The Line

(To borrow a phrase from Alexander Russo’s blog: I geek out on this stuff so you don’t have to.)

When I realized that Alfie Kohn’s highly touted book “Punished by Rewards” has well over twenty footnotes from the research of Ed Deci and Rich Ryan, I decided to follow the river back to the spring. I found one of those books that will come to my desert island: Ed Deci’s “Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation” (1995). What follows is Part One of Three on this theory and its applications to teaching.

I’ve never tried this in-depth kind of blogging before, but I am inspired by the lively and thorough prose of Eduwonkette (here’s her latest post), and I am feeling the need to document how important I think this theory is for teachers. But if your interest flags, worry not. Read another blog. I’d suggest the folks we really should be listening to: kids.

So here we go:

I was given an envelope yesterday morning that contained a pencil, a bookmark, and a colorful little eraser. I was told that at some point I should stand out in the hallway and give these out to whatever student was carrying around a book to read.

Motivation, in otherwords.  How can people motivate others? This is the question every good teacher should be asking, right?

Except that it isn’t.

WHAT IS THE PROPER QUESTION?

The proper question, Deci says, is this: “How can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves?” This reframing is very important, because it puts aside that idea that “motivation” is something that we can “do” to other people. Instead, motivation, in order to be truly effective, becomes something that must come entirely from inside the people we work with. It is tapping into their innate vitality: the natural need to engage and be engaged by the world.

WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

Deci’s answer is that the fastest, most productive, most enduring way to create intrinsically motivating circumstances for a human being is to support that person’s autonomy. Well-aware of the touchy-feely dangers and self-help gurus that populate this topic, he uses nearly twenty-five years of comprehensive, rigorous psychological research to back up this answer. He calls it “empirical humanism.”

DOES IT WORK?

Deci also conducts research to determine whether intrinsic motivation is all that it’s cracked up to be. It is. Intrinsically motivated tasks result in greater conceptual understandings, superior retention of information, technical expertise, and creativity.

HOW DO WE DO IT?

Autonomy support, Deci asserts, means addressing the three fundamental psychological needs of people—something like the air, food and water of the psyche. They are the need to feel self-determined; the need to feel competent; and the need to be connected to others. In every activity we undertake, if we consciously address these three needs, then this creates a situation where intrinsic motivation can thrive.

In his experiments, Deci addressed these needs in three concrete ways: providing a rationale for tasks (self-determination); acknowledging feelings (connection); and minimizing pressure (competence). In every case, intrinsic motivation occurred where these three things took place; and proportionately less intrinsic motivation occurred where they were absent.

And here’s a kicker: “Autonomy support,” Deci writes, “is a crucial context for maintaining intrinsic motivation…it also turns out to be essential for promoting motivation for uninteresting, although important, activities.” More on this next post—although I can’t resist commenting here on how telling it is that in this part of the book, all Deci talks about is school.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

Deci also discusses the range of behaviors in humans which are not autonomous (the gold standard). There is, of course, compliance, or doing something simply to do it. You might call this the “I don’t believe in this, but I don’t want to get in trouble” approach.

The opposite, one which teachers also know well, is defiance. Deci is very clear (and perhaps for us liberal-minded folk, this might come as a shock) that defiance for defiance’s sake is not autonomous, either. This might be termed the “Screw you, no matter what you’re saying” approach—or, more subtly on the adult level, “All change is good.” Defiance that is defined entirely by external control, in otherwords, is merely reaction, not autonomy.

But there is a middle ground as well. Deci calls this introjection. “These people,” says Deci, “do a behavior in spite of not feeling free, not enjoying it, and not believing it was personally important. They had swallowed the thought that they should do it, and they plodded forward, rather like sheep to the slaughter.” I’ll be talking more about how this  applies to school in my next post, but suffice it say for the moment that these people are tough nuts to crack. They comply; and they will even say, perhaps with great conviction, that they WANT to comply. But their motivation for doing so is not, at bottom, true to their authentic selves.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK?

Here is the list. For those of you who may not be familiar with this, it’s a little shocking. Remember that this is backed up by twenty-five years’ worth of data.

