Do you want compliant students or engaged students? Here's an excerpt that was well done, so I figured I'd share. There's a subtle line between leadership and management. In light of the recent outcry against the PARCC test, the last paragraph is particularly insightful.
I don't have all the answers, but I'm looking for meaningful learning tasks on a daily basis, and providing autonomy, strategically, is one way to make that possible.
"In your book Drive, you wrote, "While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy one for personal fulfillment." Nevertheless, people spend a lot of time complying in school. What needs to change?
There's a huge difference between compliant behavior and engaged behavior. With compliant behavior, you're doing what someone told you to do the way they told you to do it. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's different from engagement. With engagement, you're doing something because you truly want to do it, because you see the virtues of doing it.
Now most good teachers don't want compliant students—they want engaged students. It's more fun to teach engaged students; it's kind of dreary to teach compliant ones. Human beings, whether they're 6-year-olds in a 1st grade classroom or 46-year-olds in a corporate boardroom, don't engage by being managed or controlled. We engage by getting someplace under our own steam.
So if we really want engagement rather than compliance, we have to increase the degree of autonomy that people have over what they do; over how, when, and where they do it; and over whom they do it with.
Students don't have a lot of autonomy in school—but neither do their teachers. Many trends in federal policy, especially over the last decade, have focused on constraining teacher autonomy. Now when I say that autonomy leads to engagement, it doesn't mean that you have to turn the autonomy dial up to 10 in every circumstance. If you really want to get people engaged, you have to find ways to increase autonomy the right amount at the right moment.
Now what does this mean in practice? It means not having a system that requires that every 3rd grade teacher everywhere in the country on the second day of March is teaching the exact same thing in the exact same way. That's a disaster.
What it means in terms of students is giving them some discretion over what they study, which projects they do, what they read, or when or how they do their work—just upping the autonomy a bit. We're not talking about a wild and wooly free-for-all where everyone does whatever they want whenever they want to do it.
What I am suggesting is that our default assumption, for both students and teachers, should be this: Let's trust people with autonomy instead of assuming they can't handle it.
But here's the challenge: At some level, compliance is a lot easier for the people at the very top of an education system. It's a lot more convenient if you have compliant teachers and compliant students. And management is all about getting compliance. Even if you sand off the rough edges and oil the gears, the technology of management is still designed to produce compliance.
We need something different—something beyond management, whatever the next iteration is. We need leaders, both in organizations and in schools, who create an atmosphere in which people have a sufficient degree of freedom; can move toward mastery on something that matters; and know why they're doing something, not just how to do it.
And this leads to another challenge, an uncomfortable question for legislators, governors, and presidents: Are our education policies designed for the convenience of adults or for the education of our children? Take high-stakes testing—it's easy, it's cheap, and you get a number, which makes it really convenient for adults, whether they're taxpayers or policymakers. But is heavy reliance on punitive standardized tests the best way to educate our children? Probably not. Doing what we truly need to do for our kids is going to end up being pretty inconvenient for a lot of adults. But to my mind, it's the only way to go." -Daniel Pink
