I recently finished reading Drive by Daniel Pink, a book that really challenged my thinking about motivation and the learning that goes on in my classroom. There is a great deal of information and research that Pink lays out in the book that really got me thinking. The book revolves around the idea that we need to upgrade how we think about what motivates workers and students. This upgrade has three essential elements: Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives; Mastery - the urge to make progress and get better at something; and Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
After reading the book and learning about these three elements I began to rethink how I am doing things in my classroom. Are the students I teach really engaged and motivated to learn, or are they just doing the tasks I put in front of them because I ask them to? I think the answer is the latter and that has caused me to begin to think of ways I can get my students more engaged and motivated to learn.
The first step I feel needs to revolve around the element of autonomy. Very rarely do I allow for choice in my classroom, and when I do it is usually from the standpoint of allowing students to choose how they will present what they know. Students in my class have very little freedom to choose what they will learn about and how they will learn it. Giving my students more freedom to decide some of what they will learn is going to be the first task I tackle in trying to improve student motivation.
