work best together and be most productive?

I hear the cynics now... "Yes, but, you are giving your employees way too much credit." To the cynics, Dan Pink and I both would say two things. First, we are looking for and expecting the best from those who work with us. Second, to grant autonomy to those who work with us, i.e. teachers, certainly requires a higher order of faculty. How do we achieve that higher order faculty? That's a conversation for another day but the short answer is better training of the teachers we have and better hiring to replace those who leave us.

A Lesson from Daniel Pink's Drive: Seek a Mastery Mindset for Your School

One of the most applicable lessons for educational leaders found in Daniel Pink's latest manuscript, Drive, centers on the difference between a performance mindset and a mastery mindset. The performance mindset and the mastery mindset are germane to discussions of students, teachers' expectations of their students, and teachers' own mindsets regarding teaching.

We'll look first at how these two mindsets affect students. Let's contrast the two in terms of the Spanish language. With a performance mindset, a student strives to make an A for the semester in Spanish while a mastery mindset is one in which a student strives to learn Spanish. With a performance mindset, a student may be satisfied by reaching objectives and checking boxes, i.e. making an A on a test or an A for the semester. I do not want to discount goals and objectives but they shouldn't be all that drives (no pun intended) us when learning and/or practicing something. With a mastery mindset, a student realizes that attempting to master Spanish will produce not only the desired A but also an understanding of the language, an outcome which far outweighs any A on a report card.

Let's look next at how the two mindsets play out in terms of teacher expectations for students. With a performance mindset, a teacher teaching poetry, for example, wants to see on an assessment that a student understands certain elements of iambic pentameter, haiku, sonnets, etc. Once an assessment confirms that a student has reached a particular level of achievement, the objective is checked off and the teacher and student move on to something else, perhaps expository writing. With a mastery mindset, on the other hand, both teacher and student develop a long-term relationship with poetry and seek a deeper understanding of poetry, a desire to continue delving into poetry long after expository writing, research papers and major American authors have been covered.

Finally, let's see how transformational (either positively or negatively) the two mindsets could be for teachers with regard to teaching. With a performance mindset, a teacher is motivated to push classes to average a certain score on an achievement test, AP exam, state or district assessment, etc. With a performance mindset, a teacher focuses on meeting the standards the school, district, or state, require for a demonstration of competency. A school full of teachers with this mindset will soon be shortsighted and focused on the wrong things (regardless of whose fault it is that the mindset either is fostered or is allowed to take hold). Who wants teachers seeking to meet teaching standards? Not me, and hopefully not you, either. With a mastery mindset, on the other hand, teachers are driven to push and challenge their students toward mastery. Additionally, with a mastery mindset, teachers challenge themselves to grow always in every aspect of teaching: technology integration, active teaching, content knowledge, creating assessments, etc.

Perhaps you have picked up on something Pink points out about mastery: mastery can never be achieved but the process of working toward mastery produces astounding, lasting results. Who can ever really master a language? No one, but the longer one works to master a language, the more proficient (or expert) the person becomes. Who can master poetry? Arguably no one, since no single poet is recognized as the greatest in all types of poetry. Who can master teaching? As there is always something more to learn and something upon which to improve, no one. However, imagine a teacher who truly seeks mastery of teaching. Imagine a school where students seek mastery rather than spending their time and energy grade-grubbing for points or shooting for test scores. Imagine a school where mastery is the expectation of all stakeholders for students and teachers. I would want my kids at that school, and I imagine Dan Pink would, too.

A Brief Look at Drive by Daniel Pink

Author Daniel Pink follows up his excellent first book, A Whole New Mind, with a terrific sophomore effort: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink takes a hard look at what science says about human motivation then contrasts that data with how stubbornly the rest of the world, the business world in particular, tries to motivate people in entirely the wrong way. Pink covers topics like the evolution of motivation, sticks and carrots and why they don't work, using compensation as motivation (correctly and incorrectly), and more.

I'm going to do a few posts in the next week about how Drive could and should be used by educators. Specifically I'll discuss why administrators should stop empowering teachers (seriously), how and why administrators should rethink teacher compensation, and how a mastery mindset can change a school.

Check back to read the posts. In the meantime, though, pick up a copy of Drive and add it to your bookshelf.

Good Advice from Daniel Pink: Focus Less on Facts

This weekend I read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. In this manuscript, Pink posits the notion that the future will be ruled by big-picture right-brainers more so than by the systematic left-brainers who carried civilization through the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century. According to Pink, the Conceptual Age we live in and will live in requires a new mindset for those who will be successful, a mindset centered largely on the right hemisphere of the brain. Pink makes an argument that we all can tap into our right hemispheres more by focusing on what he calls the "six senses:" Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. Rather than focusing solely on facts and information, we must begin to use our "six senses" more and more.

In A Whole New Mind, Pink states, "When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact."

While Pink did not write this book specifically for educators, I believe his statement has great value for the next generation of educational leaders. Today's digital natives have access to more facts than any group of people in the history of mankind. So what? Is that really all that significant? It is only if our digital natives know what to do with these facts. For example, how important is it for today's students to commit to memory the country of origin of each of the fifteenth and sixteenth century European explorers and where on earth they explored? In my opinion, not very. On the other hand, wouldn't it be more appropriate for today's students to be able to explain the process of globalization during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the long-term consequences of that globalization, when provided with those facts about the explorers? Wouldn't we then wish our students to be able to compare and contrast the globalization of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the globalization of the 20th century or of the last decade?

As educational leaders we should focus less on the facts and more on the context in which we find those facts. We should endeavor to empower our students to use their "six senses" in their academic pursuits. We should strive to incorporate into our classrooms more opportunities for our students to use their "six senses." Research shows that our digital native students feel the need to create, to tell stories and to find meaning in the things they do. To mix metaphors, today's digital natives indeed have a whole new mind and we must adjust our instructional methods if we are to reach them.