I am soon going to need a new car. The one in this picture would be just about perfect. Care to donate to my replacement fund? Yeah, didn’t really expect so.

So why is it that you’re not willing to help me get the transportation I need? Because you can see that what I’m asking for is really a want. It may very well be that my car needs to be replaced soon, and having reliable transportation is in fact important to me, but there’s no real reason I need to spend almost $67,000 to get it.

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I’ve decided that I’m going to begin this school year with my students by letting them dream. I have several reasons for doing it, not the least of which is that it gives me a chance to get to know a little more about each of them and what makes them tick. Mostly, though, it will be a reminder for me of who I’m doing this for and what my focus needs to be. It’s a way of staying centered on the students—instead of being centered on the curriculum or my interests or the district assessment plan.

There are many ways I could go about finding out my students’ dreams: I could ask them about their goals in life, for example, or places they’d like to visit. An interesting idea occurred to me, though, when I started thinking about my district’s plan to build several new elementary schools.

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Thanks to my network on Twitter I saw two TED videos yesterday that got me thinking about (and then rethinking) my ideas about teaching and learning. (Incidentally, if you haven’t spent any time perusing the TED site, take some time right now and do it. You won’t be disappointed. I’ll wait.)

The first came to my attention through Matt Perman‘s blog, What’s Best Next. Daniel Pink recently gave a talk called The Surprising Science of Motivation.

Though his talk is geared at business leaders, it has obvious applications to education. The key idea here is that extrinsic, contingent motivators only improve performance when the task in question is narrowly defined with a clear goal and obvious route to achieve it.

The problem is that we want our students to learn how to solve non-obvious, messy problems that don’t already have optimal solutions. But our curricula, our system, and our teaching methods are still based on (a) transmitting knowledge and wisdom from experts to novices through (b) rote application of routines and skills, using (c) extrinsic motivators such as grades to increase student performance. We operate our school systems and manage the employees the same way. We may paste new labels over the old cover, but the fundamental structure and philosophy remains the same.

Almost universally, according to Pink, the social science research of the last forty years says that higher incentives lead to worse performance. So what does that say for our system that is based on increasing performance by rewarding the top performers? Pink summarizes it this way:

Traditional management is great if your goal is compliance.

This leads me to believe that the underlying purpose for the education system in the United States (and likely elsewhere) is to facilitate compliance rather than learning.

Pink offers an idea that seems radical, but I think has some potential for schools: 20 percent time. In companies like Google, the employees are permitted to use twenty percent of their time to work on anything they like—complete autonomy. In companies that have used it, a significant amount of the “real work” ends up getting generated during the 20 percent time.

What would this look like in schools? Students would have the equivalent of one day per week to spend on learning anything they choose to learn in any way they choose to learn it. Complete autonomy. Teachers would be a resource to support the learning instead of directing it. No one would say, “No, you can’t do that in school.” Students would have the freedom to choose the tools and means and sources of learning.

Critics will say we have hardly enough time as it is to cover the required material. Giving away one-fifth of the school year would be madness! Maybe then it’s time to seriously rethink what is “required.”

The flip side of this is that we will still have core content during the other eighty percent of the year that some students will have no interest in learning. If the traditional incentives don’t work, how do we get students to be motivated to learn?

The second video I saw inspired me and gave me a glimpse of what teaching might look like if we move away from those extrinsic motivators. Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speaks on Music and Passion:

Zander says something that is as true for teachers as it is for conductors:

The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. My job was to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining you get to ask this question: “Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

I have to become a conductor. I don’t transmit knowledge to my students. I only have the ability to make students powerful, to awaken possibility in them. They are already learners. I just have to frame the content, the questions, the ideas in a way that makes them passionate about learning it. Easy? Hardly. Important? Absolutely.

Test scores, incentives, and other extrinsic motivators probably aren’t going away. But as an individual teacher, when I turn my attention to those, I lose sight of my real job. Instead I must ask myself every day

Are their eyes shining? If not, who can I become so that they do?

Earlier this summer I was introduced to the educational version of Glogster. For those not familiar with the site, Glogster is marketed as a sort of graphic blog (the site’s tagline is “Poster Yourself”). It has some interesting features that also make it a unique tool for student work. The education version allows teachers to register up to 200 student accounts which are all connected to each other in a class. Students can then create an unlimited number of glogs, each of which is a one-page interactive poster.

Glog creators can embed text, clip art, photos, video, and sound on each page. Each object can also have a live link attached to it. The pages can also be embedded into other locations such as blogs and wiki sites (see my classroom wiki as an example of this). The embedded glog is live, so any changes that are made to it at the Glogster site appear immediately wherever else you embed it.

So besides “postering themselves,” what could students do with Glogster? Here are a few ideas. I’m sure these will get you thinking about others—please share your own ideas in the comments.

1. Creating a “Choose Your Own Adventure” graphic novel. Each page would be a scene from the story with certain clickable elements that would take the viewer to a new page which continues the story.
2. Build a personal portfolio, showcasing links to scanned work, uploaded files, and online work such as blog posts and web sites.
3. Create a visual glossary for a unit or subject.
4. Write an interactive, visual book review or character study.
5. Make a clickable diagram to illustrate a concept or model a process. Links would take the user to a definition, explanation, or a closer view of that portion of the model.
6. Mock up a web site home page.
7. Develop an interactive magazine or newsletter. Each page could represent a department, feature, or activity and include pictures, video, and text linking to stories in a blog or other online publication.
8. Invent a game or puzzle which includes video, image, sound, and text elements and requires the players to interact with them to move.
9. Assemble an interactive exhibit illustrating an event or era of history in pictures and video.
10. Make a talking storybook for children using clips of narration and sound effects attached to pages and images.

Truly creative students will certainly be able to come up with many more ways of using the site, so let them loose and see what they can do.