Dan Pink on motivation

Through Twitter, I just found this amazing TED video where Dan Pink talks about motivation: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html He for example says that a system of reward does only improve 'performance' if the task has a basic solution which is known to the worker. Once the task requires the right side of the brain, including creativity and innovation, the idea of a reward actually worsens the performance! He also backs it up with some research and talks about it in the context of IT and economics. The whole talk reminds me very much of Maria Montessori, who also argued against rewarding children because it made them stop what they were doing (well).

Now, for my own teaching, I have to get used to that thought. In my EFL classroom, rewards have always worked very well but then again it might be possible that this is because my tasks were very straight forward and the solution was fairly obvious. And yet this is not how you should teach- apologies to some of my earlier students, I am on my way of being a better teacher, I promise! Dan Pink suggests that the solution to motivation is autonomy, masters and purpose; excatly the factors that should go hand in hand with great teaching and learning! He brings up this example that 20 percent of the time at google workers are allowed to work on whatever they would like. At the end of the year, half of the products released by google were born out of project ideas which came out of this '20 percent time'. Amazing!

On that note, here is also another, older talk by Mae Jemison who passionately argues for the connection between art and science. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html 'The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity'. This is still as relevant today as it was in 2002! Science and art are equally important and thanks to the holistic ideas of Ron Miller, I can know appreaciate a little bit more how they all belong together! Listening to Mae Jemison talk about all the things she loves (space, dance, chemistry, ...) also helps me to be more at ease with all the different things I feel passionate about (ballet, educations, cooking, films, languages, ...). They can all influence and inspire each other and I certainly hope that as a teacher, I will have the opportunity to use all of them to inspire my students to learn.