As I have been preparing some materials for my class in the fall on the Economics of Organizations and a significant part of our topic coverage will be on various compensation schemes that provide cost-effective ways to provide motivation for employee and/or contractors, it's good for the students to reflect on their own motivation in school. Partly for that reason and partly because it is also good to begin with familiar examples before jumping into the more general approach, I start the first couple of weeks of the course on two examples that should be readily familiar - the class as an organization and then again the university as an organization. (This approach is also my way of coping with the adds and drops that happen during the first 10 days of the term and encouraging the students to get the textbook, which we will get into during the third week of the semester.)
The very first day of the class, as a I give an overview of the course, I will tell students that the course might help them think like a manager, though it is definitely an Econ course, not an MBA course. My guess is that this will draw them in, both because they'll have aspirations to become managers themselves and also be curious about how their manager thinks when they're in their first jobs after college. Then I'll do my little schtick about managing down and managing out. Most of them, having done some summer job already, will think about management mainly as managing down - supervising other employees. Managing out, which is more of what upper level management does, was my strength. At least in the university setting, it is mainly about establishing peer relationships. I certainly like doing this, with other faculty, with ed tech people, and with other campus administrators, as well as peers on other campuses. It needs schmoozing that builds a trust relationship, but it also needs some quid pro quo - usually that's just information sharing, sometimes it's a service or a program to initiate or tweak.
In contrast, I'm mediocre at best when managing down and I will let the students know I should not be their role model in that dimension. My ideal of this sort of management is Jean-Luc Picard communicating with Riker. When I first started in SCALE, Lynn Ward also started at the same time. My job was to be an ambassador of sort. Hers was to manage the office. We came in as peers and remained that way when I took over SCALE, only four months later. This continued when Jolee West replace Lynn. It was Lynn who found Jolee for the job, not me. If I have only one person to manage I can probably do that and then I will treat it as a peer relationship. I got overwhelmed, however, when I had 8 direct reports, when CET formed. I really wanted the office to run itself and not devote much time to it at all. This is not the mindset of someone who takes managing down seriously. That someone was not me.
With this as background, I will try to make a parallel between the manager and the staff, on the one hand, and the teacher and the students, on the other. If employees want to understand their manager they might get an initial inkling of this by asking whether as students they understand their teacher. What does the teacher do to motivate students? Are those attempts successful or are they flawed? When is it one and when is it the other? Does that depend on who the students are or is good teaching universal so provides motivation for all students?
Since this is an economics class, when considering popular examples of teaching thoughts immediately turn to Ben Stein boring the students to tears in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The movie came out more than 30 years ago. A decade or so later that clip, and the movie in its entirety, became iconic in ed tech circles as exemplifying the difficulties with the old pedagogy and a need for something else to replace it. Further, while others might not have realized it Ben Stein was exactly the right person to be cast in this role of the economics teacher, because his dad, Herbert Stein, was a very well known economist and was Chairman of the Council of Economics Advisors under Nixon and Ford. But the students may never have seen the clip from Ferris Bueller, so after polling them on that I might then show it in class, along with this clip from the little rascals about playing hooky from school. (Will they know Spanky and Alfalfa? I'm probably as old as their grandparents now. Do their grandparents talk about the TV they watched as kids?) And then there is the Pink Floyd song (and movie) Another Brick in the Wall. Together these clips present a rather dim view of school and of teachers.
On the flip side are movies such as Mr. Holland's Opus and Stand and Deliver; the latter is based on a true story. Both movies are inspirational. Each features a teacher with such dedication and concern for the students that the teacher is able to elevate them to performances beyond their own expectations. Other movies in this vein, Dead Poets Society and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, deliver a similar message. While we should all applaud such instructor dedication, the reality is that in the world of ed tech it is pedagogy that we hope saves the say and we'd like to see excellent results even from ordinary instructors, as long as they practice effective pedagogy. So one might ask, what does effective pedagogy look like and what does it do to encourage student motivation?
Ten years ago when I was teaching a class for the Campus Honors program, one of the students in the class introduced me to this video about the piano stairs that exemplified The Fun Theory. (I think the video was on a different site at the time.) The idea is self explanatory - take a tedious task, one that many people avoid if they can, and redesign it in a way where it is piques one's interest, so people want to engage in it. Are all tasks subject to such redesign provided that the designer has a good imagination?
In thinking about this I quickly remembered my high school years, particularly math with Mr. Conrad. He was my favorite teacher and I ended up taking 4 classes from him: 9th grade algebra, analytic geometry and trig in 11th grade, math team workshop, and number theory. Those last two classes were non-standard and probably are not offered anymore, an example of enrichment classes being crowded out by AP classes. I wrote about my experiences with Mr. Conrad in a post called Math as a gateway to creativity. Mr. Conrad did many things to make the math fun for me. Probably the most important was The Problem of the Week. A nonstandard problem was posted on the bulletin board outside the Math Department Office. You got no recognition for solving it correctly. You did it for the challenge only. I enjoyed having to think those problems through. But then, it's true that I was a math guy, high scorer on the Math Team as a senior, and a math major in college. Is this sort of fun only for nerds like me? What other fun might be more broadly encouraging of the learner?
Rather than answer that question directly, I want to note that even with the piano stairs some people continue to ride the escalator up rather than take the stairs. If my arthritis was giving me a hard time, I'd be one of those who'd take the escalator. We might ask, can a person do something in the person's own approach to things to make the person more likely to take the stairs when seeing something as unusual and amusing as the piano stairs? With this question I mean to take some of the burden off the pedagogy and put some burden on the learner. It stands to reason that more redesigns would encourage learners if the learners were eager for them. How then might we bring that about? When I pose this question to my students I will again bring into focus the parallel with the workplace. The manager may want to do some redesign of tasks to make them more engaging to the employees, but the manager is also hoping for the employees to step up so that even tasks that haven't been redesigned get their full attention. Is that a reasonable quid pro quo?
In my class, I'm going to treat this redesign question just as Mr. Conrad treated the Problem of the Week. It will be a challenge for the students to come up with their own redesign ideas. They can either email me with them privately or post them to the class site (the latter would be a way to get some recognition, although that would only be recognition within our class as they post under an alias). They will not get course credit for it. And then I will challenge them with something similar about their other classes. Can they do things to change their own orientation and thereby make other courses more engaging to them, even without those other courses going through their own redesign? In other words, might a person choose to walk up the stairs even without the innovation of the piano, by just imaging the innovation to exist?
Let me close by talking a bit about misdirection, which until now I've not mentioned. I'm pretty confident the students will be interested in this stuff from the supervisor-employee angle. After all, they will soon be entering the world of work and this is an important consideration in that setting. But in this exercise I'm using that only to keep the students interested. I'm far more concerned with how they go about learning in my class (and in the other classes they take) and I think most of them take a far too instrumental approach. I'd like them to reach the same conclusion, but I'm afraid that if we talk about it directly, they'll become defensive and say they have to worry about their GPA. So rather than go that route, we'll start with the supervisor-employee angle, where I've already told them I'm no expert, and let them invent in that domain by inventing in a more familiar one. I won't tell them my true intentions even if it works, at least not for a few weeks after that. Then we'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment