Ode to Pink

Both of my daughters love the color pink. We recently moved, and they had a hand in helping to decorate their new room. It came as no surprise to me that their room is now pinkified--pink curtains, drapes, throw pillows, wall art. . . you name it, it's pink.

I'm (professionally) infatuated with another shade of pink these days. Dan Pink's Drive. When I read A Whole New Mind, the first of Pink's books to come to my attention, I will admit to being a little underwhelmed. Why it was pleasantly put together, I didn't feel that I learned anything new from AWNM. I had a completely different experience while reading Drive. Yes, Drive referenced and distilled the work of others I'd already read, most notably Carol Dweck's thought-provoking work published in Mindset. However, in Drive, Pink put his thoughts about what motivates us (people, humanity, etc)together in a way that gets the people in my school talking on a high level about topics such as motivation, assessment, student autonomy. . . conversations well worth having.

One nice thing about Drive is that Pink and others have done some of the work to help get conversations going with a group. His Two Questions video is perfect for opening a discussion.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

At my school, we felt like the second question was not one we wanted to encourage. I'll talk more about that more in another post in the future.

Once the group has discussed the first video, it is worth seeing this collection of responses made by people from around the world to the prompt "what's your sentence."


Who knows--as a group, you may be inspired to make your own video of sentences. We've started our own--there's much more to come.



Finally, if anyone read the book a while back and needs a brief refresher/overview, I highly recommend these two videos:

Hathaway Brown Innovation Summit

I am absolutely determined not to feel overwhelmed by my experience at Hathaway Brown's Innovation Summit this weekend. Why? Because that leads to passivity. Bill Christ, the head of school at Hathaway warned attendees that what matters most is what we do after we leave.

@Sedson was at the conference and I am now following her on twitter, which led me today to this video:



In today's paper, I read a post-election editorial that referenced the Bloomberg poll that showed the majority of voters believed that middle class taxes had been raised during the last two years, when, in fact, they fell. Those asked also believed that the economy was shrinking, not growing.

The article blames Democrats for not making the message clear to voters.

Not me--I blame education. How did we get to the point in this country where being informed means listening to infotainment that echos what you already think? Why don't adults in this country ask questions and do research with the primary documents readily accessible online? Could it be because we don't teach students to ask questions in school? Because we use textbooks to teach them instead of primary sources? Yes, primary sources are harder to read. They don't have reading guides or comprehension questions already prepared. Who read the health care bill? Who read even extracts of it? (Confession, not me either).

What does school look like when we decide to prepare students to run the world instead of prepare them to have a job/go to college?

So, tomorrow, I start. First up? The kids. They need to know that I'm counting on them to be able to solve some of the pretty big problems they are about to encounter. I also want to talk with students about motivation. Both Pink's autonomy, mastery, and purpose along with the success and fun they are apparently seeking. We'll see how it goes.