I ultimately think that you need to both raise the economic incentives, and lower the disincentives.
Hmm. I’m not sure that this is such a good idea, given that the motivation that one has for teaching seems to be strongly based on social rather than market motives, and introducing market incentives to a situation governed by social incentives has been known to just screw things up.
For example, my best friend has a daughter, and I’ve been giving her various books and games that either I used to enjoy, or which feel like they might be fun and useful for learning a mathematical mindset. I do this out of a general desire for her to have fun with them, learn useful things, and come to love science. Now if you told me that I’d get a cut out of her future earnings, it seems quite possible that that notion would start dominating my thoughts whenever I thought of giving something to her, and I’d start thinking stuff like “well, I could buy her this board game, but it’s kinda expensive and any individual game is unlikely to have a big impact by itself, so would it be a good investment? Probably not.” And she’d be worse off as a result.
It seems easy to imagine similar failure modes that would start cropping up once you encouraged teachers to, in effect, start thinking in terms of “how could I profit from this kid” rather than “what would be the best for this kid”. For instance, they might focus all of their efforts on the kids who showed the most talent and were already the most likely to succeed. They could even actively try to encourage the low-talent kids to drop out, so that they’d have more time to focus on the more promising ones. Or they could encourage their students towards careers that generally cause people to be unhappy but pay well, or teach the students attitudes towards life that promoted a focus on money above all else. Or, like those Israeli parents who started being more late once a fine was introduced and they could thus pay off their guilt for being late, some of the teachers might start thinking, “well if this kid doesn’t do well in life later on, I’m already paying the cost in the form of getting less money from them, so I don’t need to feel guilty about giving them a bad education”. Et cetera.
Intuitively at least, it would feel like a better idea to raise the social incentives, not the financial ones. Part of the reason why I’m happy to give my friend’s daughter stuff is that she’s not just any random child who I’ll never see again: she’s my best friend’s kid, which means that I should be hearing about how she’s doing for as long as I live. Maybe she’ll some day become fantastically successful at something, and then credit part of her success to the role I played in her life. Attempts to replicate this effect could involve making individual teachers responsible for their students for a longer time (so more “you’ll have this teacher for the next six years”, less “you’ll have six different teachers over the next six years”), or even just providing a means for the teachers to stay in some kind of contact with their students even when the teacher’s no longer teaching them.
I think this is true, and it’s something I have a lot about. What behaviors would this reward system actually incentivize?
I figured there would be two strategies teachers could use to maximize profit. One would involve as you said, focusing on the top students and taking them under your wing, making sure YOU are the one who teaches them as much as possible.
The other would be to instead focus on motivating and effectively teaching as many kids as humanly possible, regardless of their perceived potential, and simply playing the odds.
Other possible strategies would involve apprenticeship, in which your apprentice’s work would effectively pay for your retirement, or company training, in which even if an employee was not loyal, you could still make money from them after they left you.
I figured that these strategies were close enough to how I would desire teaching to work anyway, that it was worth a shot.
One downside would be that it would cause teachers to compete to teach kids, instead of working together to get the best learning outcome.
That being said,, there’s a lot being taken for granted above, not the least of which is that people won’t figure out some way to game the system. I’m open to split testing this approach, like I am with everything in Docademy. Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate? I haven’t hit upon any yet, but I’m open to any suggestions thrown my way.
Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate?
I would guess that being a teacher is a lot more fun if you don’t have to give students grades. Especially for someone who tries to be really fair grading seems to produce a lot of unnecessary work.
As far as the system goes in Germany, I think we just pay our teachers a higher salary and we have a low turnover rate. It might be that simply paying every teacher a decent salary is the way to go.
Hmm. I’m not sure that this is such a good idea, given that the motivation that one has for teaching seems to be strongly based on social rather than market motives, and introducing market incentives to a situation governed by social incentives has been known to just screw things up.
For example, my best friend has a daughter, and I’ve been giving her various books and games that either I used to enjoy, or which feel like they might be fun and useful for learning a mathematical mindset. I do this out of a general desire for her to have fun with them, learn useful things, and come to love science. Now if you told me that I’d get a cut out of her future earnings, it seems quite possible that that notion would start dominating my thoughts whenever I thought of giving something to her, and I’d start thinking stuff like “well, I could buy her this board game, but it’s kinda expensive and any individual game is unlikely to have a big impact by itself, so would it be a good investment? Probably not.” And she’d be worse off as a result.
It seems easy to imagine similar failure modes that would start cropping up once you encouraged teachers to, in effect, start thinking in terms of “how could I profit from this kid” rather than “what would be the best for this kid”. For instance, they might focus all of their efforts on the kids who showed the most talent and were already the most likely to succeed. They could even actively try to encourage the low-talent kids to drop out, so that they’d have more time to focus on the more promising ones. Or they could encourage their students towards careers that generally cause people to be unhappy but pay well, or teach the students attitudes towards life that promoted a focus on money above all else. Or, like those Israeli parents who started being more late once a fine was introduced and they could thus pay off their guilt for being late, some of the teachers might start thinking, “well if this kid doesn’t do well in life later on, I’m already paying the cost in the form of getting less money from them, so I don’t need to feel guilty about giving them a bad education”. Et cetera.
Intuitively at least, it would feel like a better idea to raise the social incentives, not the financial ones. Part of the reason why I’m happy to give my friend’s daughter stuff is that she’s not just any random child who I’ll never see again: she’s my best friend’s kid, which means that I should be hearing about how she’s doing for as long as I live. Maybe she’ll some day become fantastically successful at something, and then credit part of her success to the role I played in her life. Attempts to replicate this effect could involve making individual teachers responsible for their students for a longer time (so more “you’ll have this teacher for the next six years”, less “you’ll have six different teachers over the next six years”), or even just providing a means for the teachers to stay in some kind of contact with their students even when the teacher’s no longer teaching them.
I think this is true, and it’s something I have a lot about. What behaviors would this reward system actually incentivize?
I figured there would be two strategies teachers could use to maximize profit. One would involve as you said, focusing on the top students and taking them under your wing, making sure YOU are the one who teaches them as much as possible.
The other would be to instead focus on motivating and effectively teaching as many kids as humanly possible, regardless of their perceived potential, and simply playing the odds.
Other possible strategies would involve apprenticeship, in which your apprentice’s work would effectively pay for your retirement, or company training, in which even if an employee was not loyal, you could still make money from them after they left you.
I figured that these strategies were close enough to how I would desire teaching to work anyway, that it was worth a shot.
One downside would be that it would cause teachers to compete to teach kids, instead of working together to get the best learning outcome.
That being said,, there’s a lot being taken for granted above, not the least of which is that people won’t figure out some way to game the system. I’m open to split testing this approach, like I am with everything in Docademy. Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate? I haven’t hit upon any yet, but I’m open to any suggestions thrown my way.
I would guess that being a teacher is a lot more fun if you don’t have to give students grades. Especially for someone who tries to be really fair grading seems to produce a lot of unnecessary work.
As far as the system goes in Germany, I think we just pay our teachers a higher salary and we have a low turnover rate. It might be that simply paying every teacher a decent salary is the way to go.