[Applause] hello for the past 30 years or so I've been a professor of psychology at Welssley College in Welssley Massachusetts but in my former life I was an elementary school teacher my classroom in Colorado combined kindergarteners first graders and second graders all in the same room which meant that children stayed with me for three years it was a wonderful time of my life a real privilege but as I went on in teaching I began to worry more and more about my students motivation and creativity or better said their lack thereof almost without exception kindergarteners started the new school year raring to go their imaginations ran wild they were excited about anything I put in front of them and their problem solving was fantastic it knew no end but for many of those same children as they were finishing up their second grade year they were no longer willing to take chances to take risks i started really wondering and worrying frankly about what it was about my own classroom or classrooms in general that was causing these children's motivation and creativity to die out over time i was still really young at that point and the optimism of youth told me "Well simple just go to graduate school get a PhD and figure things out 35 years later I'm happy to say that my colleagues and I have figured a lot of this out we now understand that motivation and creativity go hand in hand for any of us no matter what our background what our age we need to approach a thorny problem a creativity type task for the sheer pleasure enjoyment satisfaction and challenge of that task itself rather than for some extrinsic goal like getting a reward that someone has offered us or we know that there's an impending evaluation intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity and exttrinsic motivation is almost always detrimental we know this we understand it now let me step back just for a moment and make certain that you understand that exttrinsic motivation isn't always the enemy it's not always bad if creativity isn't at stake if you want your students to help you clean the classroom memorize their multiplication tables or master a list of spelling words by all means go ahead load on those extrinsic incentives offer them a reward their work will get done and it will get done on time but if creativity is your goal that's when you have to be really wary very careful of those extrinsic incentives over time my colleagues and I have learned as researchers that it's all too easy to kill motivation and creativity intrinsic motivation is a very ephemeral situation specific state we have found in fact that there are six shorefire methods for killing motivation and ensuing creativity promise someone a reward for what they're about to do lead them to expect that they'll be evaluated restrict their choice restrict their time breathe down their necks peer over their shoulders and in and engage in surveillance and the killer number six the most powerful killer of all bring all those other killers together into situations of competition expected reward expected evaluation restricted choice restricted time surveillance competition this recipe for how to kill motivation and creativity most unfortunately reads like the recipe for the typical classroom even my own former classroom now it's important to know that this understanding is not just based on anecdotal evidence from teachers or people in the business world it's not just based on hunches i'm trained as an experimental empiricist my colleagues and I have now done hundreds of studies across all age groups people with from all walks of life this isn't just true for little guys in kindergarten and first grade we understand that these findings are are really they're cross-cultural they're cross time and they're cross place typically we go into schools into natural classroom settings and we randomly assign children to constraint or no constraint conditions in other words maybe children will be assigned to an expected reward group or an expected evaluation group or a control no constraint group we then ask children to create some sort of product they might tell a story or make a collage and we also measure their motivational orientation time and time again we find a statistically significant difference a difference of magnitude between the performance of the two groups that can't be explained away by chance alone something other than chance is operating there and the something other is that the children in the constraint conditions were working under very different circumstances than the children in the no constraint control conditions invariably children who were working for a reward expecting an evaluation or performing under one of those other six constraints that I talked to you about show creativity that's significantly lower than children in the no reward no evaluation control groups we can't get away from it that's what's happening historically teachers have really not been taught or even encouraged to think much about student motivation yet even at the turn of the last century there were already some visionaries out there people like John Dwey and the pragmatists who were already experimenting with child- centered classrooms and in the 60s and 70s in this country the open circle movement came to a four but over time for a lot of complicated reasons our educational system has come to look very differently than it did in Dwiey's time or in the 60s it's all about stat the standardized tests these days tests that are touted to capture students learning and teacher effectiveness it's all about teaching to that test learning for that test we have to as educators turn things around we have to understand that we can't just coersse kids into learning we have to rely on their own unending stores of intrinsic motivation their own drive their own passion their own creativity of which they have quite a bit and we can do this we can turn things around we if we have the will there is a way most importantly I would recommend that children need the luxury of time in the classroom they need time to really immerse themselves in difficult problems to persevere to work in teams to try new things to experience failure and then to pick themselves up in the face of that failure and try again this is what they need as they go out into a world where other speakers today have said it's very uncertain exactly what the workers of tomorrow will need but we know they'll need to have intrinsic motivation against all odds we know they'll need those creativity skills we know they'll need to persevere and it's classroom experiences that are going to give kids those lessons where there's a will there's a way if parents teachers and policymakers really value creativity it's time to construct classrooms that will facilitate that kind of exploration on the part of children it's time to have faith in kids curiosity their drive and their own unending stores of intrinsic motivation thank you