“I want to be on the leaderboard!”
So my son said to me as he methodically inputted his reading into our local library’s online Summer Reading Program.
My son, who will regularly be up past midnight, reading – because he got to the good part.
My son, who will finish a book and press it passionately into my hands. “You have to read this!”
He reads for hours a day, but the library’s program limited him to 15 minutes/day for the program. So he had to backlog his reading to complete the challenge. But after he had logged enough to have won his prize, he wanted to keep going, because he wasn’t yet on the leaderboard.
Motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Reading for love – intrinsic. Reading for prizes – extrinsic. I’m always apprehensive about these competitions because I fear they will tamp down the intrinsic for the sake of the extrinsic. Then what happens when the game is over? Once he knows he can only log 15 minutes, will he stop reading past that? Will he stop reading entirely without a prize?
I don’t know how to teach intrinsic motivation, but I know it’s the silver bullet of learning, growth, and achievement. And I know that many of the things we do in an attempt to motivate students–grades, prizes, competitions, trophies, leaderboards–disconnect young people from their intrinsic motivators.
That is a profound loss to both the student and our society. We must all think long and hard as parents, teachers, and leaders about how we are inadvertently undermining the motivation of our youth.