1)      In general, rewards of any kind: money, certificates, or colorful little erasers.   

2)      Pressure.

3)      Competition.

4)      Threats/demands.

5)      Surveillance.

6)      Critical evaluations.

7)      Summative tests and quizzes.

8)      Grades.

Deci puts it best: “Not only do controls undermine intrinsic motivation and engagement with activities, but—and here is a bit of bad news for people focused on the bottom line—they have clearly detrimental effects on performance of any tasks that require creativity, conceptual understanding, or flexible problem solving.”  

And the costs don’t stop there. Very strong extrinsic aspirations in adults– the same ones we encourage in our students–were always—always– associated with poorer psychological health.

Lots to think about…

In Self-Determination Theory Part Two, I’ll be addressing some foundational questions that arise from this work, and also how this theory applies specifically to teaching and learning.

I realized recently that I’ve been playing guitar for nearly twenty years now. (Have I been alive for twenty years?)

I’m a total hack– never took a lesson. I fake complexity in several nutty “Eastman School of What?” ways, including “alternate tunings.” Although that term implies gravitas that I don’t deserve. I basically just mess around with the pegs until something sounds good to me.

One of these tunings is formal, though: Open D. You tune your lowest and highest string to the note “D,” and when you strum without any fingering, out comes this lovely, resonant, deep thing, like a monk’s chant. It’s a dangerous tuning, though, has a life of its own. One misplaced finger when you do add chords, and the whole thing can fall apart– or, conversely, can take you on a wild musical trip you hadn’t planned at all.

Playing is a lot like that in general. Yeah, you practice, ostensibly so that you “get it right.” And you feel nervous at the idea of “messing up.” But this presupposes that your song is a static, unmoving body of knowledge. The fact is, though, that your “mistakes,” your missed strings, your off-beat strum, can actually end up being more interesting, more captivating, more truthful than what you were trying to do in the first place.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to say here. That standardized tests and other school practices rob our kids of this organic kind of response to the world? That knowledge is just as much what happens in the unrepeatable moment as anything else? That “predictive validity” isn’t really validity at all?

Despite all these brave words, though, I have played for my students over the years exactly twice. But I hope to do something with one class mid-week, and if it flies I’ll unleash it on everyone else after the break. Working on it.

OK, grades are done, and it’s time to write about something positive. I stumbled randomly onto something this year that solved so many writing problems in one sweep that it’s near magical. What is this silver bullet?

Choice. Kids write a mini-essay– that is, three paragraphs, no more, no less– once a week, on whatever topic they choose.

I did this primarily to help motivate kids to write– that is, merely to get some pleasure out of producing words. I had no idea it would make them write so much better. They are regularly turning in work that is creative, lively, well supported with detail, and organized. My current favorite example is the kid who wrote his last essay describing, in five paragraphs of hilarious irony, how he couldn’t think of anything to write his essay about.

And I don’t think I will ever forget my student K., a reluctant writer at best, who shocked me by bursting out spontaneously in class the other day, “You’re like my favorite teacher ever. You give us…like… options.”

Now, this is not to say that I now have 85 Hemingways on my hands, but the writing problems I hear about in faculty meetings are not ones I consistently have. “They’re so dry. They have no voice.” “Their use of dialogue is awful.” “Why can’t they get their thoughts organized?” And I sit in the back and think: Who are these children?

These results are supported by a strong body of research conducted by Ed Deci at the University of Rochester, my new hero– I’ll be blogging on his stuff next post. But here’s a quote to whet your appetite: “…The performance of any activity requiring resourcefulness, deep concentration, intuition, or creativity is likely be impaired (italics mine) when external controls are the reason for their behavior.”

Oh my.

It seems to me that the most interesting thing about this is the implications it has for assessment. I would love it if kids were regularly given were opportunities to polish and share their own writing in addition to imposed assignments (which we do need to do, and can do well). This guarantees more of a multiple measures approach. But if a child’s writing portfolio is composed of nothing but demanded pieces, then what are we actually seeing?

