Tapping the Motivation of Teachers and Students: Dan Pink Drives a School in New Directions

This past summer we took a bit of a gamble at my school. As we prepared to launch a pilot program for a culminating senior project, we used a couple hundred dollars in donated funds and purchased Daniel Pink's Drive for our rising seniors to read over the summer. We also tapped some professional development funds to purchase a few copies of Pink's book for our teachers. The result has been a more positive and energized beginning of school than I have experienced in a long time.

After reading Drive over the summer, we scheduled a FedEx Day for our faculty to break up the usual deadening monotony of pre-opening of school in-service meetings. Our hope was that our faculty would gain some sense of the internal motivation we can sometimes forget to spark in our students (or even drive into hiding). I have to admit, I had more than a few trepidations. The result, I'm glad to say, was nothing short of amazing. The teachers were given a few brainstorming tips (pursue your B-side was one, borrowed from Marco Torres's workshop at BLC 10 that I attended this summer), then asked to produce "overnight" some sort of creative project. Three teachers who might not normally get together came up with a plan for a "food revolution" at our school. One teacher made a video illustrating a short story he teaches. A couple of teachers blogged, one about her recent 30-plus labor delivering her baby daughter, another about the post-graduation habits of twenty-somethings. I was most moved by the letters written by a Teaching Fellow to his family reflecting on life going on after the death of his mother and the return to watercolor painting by our librarian who had literally boxed up her paints and brushes for twenty years. The librarian touched on the essence of self-motivation when she said "the hours just flew" when she was painting. Another teacher, who spent her FedEx day sprucing up our girls lounge, said in our teachers' reflections: "The things that you are truly motivated to learn will never feel like work." (See below for a glimpse of their comments.)

Meanwhile, over the summer, our seniors have been blogging about Drive. They are addressing the issue of motivation as they face one of the most challenging moments of their lives, applying to college, finishing up their senior year of high school, and creating sustainable senior culminating projects for the first year of our pilot project. These gutsy seniors have questioned everything from grading to the time given for working on meaningful projects. Several of them faced off with faculty in a panel discussion about what provides meaningful motivation in the classroom (more on that later -- I hope to have a video clip up soon).

Dare I say that we as a faculty and senior leadership are committed to a year of the pursuit of what matters -- creative exploration of what DRIVES us?!

Teaching Teachers

This year my school has participated in a wonderful learning community, Powerful Learning Practice led by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, which has pushed and stretched us to rethink teaching and learning.

Soon my PLP team -- made up of administrators and classroom teachers -- will be presenting "teasers" about training workshops we are planning for our faculty in August and October. Our topics will be based on our most significant take-aways from the program and geared towards helping our faculty step up to the needs of our students, our seniors in particular, because they are embarking on a new senior project.

So, I got to thinking about how to help these teachers scaffold their workshops for our faculty. I came up with the guidelines below, which may be helpful to others who design professional development for teachers.

1. All workshops should introduce at least one tool but probably no more than three (if a choice is provided). This is so that teachers have something to play with during the workshop and, I hope, something concrete as a take-away assignment to use immediately in class. At the same time, we don't to push participants into overload.
2. However, the point of the workshop, as we know, is not the tool, but a better understanding of 21st century learning. Thus, the teachers need to experience and discuss specific skills and concepts relevant to 21st century learning that are suggested by the tool if it is integrated well into the classroom. Thus, blogging introduces new ways of thinking about writing for a digital audience, integrating images, tagging, etc. The presenter should help guide the teachers towards an understanding of what the particular tool does best and how it can be a game-changer for student learning in the future.
3. All workshops should use examples that can convince teachers that these skills are applicable across disciplines and grade levels.
4. All workshops should provide sufficient "play" time so that teachers can learn from their hands-on experience with digital tools
5. Workshops should include time for discussion about what teachers have learned, raise questions, discuss best practices, etc., and generally address issues and concerns about 21st century learning and how teaching is evolving to address students' needs.
6. Presenters should follow up on each teacher in his or her workshop as he or she implements what was learned -- providing advice, offering support, cheerleading, visiting a class and discussing further. I think this will provide a wonderful means for collegial interaction and sharing of ideas, and it's what makes our work "scalable."

I'm interested in any other ideas and suggestions our readers here may have. I understand that our formula may not work for everyone, but wonder if there are some "best practices" you can recommend to enhance the technological PD experience for teachers and to help others who lead such PD in their own schools.