The Toolkit (Pink, part 3) (2011)

 Originally posted as a Facebook Note June 28, 2011.

Part 3 of Pink's book is a grab bag of ideas for individuals, institutions, parents and educators for instituting his findings about motivation. It's a lot to think about. Most of it is likely to be inapplicable to any one reader, but anyone ought to find at least a few ideas that are worth thinking about. 

Where I am now is thinking about how these might practically plug into my day-to-day teaching. My overall sense is that things are going pretty well, could be better, could be a lot worse. I don't want to try something radical that results in crashing and burning. 

Here are three ideas that occur off the top of my head. 

1. 1. Better first days. The 24 worst days of my 24-year teaching career have certainly been the first days of the year. The next 24 worst would be the first days of the spring semester. I simply struggle without a text to discuss. It wouldn't be bad to talk about motivation and purpose. Yes, we all have to do assignments and get graded, but could students think more consciously about their own objectives and maybe (see #2) about alternate ways of getting there? Could we do this in such a way that students who want to do things the traditional way can do it, students who want to just get by (I hope because their sense of purpose is being fulfilled in other classes), but students who want more autonomy and have ideas about mastery can have freedom to pursue them?

   2. Fewer exams. Or, at least, available alternatives to exams. I don't give exams in my political theory courses, and my political science colleagues have gone even farther than I have in removing exams. I'm starting to wonder if they serve any purpose at all, other than a systematic survey of student knowledge retention, and an easy way to assign grades. I am beyond awesome at test-taking, so naturally I have a high comfort level with them, and imagine other students do, too, so maybe that should be one option; but it also leads me to have rather low respect for exams as pedagogical tools. Is there any profession/career for which a talent for timed short-answer or essay exams is useful, or even applicable? (Don't even start me on multiple choice exams; I went off them a long time ago.)

   3. Pink's DIY report cards idea (pp. 187-188) is intriguing, and would probably work for some students. The idea is to have students list their own top learning goals at the beginning of the class, then write their own evaluations at the end which they compare with the teacher's. Pink suggests, "let the comparison of the two be the start of a conversation on how they are doing on their path toward mastery."

 My biggest reservations:

1. 1. Perceived fairness (see Pink's discussion of compensation, pp. 178-184). Students with different assignment structures may well be concerned about equivalence of workload and grading.

    2. Phobia avoidance. I've had students who are phobic about writing papers, making speeches, taking exams, talking in class, working with computers, or some combination of the above. Would a student who chooses an alternative assignment to avoid the original be well served in being allowed to do so? I've told students who have sat silently for 15 weeks that no job will reward an employee who never says anything. Am I right?

    3. Workload. For a variety of reasons, I cruise through the first half of the semester, then struggle to stay afloat for the rest. Students are in even worse situations, partly of their own making due to procrastination. What gets me through the torrential downpours of work is having a system that I can plod through. Now I'm talking about going off that. Could my students and I  sustain our ideals through the storm? Or, would it become easier?

    4. Assessment. As I remarked in an earlier post, assessment seems geared towards simple objective measures. This is certainly true of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), as was recently reinforced by a scornful note I got from the editor of the Journal of Political Science Education on my recent submission which was based mostly on qualitative evidence. Can we do both?

My resolution: I have a Congress class (upper-level) of 13 students this fall, mostly strong ones. I'm going to try some of these techniques to see if I can give students more autonomy over their work.