Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Pink addresses educators and parents, offering a toolkit for raising children who exhibit Type I Behavior. Schools have been based on a Motivation 2.0 operating system for a long time, and this system tends to kill students’ intrinsic motivations. To change this, he offers a few recommendations:

• Teachers should reassess their homework assignments to make sure that they provide students with autonomy over how the work is completed, that they help promote mastery and engagement, and that it’s clear to the student how the assignment fits into a larger purpose.
• Teachers and parents should try having a “FedEx Day,” allowing children to work on one project for a day and deliver results the next day, with the reward being that they get to share what they did.
• Instead of giving out report cards to students, teachers should have students evaluate their own progress: Students should set goals for themselves early on, then later assess their own progress toward achieving those goals. Students can then compare their own report cards to those of the teachers.
• Parents should give kids both an allowance and chores but avoid tying the two together.
• When giving children praise, teachers and parents should focus on qualities like effort and strategy rather than intelligence, should be specific in their praise, should give feedback in private, and should avoid giving praise when it hasn’t been earned (which will cheapen the praise in the child’s eyes).

Pink emphasizes how important it is for students to understand the purpose of what they’re learning and see its real-world application. He also emphasizes the importance of paying teachers fairly and not tying teacher salaries to students’ standardized test performances. Doing so has been shown to increase cheating while failing to improve student performance. Instead, he argues that the base pay for teachers should be raised high enough that monetary concerns are no longer an issue for those in the profession, while making it easier to get rid of bad teachers who are more interested in gaming the system rather than giving students a good education.

Pink concludes this chapter by highlighting a few schools that, in his view, are doing good work to foster more Type I Behavior in students, placing the focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose rather than rewards and punishments. He also brings up “unschoolers,” a segment of the homeschooling movement that focuses on letting children explore their own interests rather than sticking to a strict formal curriculum. Lastly, he recommends allowing students to become teachers, demonstrating their mastery of a subject by teaching it to others.