In a video excerpt from his book Drive, author Dan Pink condenses human motivation to three factors: The need for autonomy, the goal of mastery, and the desire to make a contribution or serve a transcendent purpose. What if public school teachers organized their classrooms and lessons around these three concepts? We do it in small ways all of the time - a recycling program, a food drive, a fundraiser, etc; but what if these concepts were the organizing principles that motivated everything else we do?
For example: A group of 5th graders is animated by helping find homes for stray animals so they design a project to help the local animal shelter expand the visibility of animals up for adoption. In pursuit of the larger goal they recruit a parent who is a marketing executive to help them with a strategy; they talk to local businesses about posting flyers in the windows; they develop a social networking plan to get the profiles of the animals in front of as many eyes as possible. Before long, a classroom project is having a real world impact and the rewards that the kids are getting are far more significant than a score in their teacher's grade book.
Sound interesting? It does to me too.
Unfortunately, in our data driven, standards based educational world, opportunities like this are going to become more and more rare. Why? Because there is no way to assess them. There is no standardized test to compare these students' performance to that of any peer group. Projects like this do not create data points that can be aggregated, disaggregated, manipulated, and compared. How will those who judge schools' effectiveness be able to judge a school that doesn't create data points?
Authentic teaching can create awkward conundrums for the digitheads amongst us. On one hand there is a desire for our kids to do REAL THINGS, but oftentimes real things don't leave neat binary footprints.