As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!
Why Are We Driven to Learn?
Daniel Pink, in their book Drive, identified three things that motivate us to learn:
- Autonomy (the desire to be self-directed)
- Mastery (the urge to get better at something)
- Purpose (the idea that was it being done has meaning)
As a high schooler, I think that ‘Mastery’ was my biggest driver. Not necessarily mastery over content, but mastery over the task of being a student in a public school (it was a pretty cool new thing, after being homeschooled grades 2-10). This drive was transformative for me.
Towards the end of high school, and for large sections of my college experience, I was committed to being a high school math teacher. That gave me a new drive—Purpose. Suddenly, I saw everything as steps along a journey to “becoming the teacher my future students deserved.” This was a new kind of drive, also transformative for me.
The most impactful time I’ve felt driven by ‘Mastery’ was my growth as a writer throughout high school. I grew up receiving feedback (explicit and implicit) that my writing was poor, and I came to hate and fear writing. But shortly after starting high school, I decided I didn't want that feeling. I committed myself to my English classes above all—I was deeply driven to master the craft of writing. And I developed a TON as a writer. I don’t think the task of mastery ever really concludes, but I was able to see my growth, and be proud of it and myself.
As I’m reflecting on these times in my life where I’ve felt “driven” in my education, it’s not lost on me how all three of them I consider to be major arcs that are pretty central to the development of my identity as a whole. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
When we are able to follow the innate human drives to learn, we are humanized. These drives are born within us, and so as we listen to them, follow them, and shape them, we are getting closer to ourselves. At the same time, we are able to both find and construct who we are. Isn’t that what we hope to experience in our education? That process certainly feels more meaningful, human, and compelling than an education designed to make us employable.
These drives are super lofty, abstract, and honestly a little amorphous (at least to me at this point). If we want to build a course around these three drives, we will need to spend a TON of time reflecting on them constantly with students. And that's definitely something I need to learn more about.
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