A monkey hitting typewriter keys at random may eventually produce Shakespeare. But given my experience so far this year, I’d rather see what he turns out if we let him write about bananas.

Because I have no shame about this stuff anymore I emailed Lowell Monke today with a thank you and a note that I cited him in the last blog entry. Imagine my shock when he wrote back immediately.

To be included in an essay under a headline that pays homage to Pink Floyd and Albert Einstein is a great (and totally new) honor. Thank you for getting in touch. I am heartened that you pulled that particular item out of my article. Everyone else seems to ignore it, but I think it is really the key to changing the way we look at childhood and teaching.

Wow.

My colleague Joe likes to quote “question the heck out of everything” (and thank goodness). And so, when we attended a meeting recently where we were trained to be community portfolio reviewers for a constructivist high school in the area, it shouldn’t have surprised me to have him say as we left: “This is great. But really, though– how do we really know what our kids know? No matter what measures we use?”

He’s right, of course. The challenge teachers contend with every day is that we cannot (yet) pop our kids’ heads open like a Coke can and see what’s inside. We settle for the next best thing, which is to find valid and reliable means of assessing our students’ behaviors. But no matter how clever and penetrating this assessment is, it still stops short of truly knowing another’s mind. And for the entirety of my teaching career, I have treated this as a problem to be solved.

But perhaps it isn’t a problem at all. Perhaps, in the end, it is exactly the way things should be.

Einstein put it this way: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Lowell Monke, in his article “Unplugged Schools” in the October 2007 Orion Magazine, then applies this idea to our students. “Some facet of a child’s inner life must remain sacred– off limits to our machinations,” he writes. “It should be viewed not as new territory for scientific investigation and technical manipulation but simply with awe and reverence and our own best, most human, expressions of support.” And this is exactly the fact that keeps our innocent hero Andy alive in the amazing movie “Shawshank Redemption” (check out how here).

Now, we’re not all going to be imprisoned in a 1960’s penitentiary falsely accused of murder. But we are going to be faced with pressures to act immorally, destructively, or simply in a way which is not in accordance with our authentic selves. And the fact that we all possess this autonomous core may be the only thing that saves us.

Can I then let my assessment do what it does well, and then trust the rest? Trust that honoring the core selves of my students will bear good fruit– perhaps precisely because they know I trust them? Should I risk intruding on this core self simply because I want to figure out if a kid really knows what the central metaphor of The Great Gatsby is?

This is not a plea to abandon assessment. Is is, I think, a challenge to accept assessment’s limitations– and even to consider those limitations as healthy and appropriate.

Is one of the best things we can do as teachers is– well– leave those kids alone?

STAKE (from my goldmine http://www.etymonline.com): “post upon which persons were bound for death by burning”, recorded from c.1205.

Just a few hours ago I received an Excel spreadsheet for my student cohort of the results of what my district calls the “E/LA Pre-test.” This is basically the multiple-choice section of the NYS 7th grade English exam. (Yes– my district, being somewhat attuned to how tests actually are useful, has to administer and collate data from a second test because of the ridiculously slow turnaround and incomprehensibility of the results of the real one.)

I’m not going to discuss my kids’ results here, because they’re not actually the point. What struck me so powerfully was my reaction to the data. And people who know me might be surprised at what it was.

“Well. Look at this spread. Am I going to get in trouble? What’s the cut off point I need to worry about here? Let me get my calculator out. Hm. Looks like I’m safe. But maybe not. I’ll have to figure out which questions the kids messed up on and drill them. And I wonder if I did better than my other 7th grade colleagues in the building. ”

“I wonder if I did better…”?? Drills?

You know, I do think I am generally ego-balanced as a person. More importantly, I am steeped in a constructivist, collaborative, whole-child mindset. It is what works. It is what I believe in with all my heart. And I trust that I’ll recover my equilibrium here. But I can’t deny my discomfort.

My very first look at the “data,” and this is what comes out of me. This is what AYP and non-growth models engender. Punitive, isolating, vicious competition.

High stakes? I am tied to this stake now. Am I already burning?