Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are a focus of Daniel Pink's video. Pink defined these terms as...
Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives
Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Pink states that traditional forms of management are great if you want compliance. If you want engagement, self-direction works better. Three examples were given to show how this can be done in business.
1. FEDEX Days: The company Atlasian tell their engineers to spend the next 24 hours to work on anything they want. Then they present their developments to their peers.
2. 20 Percent Time: Google (as well as other companies) engineers spend 20 percent of their work time working on anything they want.
3. ROWE (Results Only Work Environment): Workers direct their own schedules. They have to get their work done, but they decide how, when, and where they will do it.
In all of these examples of autonomy productivity, worker engagement, and worker satisfaction increases.
While this talk focuses on the business setting, these same principles can be applied to an educational setting. Teachers could allow students time to direct some of their own learning. Students could choose what they are going to learn and how they are going to learn it. Students would be intrinsically motivated to learn about the topics they choose.
The video showed that extrinsic incentives dull our thinking and block creativity. Ultimately we want to teach our students to think. Therefore we want to provide our students opportunities that give our students autonomy.
