kitchen table math, the sequel: Incentives

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Incentives

The quality of patient care when focused on the patient, the unresponsive school district, Precision Teaching, business acumen, and Don't Shoot the Dog. The connection is

Incentives Matter.

We need to Incentivize the behaviors we want to see more of.

Behavioral Science has shown us that We Improve What We Measure. Positive Reinforcement works best by measuring successes and rewarding them. But even just charting the results with no other reward improves the outcome for what's measured.

So we better measure the right things.

What outcomes do we want to incent?

Often, we're talking about this at the student level. But what if we turned it around, and instead of using e.g. Precision Teaching just on students, we did it to the teachers? The principal? The School Board?

Seriously, if we want transparency from the school board, can we chart it? What if we kept a celeration chart on the web showing the District' Response Time to a parent's request for data? Just KNOWING the chart is publicly available should have an effect.

Or how about keeping a chart showing number of conversations board members have per week with non ed-speak people? ie.e parents or students?

Or a chart showing the number of conversations had without a lawyer present in the room?

Or a chart showing how many parent suggested curricula/materials/ideas were adopted?

Any other suggestions for what behaviors we want to incentivize? Any suggestions for the metrics to do it?

How about in the classroom, by the teacher? How about at the principal level?

Any chance we could get a school board to adopt putting the celeration chart for their principals/teachers/etc on their web site? That would really make a difference.

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