Reading Drive: Motivation in the classroom

I really need to read the rest of this book, since it seems like this is one of the core competencies of the teacher - can we motivate our students to learn?  Can we find what they are motivated in and match the assignments to their intrinsic motivation?  Can we increase motivation in a hard subject or a subject outside of their interests?  My answer to this has always been to use the basic psychology that I learned in school - rewards will increase behavior and punishments will decrease it.  My basic theory was that intrinsic motivation was great, but we can't change that, so as teachers we have to focus on the external motivation factors to encourage our students to succeed.

Drive suggests just the opposite.  This chapter claims that intrinsic motivation can actually be decreased by external rewards, and that external factors to increase motivation can only work as long as the reward/punishment is in place.  In other chapters, I am sure that this argument becomes far more nuanced; the author implies that there are strategies for using external motivation to increase long term productivity and creativity, but that's a topic for another day.  Instead, we learn here that rewards and punishments can "crowd out" internal drives, and that one motivational factor seems to hold sway at any given moment.  So, if we give a child a treat for doing a math assignment, we are implicitly saying several things:

1. Math isn't fun.  You need rewards to want to do it.
2. Your love of math isn't enough.  You need to do math on our terms, with our rewards.
3. You should solve math problems the way we say in order to get the reward.  If another way works better for you, or if you enjoy coming up with new solutions, that's too bad.  It's time to move on.
4. The product is more important than your learning.  If you cheat, copy, or just fill in numbers in order to complete your assignment and get the reward, that is fine.
5. This assignment is the only thing you should be thinking about right now.  Do this, get your treat, and be done.  Do not think about how this relates to anything else you are learning.  Focus on the detail, not the big picture.
6. You should want to treat so much that it will motivate your next assignment too.  This is how the world works; we work for someone else's pleasure and then we get reward.  The reward is all that matters.

I had never thought about the negative consequences of extrinsic rewards in the classroom.  I will be very interested in reading the rest of this book and learning how to reduce these harmful messages to our students, increase motivation in the classroom, and retain student excitement and creativity during the learning process!