I’ve written a lot about incentives and motivation, including I’ve Never “Motivated” A Student and posts related to Daniel Pink.

The PBS News Hour yesterday had a segment titled “What Drives Motivation in the Modern Workplace?” (you can see the video and read the transcript at that link. It includes a short interview with Pink.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you won’t find anything particularly new. But it’s a nice summary about the dangers of incentives.

Lifehacker today had a nice post about the art of giving advice. It quoted a Psychology Today article titled “What Is The Best Way To Give Advice?” and has this quote from the article, which says that it’s best to give information and not necessarily a recommendation:

For one thing, when someone makes a recommendation for or against a particular option, a decision maker may feel like they have lost a bit of their independence in making a choice. Recommendations about how to go about making the choice may also make a decision maker feel a loss of independence. When the advice comes in the form of information, though, the decision maker still feels like they have some autonomy.

This kind of “advice about giving advice” is sort of a companion to two other guidelines I use in the classroom:

“If you don’t give people the opportunity to say no, you don’t give them the opportunity to say yes, either.”

This is an old community organizer saying and, if it’s not applied often, much of what happens in the classroom will be running off of your energy and not the students’.

Another piece of advice comes from Marvin Marshall. I can’t find the exact quote, but it basically says when you’re giving alternatives to students in a classroom management situation, always give more than two. Usually, when teachers only give students two options, it’s often clearly one very bad one and one that the teacher obviously wants done. In that kind of situation, it’s not really giving them a choice they can “own.”

Feel free to offer your advice on giving advice, or on other good guidelines to keep in mind….

Thanks to Alexander Russo for the tip on Lifehacker…

Last week I posted my commentary on TIME Magazine’s article on a major study on paying students for increased academic performance (see The Problem With “Bribing Students”).

Since that time, several other bloggers have posted insightful comments on the same topic, and I’d encourage you to read what they’ve written.  I’ve certainly learned from them.

First, Alice Mercer has written a great post titled “It’s all about the exit strategy…” It’s a very thoughtful reflection on the importance of weaning off of any kind of “behavior modification” program, and it’s partially based on her personal experience as a parent of child with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder).

Walt Gardner talks about the dangers of the Hawthorne Effect (a temporary change in performance as a result of something new) as it relates to the study.

And I’ve already written about Claus von Zastrow’s great post, What Really Happens When We Pay People for Test Scores?

Larry Cuban has just published “Paying Students To Do Well in School: What Economists Are Learning about Pay-4-Performance.”