The Puzzle of Motivation

Motivation

The Puzzle of Motivation

Watching  Dan Pink talking about the facts that science has learned through different investigations,  and how these scientific findings do not match with what is actually happening in businesses all around the world, make me think how is this similar to what happens in education. 

Educators everywhere have believed for many years, that the performance of students is always directly related to the extrinsic motivations that you give them, usually as grades, extra credit , recognition, a diploma, etc. In the article "How Rewards can Backfire and Reduce Motivation" the author, Jeremy Dean shows the results of a similar research shown in the Dan Pink Video, but done in an educational field with preschoolers that love drawing. The results showed, that students that were not offered a reward for their performance or that were offered a surprise reward, did much better than those students who were offered one. Based on these studies, if as teachers we want to promote in our students creative abilities and other skills needed to succeed in the 21st century, we need to start focusing in helping and guiding our students to become autonomous and independent learners with a sense of awareness and responsibility for their own learning process, inspire in them the will to become better and better as human beings and as learners, helping them develop a true interest in becoming the best version of themselves given their own qualities and skills, and finally we need as teachers to give our practice a greater purpose, facilitating and guiding our students to be aware of the current problems of the real world, and give them the confidence to believe they can be part of the solutions and be contributors of something larger than what happens in the classrooms.