Drive.............thanks to Dan Pink

Those who have been reading through my summer of interesting research topics.........my apologies, I am still working through Drive. I promise to post some additional topics for summer fun. Today, I want to focus on  Chapter 5 which is about Mastery and mastery has three laws:

1. Mastery is a mindset.
2. Mastery is a pain.
3. Mastery is an asymptote.

Mastery as a mindset was eye-opening. Carol Dweck, psychology professor, Stanford University, writes that some believe in the "entity" theory or intelligence that is finite and can't be increased while others believe in the "incremental" theory. Incremental intelligence varies among people but we can increase it. Now, what amazed me in her (and Pink) research and writing was the education application. The two theories lead to different roads to achieve mastery. One can use "performance goals" or one can use "learning goals." An A in your chosen foreign language is a performance goal, while mastery of a foreign language is a learning goal. "Dweck found that giving children a performance goal was effective for relatively straight-forward problems but inhibited children's ability to apply the concepts to new situations." Am I totally wrong when I see most of what we have been doing in the name of test prep falls into the performance goal category? As a retired history and geography teacher I would become frustrated year in and year out with the inability of students to apply any math principle to a problem given in my class. Latitude and longitude are a means to plotting points on a graph (map) but my students were consistently confused by the instructions. Charts and graphs provided a means to reinforce basic math principles of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and percentages but I always ended up having to walk classes through the basic math. Our goals were performance based not learning based. Common Core, I believe, is attempting to move students toward learning based goals.

Goal 2 needs no further explanation, I want to ride a century or double century on my bicycle, I must train and training isn't always fun.

Goal 3, we never quite achieve mastery. There is always something I could do just a bit better and that is what keeps me motivated to go and ride six days per week.