Here is the video, some comments from me are below.
Pink identifies three factors that impact what he calls 'drive': Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Oh yeah, money is a factor, but not they way we might think, according to Pink (sorry for the rhyme).
Here is how I think this relates to the lives of teachers (I'll address students in another post when I have a chance- because I think what he says is also important in thinking about the experiences of students). For much of the history of public education- at least in my memory, teaching has been a comfortable middle class job. No one was getting rich, but none of us expected that. We made a living. This was using money in the way Pink identified- teachers made enough money to take the issue of money off the table. In return for stability, teachers lived with the fact that they wouldn't be subject to huge financial reward. For most of us that was a fair trade. Of course the high social prestige of the profession made up for some of that (note sarcasm here), but what was important was that it was a fair living, and since most of use have ambitions other than monetary, that was good enough.
What made teaching great was the abundance of the other three factors. Teaching has buckets of purpose. I have never met a teacher that didn't really believe in what they were doing- it's importance, it's meaningfulness, it's worth. You want purpose, education has purpose. Helping children learn and understand the world around them feels as meaningful as anything one could be doing.
For a long time, education has also had a fair bit of autonomy. Sure, in public education we are (and should be) accountable to our students and communities for providing the collective vision of eduction we are charged with, But for the most part, teachers and schools have had a high degree of autonomy in not only how we do our work, but often what that work actually is. Teachers were invited to participate in the discussion of what we should be doing, and had genuine influence. Further, in our classrooms, we often had tremendous autonomy. Though we were often told the what, the how of our work was mostly left up to teachers and groups of teachers in schools. As long as we met the expectations of our community, we were allowed freedom in how we did what we did. Note that the teachers we revere, both in our own lives and in our mythology, are the ones that exercised autonomy (think Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society)
And, teaching is hard. Really hard. It is the sort of higher level cognitive work Pink is discussing (I know it is fashionable in some quarters to claim that 'any person with the appropriate background can teach,' but that simply isn't true. It is hard, complicated, and takes time to get competent- a minimum of three years according to most research I have read). So mastery takes work. And we are never done. Over the nine years I have been in the high school classroom I have gotten continuously better, and every time I became aware that I had achieved a new level of competence in some way, it was also apparent to me how much further I needed to go.
So teachers were willing to put up with low social status and the less appealing parts of the job because it provided large amounts of the other things that Pink identifies as key to 'drive.' In many ways it was the perfect job (for the right sort of person). The rewards Pink is describing to produce high performance we actually working pretty well.
However, today what is happening in eduction is changing that. There is less financial stability, so money becomes an issue. I already live with a salary far below the average for my level of education, but the budget squeeze at the federal, state and district level is real and serious. My salary has never held pace with inflation, but it wasn't that far behind. Now we face real changes in the monetary aspects of education. One of my colleagues was literally in tears in her office the other day having heard that our districts 'offer' in this year's negotiations was a pay cut. It not that we are or should be immune from the realities of economics, I'm just pointing out that the game is changing. Money has been put back on the table in education and we are worried. And the stability that we used to trade for the lower salary is no longer. Benefits are being cut or squeezed, teachers are getting laid off in large numbers, and this will continue for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, there are major changes in the other factors Pink discusses. It is, again, fashionable right now to blame teachers for the problems in education. This has produced the most top heavy, top down model of management one can imagine. Teachers are losing autonomy very quickly right now. At the federal, state and district level, more focus is being put on controlling not only the what, but the how of teaching. Teachng is being transformed in some quarters from the cognitively challenging work it should be, into the sort of mechanical, menial labor that Pink says is exactly the sort of work in which the simple reward paradigm does work. Which might not be that big a deal, except that if you remember the best teachers you ever had, they probably weren't the ones who treated their work as mechanical menial work. They treated it like the intellectually complex challenging task that good teaching is. And if you think about the worst teachers you ever had, they were probably exactly the type of teacher that will fit well in the new vision of teaching.
As for the other two factors, education will never lack purpose, but if it feels like the very system you work in has committed itself to making it difficult if not impossible to achieve that purpose, then eventually all but the least imaginative will quit in frustration. And if we turn the job into a mechanical menial function, then there is no challenge in mastery, and that will cease to be a factor.
Now for the editorializing. As if I wasn't already doing that. It is always interesting to me that we (the collective 'we'- read 'that guy who has the Secretary of Education post and many others like him) think that 'business ideas' will save education, but when you hear that, the person saying it does not mean ideas like the one in Pink's lecture (or in the awesomely creative deployment by RSA Animate). No, the lessons of 'business' that we want to deploy in education all come from the manufacturing sector. Efficiency, scale, standardization. A business model with little room for the factors that Pink identifies as key to "drive." Also, interestingly, it is the part of our economy that our leaders continually tell us is not the future for our country. So we are trying to make a system for educating children (which NO-ONE ever says is not of grave importance), who we want to be passionate, autonomous and committed to mastery, using a system which researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago found is unlikely to allow the people who are the delivery system to be passionate, autonomous or committed to mastery. But we really want innovation? We think we want creativity in education? We want teachers passionately committed to the work they do and willing to labor at continuously improving? We could do that. But I don't think that's the direction we are heading right now.
It's two weeks to the end of the school year. I just spent two hours in which I should have been grading thinking about this, which is perfect anecdotal support for what Pink was saying. But I REALLY have to grade some papers today. Really.
-F. Scott
No comments:
Post a Comment