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?!

Need your input!

First, Second, and Third Grade teachers are exploring classroom uses of the iPod Touch this summer. I've created a Wiki for resources and comments and I'd like to invite you to contribute your thoughts about the iPod Touch too. We're really interesting in apps you're using and ways you've integrated this device into the classroom. Here's the link and thanks for your help!

Movie-Making as a Model for Learning

What do movies communicate? They entertain us by telling a story, motivate us by moving us to action, or puzzle us by posing a question for consideration. Aren't these some of the ways we like to learn best? Yet, here we are talking about the final product. I'm wondering, what do we learn from making movies, and from making them in collaboration with others?

Movie-making, by its very nature is a collaborative process. I have just completed a workshop with master media-teaching mentor Marco Torres as part of Alan November's Building Learning Communities 10, something I have wanted to do for several years. And I have learned from Marco one of his key precepts: "The product is part of the process." The learning comes from the whole enchilada.

What do we learn from making movies together? First, there's the brainstorming, articulating, planning part of the process. During these discussions, we learn how to animate our curiosity and inspiration. We learn how to figure out ways to push out an idea so that others will take a second look at it.

We learn to translate an idea in to words (script) or sketches (storyboards). We learn how to communicate in careful and precise detail to a crew.We learn how to make purposeful choices -- and determine those choices in conversations with others. ("Make the camera movements purposeful," Marco says.) We learn how to project ideas from multiple perspectives (using camera angles, different types of shots).

During production, we learn how to see (borrowing the "rule of thirds" and other commandments from photography). We learn how to listen. We learn how to ask permission. We learn how to work under tight time constraints. We learn how to plan and implement a project based on that plan.

When we edit, we learn how to focus on our purpose and cut whatever doesn't add to that purpose.  We learn to look for ways to tie everything together.  We learn how to present our work to others in rough form, reflect on our challenges and our learning. We learn how others see what we do. We learn how to go back and make it better.

Oh, yeah. We learned how to do this in two days. Here's the movie my husband, Larry Kahn, and I finished this afternoon.  (I've revised this blog to include the YouTube version for you iFolks. Unfortunately, this version cuts off the side.  You can't win, I guess.)




(Thank you, Marco, Rosa, Elizabeth, and Miguel.)

Blog Skillz: What Can Students Really Learn from Blogging?

What are the skills our students learn when they blog? What are the 21st century skills they need to learn -- and can gain fluency with by blogging?

These are the questions left bumping around in my head after attending a couple of sessions at Edubloggercon at ISTE 2010 this year: Jim Gates's session on "Best Practices in Student Blogging," my (and Jim Gates's) discussion group on "Building Personal Learning Networks," and Kevin Honeycutt's entertaining "Conversational Lubricants." I know they learn tagging ("higher order thinking on steroids" according to Honeycutt), and tagging is a skill that is largely absent from their regular Internet lives. They learn to assess one another's blogs by commenting -- and they can learn to comment in more meaningful ways as a result. They learn to share ideas, to engage in intellectual discourse, to collect and make sense of ideas from others. They learn to expand their notion of the world. They learn to write with words and pictures and video -- and to have a point. They learn to think "out loud."

They learn to teach.

The TED Standard

I have come to think of TED Talks as the gold standard for presentations. While not all of the TEDs are pure glorious intellectual entertainment, enough are to make the standard hold. It's worth asking -- what do the best TED talks have in common to set them apart from the run-of-the-mill lecture or mediocre PowerPoint presentation?

We can learn from TED talks when we think about education, about inspiring others to think and to learn. This is what was on my mind today when I attended TEDxHouston. First, you know there has to be some powerful chi at work when you have that many smart, articulate people in one room. The air pops with their enthusiasm -- they are so happy to have found one another. I found that the best talks are also conscious of their purpose, which is to be worthy of the "ideas worth spreading" label. Which basically means they are meant to inspire us in some amazingly thoughtful way. Finally, the best talks are expert performances (and the less good ones not so much). The "talks" come across as conversations meant to enthrall and amuse, while they also tackle the big questions of the world. One final note: the best speakers use big, powerful images and only a select few words as written text in their digital presentations -- or they use no digital presentations at all. The best speakers connect with their audience and do not merely speak from on high.

Here are some of the highlights from today's delicious deli tray of ideas:

Dr. Brene Brown:
BreneBrown.com
"Stories are just data with a soul."
"Embracing vulnerability as beautiful is the birthplace of joy, creativity, love."
"You cannot selectively numb your emotions."
"We pretend that what we do doesn't affect other people."
"We need to let ourselves be seen, love with our whole hearts, practice gratitude, lean into joy."
"I am enough."

Dan Phillips
PhoenixCommotion.com
"Appollonian concepts create mountains of waste."

Cristal Montanez Baylor
HashooFoundation.org
"In order to empower women, men have to be participants."

Drs. Rebecca Richards-Kortun and Maria Oden
Institute for Global Health Technologies
"Students can solve global health challenges."
Haitian saying: "You do not learn to swim in the library, you learn to swim in the river."
"When our students put their ideas into action, they become the leaders of the 21st century."

Stephen Klineberg
Houston Area Survey
"No city in America has benefitted more from immigration than Houston, Texas."

Mark Johnson
Hometta.com
Questions we need to ask:
"What is authentic? What is sustainable? What is design integrity?"

Monica Pope
ChefMonicaPope.com
"We say eat where your food lives. Hell, I say, eat at a table."
"We need the new campfire -- cooking, eating, being together at the table, sharing who we are...."

Dominic Walsh
Dominic Walsh Dance Theater
"There's a beauty in the uncertain."
"Dance is a way of observing the spirit in the physical body."
"When I watch dance, I look for the space in which I can participate. This is the creative space meant to be filled."

Dr. David Eagleman
Eagleman.com
"What we really learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance."
"We need to not 'cowboy up,' but geet out."
"Lead a life that is free of dogma....Celebrate possibility and uncertainty!"

Finally, congratulations to the brave and awe-inspiring young people at Culture Pilot who made TEDxHouston happen! What a day -- my head is still spinning.