The Retronaut blog, which collects artifacts from the past to help us understand the present, unearthed an article from Ladies Home Journal circa. 1900, headlined, “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.” Its author, one John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., lays out his predictions for the American life in the early 21st century.

Among his calls: Americans will be taller. (True) There will be no C, X, or Q in the alphabet. (False) Photographs will be telegraphed from large distances. (True) Rats and mice will be gone. (False). Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. (False, but Amazon is working on it.)

But somehow I found his predictions for “How Children Will Be Taught” most compelling. Here’s what he says:

A university education will be free to every man and woman. Several great national universities will have been established. Children will study a simple English grammar adapted to simplified English, and not copied after the Latin. Time will be saved by grouping like studies. Poor students will be given free board, free clothing and free books if ambitious and actually unable to meet their school and college expenses. Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children with free eyeglasses, free dentistry, and free medical attention of every kind. The very poor will, when necessary, get free rides to and from school and free lunches between sessions. In vacation time, poor children will be taken on trips to various parts of the world. Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.

Your thoughts?

Here is Joe’s explanation, followed by his questions:

Our school holds an annual holiday volleyball tournament in phys ed class.  Every student participates, and even the athletically uninclined risk dignity and limb diving into bleachers to save a point.  The reward for winning is nothing, yet they care at a near super-human level.

Many JV and some Varsity coaches have complained that their athletes do not care as much about their varsity sport as they do this tournament.

1) Why?

2) What can varsity and JV coaches do to build/foster this measurable effort in their sports?

Okay, folks, what do you think? Offer your answers in the Comments section. I’ll collect the best and include them in a separate post.

Josh’s goal was to guide 250 students as they tackled self-selected learning projects — everything from building a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to writing and performing a comedy act, to creating a documentary video of Innovation Day itself. What could have been full-bore chaos turned into a fantastic day of learning and sharing. In his blog, Josh reveals some of the secrets of the day’s success:

• Teachers, administrators, and students treated each other with mutual respect. The kids knew Josh would support them, and Josh knew the school administrators would support him in turn. According to Josh, “One of the hallmarks of the school I work in and the principal that leads us is innovation.”
• As a teacher, Josh was flexible, in touch, and resourceful. He kept an eye on his students’ progress, knowing “when to step in and when to step back.” And rather than pose as the expert, he used all the resources at his disposal to give the students “access to as many learning opportunities as possible.”
• Josh recognized the importance of asking his students to do worthwhile work. “You don’t want students to waste your time turning in sub-par quality work, so don’t waste their time and ask them to do sub-par quality activities.”

So how did the project turn out? Josh reports that his students tackled their tasks with “an abundance of enthusiasm.” They completed more than 20 projects. Discipline problems were nonexistent.  Students helped each other out. Administrators and Josh’s fellow teachers dropped by the classroom and were caught up in the excitement. But perhaps this exchange between Josh and one of the sixth-graders best illustrates the power of Innovation Day:

As the students were walking out at the end of the day one student stopped me and asked, ”Can we do this again tomorrow”?

I responded with, “Well, I would love to, but tomorrow is Saturday,” in a half-joking manner.

This student looked me dead in the eyes and replied, “I would come back tomorrow to do this again.”

The first comprehensive study of this approach, from the Nashville public schools, showed an effect somewhere between minuscule and nonexistent. The students of incentivized teachers did no better than the students of teachers paid regular salaries.

Now an even bigger study is out from Roland Fryer, a prominent Harvard economist and an architect of some of these programs. In an impressive paper published last week, he examines the effects of pay-for-performance in the New York City public schools. Here, from the paper’s abstract (and with italics added), are his key findings:

“Financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world. This paper describes a school-based randomized trial in over two-hundred New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives on student achievement. I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”

I’m all for experimenting with new solutions. But it should be clear from these results — not to mention, from 50 years of research on human motivation and performance — that improving American education will take bolder and less convenient solutions that dangling a few carrots in front of our teachers. (You can read Fryer’s full paper here.)

]]> http://www.danpink.com/archives/2011/03/does-giving-teachers-bonuses-improve-student-performance/feed 67 http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/12/interview-exchange-of-the-day http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/12/interview-exchange-of-the-day#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:39:54 +0000 Dan Pink http://www.danpink.com/?p=2968 From Deborah Solomon’s New York Times Magazine interview with superstar physicist Brian Greene . . .

SOLOMON: Do you think SAT scores define intelligence?

GREENE: No. They define the capacity to answer questions on an SAT test.

But Fisch also has a day job — at Arapahoe High School, near Denver. This year, in addition to his other duties, he’s begun teaching algebra to 9th and 10th graders. And he’s taken a novel approach: Instead of lecturing during class time and assigning problems as homework, he’s flipped the sequence. He now records lectures on video and puts them on YouTube for the students to watch at home at night. Then spends class time working on problems with students. (Note: As Fisch himself says, he didn’t invent this “inverted classroom” approach and he’s not the only teacher doing it.)

There’s a great lesson in innovation here, which is why I devoted this month’s Sunday Telegraph column to what the rest of us can learn when flip happens.

Previous Sunday Telegraph columns:
August: Is the best vacation policy no policy?
July: Can you speak human at work?
June: Is Bob the Builder the ideal leadership role model?
May: Could ending sales commissions increase sales?

“In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

“[Indiana University professor Jonathan] Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’”

(Full story)

It turned out that I was somewhat adept at deconstructing poems — and just plain awful at writing them. The person who helped me figure that out, and who gently urged me to apply what I’d learned in class to endeavors outside of poetry, was my professor — an extraordinary poet named Dennis Brutus. He died today at the age of 85.

Brutus cut an imposing figure in the seminar room. He had a rich voice, a sprawling beard, and a thick mane of hair. But what gave him a stature that I’d never encountered, as well as a certain ethereal quality, was his story. He had come to the U.S. as a political refugee after having been one of South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid activists. He pioneered the idea of using sports as political lever to persuade the all-white government. And for his writing and rabble-rousing, he spent a couple of years at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela.

One of Brutus’s poems, “Somehow We Survive,” is among the few poems that remain stuck in my head after all these years. I offer this long snippet in his memory.

Somehow we survive
and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.

Investigating searchlights rake
our naked unprotected contours. . . .
boots club the peeling door.

But somehow we survive
severance, deprivation, loss.

Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,

most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and unlovable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender

but somehow tenderness survives.

As Real Clear Arts reports, “Instead of reading a common book, to be discussed on campus, freshmen have been asked to study and be ready to discuss a painting, The Gross Clinic, by Thomas Eakins.

“The goal, according to Penn’s site, is to “introduce students from the start to the critical skill of interpreting visual material. This choice also reflects a celebration of art in Philadelphia and cultural activism on the part of our citizens, and underscores the importance of the arts in civic life.”

It’s a cool idea, one I could see spreading to other campuses.