So how do we motivate people to learn?
Daniel summed up the basics “If you reward something you get more of that behaviour – laws of behavioural physics!”
He then went on to discuss a couple of really interesting examples from research over the last 50 years which you may be familiar with here is one of them.
The 1st study from North American economists – basically experimented on participants in America & India. They gave the participants some practical challenges so things like throwing balls into hoops etc and then more cognitive based challenges where they may have to learn things or use their brain. The first group had the reward that if they were a top performer then they would only get a small amount of money, the second group if they were the top performers then they would get a bit more money than the first group and the third group got an extremely large amount of money. It probably won’t surprise you to find out that the results showed that there was a correlation between the higher pay higher performance on mechanical skills from the physical activities. However bizarrely on the tasks that called for rudimentary cognitive skills (a bit more thinking) then they discovered that the larger reward actually led to a poorer performance.
3 key factors for motivation within schools:
Autonomy – at the level of teachers and students themselves
Mastery
Purpose
He then went on to say that “sometimes we look at management as if we are looking at a river – oh cool look it is a river or do we think how did that river form? Management isn’t given to us by god it was created by someone – it is a technology from the 1850’s… Why do we still use management then?”
He said that “Best teachers are engaged, the way people engage is not through management or control – only way is to get them there under their own steam, acquires radical autonomy – time, technique, team and task – cutting edge businesses emulate this they give them this and are successful. Do we do this for our teachers and students in schools?
He gave these examples:
Atlassian (Australian company) They have Fedex days (where they have to deliver something over night) they have an afternoon when they can work on whatever they want, however they want but then the following day must share this with others. Could we do this in our schools? Do you already do something like this?
Google – They give their staff 20% time of their normal work to do this same type of approach for example some of the best products have come from this e.g. gmail was made out of this 20% time. “Just about all the good ideas here have bubbled up from 20 percent time” What would happen if we did this with 20% timetable time in schools?
Konstantin Novoselov & Andre Geim –Won the Nobel prize in physics recently from University of Manchester, they have their usual research for papers etc but also have at the University what they call a ‘Friday evening experience’ – each Friday night they work on stuff they want to try out etc. Their idea came from one of these sessions.
So what lessons can we learn for education? Have you any ideas of applying this in your school? I would like to hear your ideas.