Skip to main contentdfsdf

George Couros's List: Motivation


    • Robinson offers a solution. When you help a student find their talent their whole life changes
    • When you help a student find their talent their whole life changes
  • Mar 28, 10

    "One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself."

    • For starters, most proposals for "merit pay" (sorry, I can't use the term without quotation marks) tie teacher compensation to student scores on standardized tests. That's a disaster. It focuses teachers almost single-mindedly on training their students to pencil in correct answers on multiple choice tests - and turns classrooms into test prep academies.
    • A second option is for school principals to decide who gets performance bonuses. Again, there's a certain theoretical appeal to this method. But I've yet to meet a teacher who considers it fair, let alone motivating. Teachers worry that principals don't have sufficient information to make such decisions and that "merit pay" would be based too heavily on who's best at playing politics and currying favor

    1 more annotation...

  • Apr 16, 10

    Great video about how money often gets in the way of doing a good job.

  • Aug 03, 10

    Share via @joe_bower

    • Studies over many years have found that   behavior modification programs are rarely successful at producing   lasting changes in attitudes or even behavior. When the rewards   stop, people usually return to the way they acted before the program   began.
    • Rewards are no more helpful at enhancing   achievement than they are at fostering good values. At least two   dozen studies have shown that people expecting to receive a reward   for completing a task (or for doing it successfully) simply do not   perform as well as those who expect nothing (Kohn, 1993). This   effect is robust for young children, older children, and adults; for   males and females; for rewards of all kinds; and for tasks ranging   from memorizing facts to designing collages to solving problems.

    11 more annotations...

      • Meet People's Needs: Schwartz says that questioning orthodoxy is one of the keys to fostering creativity, and this begins with questioning conventional expectations around work. "Define what success looks like and hold people accountable to specific metrics," he said, "but as much as possible, let them design their days as they see fit to achieve those outcomes."
      • Teach Creativity Systematically: Schwartz lists five stages of creative thinking: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination and verification.
      • Nurture Passion: "The quickest way to kill creativity is to put people in roles that don't excite their imagination."
      • Make the Work Matter: Meaningful work that we feel is making a positive contribution can keep people motivated, not just so we "perform better," but so that we can offer innovative solutions we really care about enacting.
      • Provide the Time: Time is, of course, scarce for all of us, but the best way to a creative outcome is to make sure to set aside time for deep thinking, rather than always caving to the pressures of instant answers.
      • Value Renewal: Step away from a problem, and go do something else. Even better: go do something active, for as Lifehacker noted last week, even half an hour of exercise can boost creativity.
1 - 20 of 22 Next ›
20 items/page
List Comments (0)