NaNoWriMo and the Crowbar of Extrinsic Motivation

As I write this, over 400,000 people around the world are in their eighth hour of the 2016 National Novel Writing Month contest.

For those unfamiliar, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo if you’re into the whole brevity thing) is a month-long exercise in near-manic writing: to “win” (a distinction that comes with no prize other than a printable certificate from the official website) a participant must craft a novel of at least 50,000 words during November. Many ideas that started as NaNoWriMo projects have turned into award-winning novels, including Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and Wool by Hugh Howey. If my onboard Mac calculator is to be believed, this works out to exactly 1,666.66 words per day, an amount that is ominously, and awesomely, metal.

I first found out about this competition seven or eight years ago through that student. You know the one I’m talking about: violently large book in hand at all times, at least one item of Dr. Who-themed clothing, fervent fan-fiction aficionado, Edward Cullen-acolyte, etc. As a relatively new English teacher at the time, I assumed that NaNo’s appeal would forever be limited to a student like her: intrinsically-motivated, recreational readers and writers willing to stay up all night for the warm fuzzies of creating a fictional world in which to dwell, even for a moment.

And so it remained. Over the years, I had a student attempt the competition once in awhile; on a rare occasion, I heard of a student winning (reaching 50k words), but these were rare deviations from the norm.

But then, in 2015, twenty-five students attempted the challenge. Twenty-one students won. They printed their certificates and carried them with pride. They smiled as their picture was taken for the local newspaper. They began revising, revisiting, and reimagining their novels.

This year, sixty of my students are attempting the competition.

How did this happen?

A great deal has been written about the benefits of cultivating intrinsic, or internal, motivation in the classroom. Excellent books such as Drive by Daniel Pink celebrate the merits of pursuing goals not solely due to a compensatory reward but rather because they engender inner purpose. Purpose (along with its contextual brethren “meaning”, “worth”, and “calling”) is one of those words that just feels right. Of course, we’d all love to, at least in theory, follow a course that kindles our inner-selves.

We, as conscious and empathetic educators, attempt to translate this to the school environment. “Don’t read this poem because there’s a grade attached” we suggest, “read it because poetry is the wellspring of the lyrical heart.” (I’m not quite sure what that means, either, but it certainly sounds like something I would have said…) We divorce our texts, discussions, assignments, and curricular units from “arbitrary, artificial” grades to emphasize the timelessness of artistic qualia. We read dramatically, tear up, and sigh audibly over particularly breathtaking metaphors. We do this, and bless our naive hearts, we absolutely mean it.

And then one of two things happens:

1. We don’t grade it. Many students figure this out early (especially if we lead with this fact) and don’t take the material seriously. Those who find this out after the fact feel betrayed by this disruption of the socio-academic contract and are embittered, or at the very least glean that this unit isn’t essential to the course.
2. We grade it, despite our earlier proclamations that this material transcends such base notions of assessment. As a result, students feel betrayed and misled, and a neurological bond has been forged between intrinsic (or perhaps “pseudo-intrinsic”) work and misery.

Intrinsic motivation is important—essential, in fact, to any sort of long-term appreciation, pride, growth, and satisfaction—but the way we are encouraging it in the classroom often does more harm than good, because our classrooms (in all but the rarest of exceptions) operate within a transactional, extrinsically-focused system.

We can blissfully wax poetic about following the music of one’s heart all period long; students are still constantly reminded, in both explicit and implicit ways, that they are being externally quantified, ranked, and evaluated.

The good news?

We can use this potentially defeating awareness to tangentially foster internal validation in our students: the extrinsic motivator as a crowbar to crack open the door of genuine, intrinsic appreciation.

My class follows an open-curriculum, skill-based grading model. One set of skills, worth approximately ten percent of the year’s grade, focuses on narrative and creative writing. Last year, I sensed an opening...

I wielded the extrinsic crowbar: after introducing the concept of National Novel Writing Month, I mentioned that any student who attempted, and successfully completed, the competition would automatically receive full credit (“mastery”) on their five narrative writing standards. They were also given the freedom to work on their novels in class every day throughout the month.

“And remember,” I prodded further, “your novel is going to be atrocious; that’s the point! High-speed writing. Smoke coming off the keyboard. Don’t hit delete. Quantity over quality. That sort of stuff.”

“So...we just write a bad novel...and we get the points?” A student cautiously inquired.

“Absolutely! Well, don’t try to write a bad novel. Just don’t dwell on the quality as you’re writing.”

“And it can be about anything?”

These are always dangerous questions. “Yes! Well, no. Not anything. You know the things you can’t write about...I mean…” I could feel the sales-pitch slipping away from me.

Little did I know the wheels were already in motion. Students verbally shared novel ideas all period, gaining enthusiasm as the conversations expanded. The fear of wasted time or compromised grades had been assuaged. Before the end of the day, a dozen students told me they had signed up.

To drive the point home, the next day, I had the aforementioned student who had previously won the competition come into class and guest-lecture on her experience with NaNoWriMo. By greasing the wheels with the extrinsic reward, I sensed that my students were far more receptive to her pitch than they normally would have been; they viewed this student not as an “other” but as someone who they could aspire to emulate, given the structural support and extrinsic compensation.

As Daniel Pink writes in Drive (and in his wildly popular TEDtalk on the same topic) “the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table.” Students’ “money” is the grade; by taking any grade concerns off the table by fairly compensating them for their efforts, these students were free to challenge themselves in ways they hadn’t imagined possible. They also attempted something they would most likely not have even started had there still been a lingering concern that their involvement would negatively affect their grades. By “crowbarring” extrinsic compensation into an inherently intrinsic challenge, students are given the agency to take an authentic, and rewarding, risk.

Long after the grade has been forgotten, those students will be able to say that once, during one crazy November, they wrote a novel. At the end of this month, I hope sixty more of my students will be able to join them.