Reading+and+Reflection

Ted Talk by Dan Pink media type="custom" key="7051713" width="200" height="200" align="right"  Austin Zeimet  9-29-2010  EDUC699

 Work Cited: __http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html__

 Article Summary  This Ted Talk was by Dan Pink and it talked about what motivates people in their jobs. Mr. Pink started by talking about the candle problem and how people most think outside the box to give the answer to this kind of problem. To come up with the answer to the problem people must overcome functional fixediness and reward performance initiatives do not help people working on these kinds of problem. He then goes on to talk about performance based rewards dulls thinking, narrows focus and erases creativity. The author said that this may have worked on people working in 20th century jobs with simple steps and a clear endpoint; but not on 21st century jobs. Mr. Pink believes motivation in the 21st century should be based on intrinsics of autonomy, mastery, and Purpose. Finally he talk about how people need to be self direction and not manage to increase engagement in the 21st century work place.

 Reaction/Reflection  I found this Ted Talk very interesting. I could relate the topic of motivation to not only the students in my classroom but also the problems facing education in this country. The speaker talked about the candle problem and how you need to overcome functional fixediness to come up with the answer we in education have our own candle problem with student’s performance that is not simple and with no obvious answer. These are the problems that performance based reward systems will not work on, so to me this tells me that paying teachers based on students performance will not work to close the gap between us and the rest of the developed world. I feel like Mr. Pink is correct that the way to solve education’s candle problem is to get students to buy in to their education with the intrinsics of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If we get students to realize they can master the material and give them purpose to why they need to learn this information they will be motivated to learn more and then do better on their high stakes tests. I laughed and thought about what we in education are doing right now when the speaker said the answer to the problem is not doing more of the wrong thing.